The Lake House by Kate Morton Read Free Book Online Page A

warned that the boards might collapse at any moment but she was too exhausted to pay it any heed.
    The sun had risen now, high in the sky, and its warmth on her face was godly. Sadie had never been the meditating type, but in this moment she understood what people were on about. A sigh of contentment escaped her lips, even though contented was the last word she’d have chosen to describe herself of late. She could hear her own breaths, her pulse pumping beneath the thin skin of her temple, as loudly as if she held a conch shell to her ear to eavesdrop on the ocean.
    Without sight to get in the way of things, the whole world was suddenly alive with sound: the lapping of water as it washed around the posts below her, the splashing and skimming of ducks as they landed on the lake’s surface, the wooden planks stretching beneath the sun’s glare. As she listened, Sadie became aware of a thick blanketing hum behind it all, like hundreds of tiny motors whirring at once. It was a sound synonymous with summer, difficult to place at first, but then she realised. Insects, a hell of a lot of insects.
    Sadie sat up, blinking into the brightness. The world was briefly white before everything righted itself. Lily pads glistened, heart-shaped tiles on the water’s surface, flowers reaching for the sky like pretty, grasping hands. The air surrounding them was filled with hundreds of small winged creatures. She scrambled to her feet and was about to call for the dogs when something on the other side of the lake caught her attention.
    In the middle of a sunlit clearing stood a house. A brick house with twin gables and a front door tucked beneath a portico. Multiple chimneys rose from the tiled roof and three levels of leadlight windows winked conspiratorially in the sun. A climber, green-leafed and voracious, clung to the brick face of the building and small birds flew busily in and out of the fretwork of tendrils, creating an effect of constant movement. Sadie whistled under her breath. “What’s a grand old lady like you doing in a place like this?” She’d only spoken quietly but her voice was foreign and unwelcome, her humour forced, an intrusion on the profound natural exuberance of the garden.
    Sadie started around the lake towards the house; its pull was magnetic. The ducks and wild birds ignored her, their obliviousness combining somehow with the warmth of the day, the moist humidity of the lake, to feed the atmosphere of cloying enclosure.
    There was a path, she noted as she reached the other side, mostly grown over due to encroaching hawthorn, but leading all the way to the front door. She scuffed the toe of her running shoe against the surface. Stone. Probably pale pinkish-brown once, like the rest of the local stone in the village buildings, but time and neglect had tarred it black.
    The house, she saw as she drew nearer, had been as thoroughly forgotten as the garden. Tiles were missing from the roof, some of them lying shattered where they’d fallen, and one of the window panes on the top floor was broken. The remaining glass wore a thick render of bird droppings and white stalactites drooped from the sill, spilling onto the glossy leaves below.
    As if to lay claim to the impressive clumps, a small bird launched itself from behind the broken glass, diving in a direct line before correcting to swoop fast and close by Sadie’s ear. She flinched but stood her ground. They were everywhere, those little birds she’d glimpsed from the lake, darting in and out of the creeper’s dark spaces and calling to one another in urgent chirrups. Not just birds either; the foliage teemed with insects of all descriptions—butterflies, bees and others she couldn’t name, giving the building an appearance of constant animation at odds with its dilapidated state.
    It was tempting to assume the house was empty, but Sadie had been sent on call to enough homes of the elderly to know that the