by Kate Morton
“It means ‘Lake House’.”
“Yes . . .” Sadie pictured the muddy lake and its eerie avian population. “Yes, that’s it. What happened there?”
“A terrible business,” Louise said, with a sad shake of the head. “Back in the thirties, before I was born. My mother used to talk about it, though—usually when she wanted to stop us kids from wandering too far. A child went missing on the night of a grand party. It was a big story at the time; the family was wealthy and the national press paid a lot of attention. There was a huge police investigation, and they even brought down the top brass from London. Not that any of it helped.” She slipped the last toy into place and folded the box shut. “Poor lad, he was little more than a babe.”
“I’ve never heard of the case.”
“Sadie’s in the police,” Bertie explained. “A detective,” he added with a lick of pride that made her wince.
“Well, it was a long time ago, I suppose,” said Louise. “Every decade or so the whole thing rears its head again. Someone calls the police with a lead that goes nowhere; a fellow comes out of God knows where to claim he’s the missing boy. Never makes it further than the local papers, though.”
Sadie pictured the dusty library, the open books on the desk, the sketch, the portrait on the wall. Personal effects that must once have meant something to someone. “How did the house come to be abandoned?”
“The family just left. Locked the doors and went back to London. Over time people forgot that it was there. It’s become our very own Sleeping Beauty house. Deep in the woods like that, it’s not the sort of place you go near unless you’ve got good reason. They say it was lovely once, a beautiful garden, a great big lake. A sort of paradise. But it was all lost when the little lad disappeared into thin air.”
Bertie sighed with deep satisfaction and brought his hands together in a soft clap. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s just the sort of thing I was led to believe I’d find in Cornwall.”
Sadie frowned, surprised by her usually pragmatic grandfather. It was a romantic story, to be sure, but her police instincts quivered. No one just disappeared, thin air or otherwise. Leaving Bertie’s reaction for another time, she turned to Louise. “The police investigation . . .” she said. “I take it there were suspects?”
“I suppose there must’ve been, but no one was convicted. It was a real mystery from what I can remember. No clear leads. There was a huge search for the boy, an initial theory that he might merely have wandered off, but no trace of him was ever found.”
“And the family never came back?”
“Never.”
“They didn’t sell the house?”
“Not as far as I’m aware.”
“Strange,” Bertie said, “just to let it sit there, locked and lonely, all this time.”
“I expect it was too sad for them,” Louise said. “Too many memories. One can only imagine what it’s like to lose a child. All that grief, the sense of impotence. I can understand why they’d have fled the scene, decided to make a fresh start somewhere else. A clean break.”
Sadie murmured agreement. She didn’t add that in her experience, no matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them.
* * *
That evening, in the room Bertie had made up for her on the first floor, Sadie took out the envelope, just as she had the night before and the one before that. She didn’t slip the letter from inside, though. There was no need; she’d memorised its contents weeks ago. She ran a thumb over the front, the message written in capital letters above the address: do not bend, photograph inside. She’d memorised the picture, too. Proof. Tangible evidence of what she’d done.
The dogs shifted at the foot of her bed and Ramsay whimpered in his sleep. Sadie laid a hand on his warm flank to calm him. “There now, old fellow, everything’s going to be all right.” It crossed her mind she was saying it as much for herself as for him. Fifteen years the past had taken to find her. Fifteen years in which she’d focused on moving forwards, determined never to look back. Incredible, really, that after all her efforts to build a barrier between then and now, it only took one letter to bring it down. If she closed her eyes, she could see herself so clearly, sixteen years old and waiting on the brick wall out the front of her parents’ neat semi-detached. She saw the cheap cotton dress she’d been wearing, the extra coat of lip gloss, her kohl-rimmed eyes. She could still remember applying it, the smudgy stub of eye pencil, her reflection in the mirror, her desire to draw circles thick enough to hide behind.
A man and woman Sadie didn’t know—acquaintances of her grandparents, was all she’d been told—had come to collect her. He’d stayed in the driver’s seat, polishing the black steering wheel with a cloth, while she, all pearlescent coral lipstick and bustling efficiency, had climbed out of the passenger seat and trotted around to the kerb. “Morning,” she’d called, with the strident cheer of someone who knew she was being helpful and rather liked herself for it. “You must be Sadie.”
Sadie had been sitting there all morning, having decided there was no point staying inside the empty house and being unable to think of anywhere else she’d rather go. When the henna-haired social worker first gave her the details of when and where to wait she’d considered not turning up, but only for a minute; Sadie knew this was the best option she had. She might have been foolish—her parents never tired of telling her she was—but she wasn’t stupid.
“Sadie Sparrow?” the woman persisted, a thin lace of perspiration on the blonde hairs above her top lip.
Sadie didn’t answer; her compliance had limits. She tightened her mouth instead and pretended great interest in a flock of starlings soaring through the sky.
The woman, for her part, remained splendidly undeterred. “I’m Mrs Gardiner, and that’s Mr Gardiner up front. Your Grandma Ruth asked us to collect you seeing as neither she nor your grandad drive, and we were only too happy to help. We’re neighbours, and as it happens we spend quite a bit of time out this way.” When Sadie said nothing, she nodded her lacquered hair-do in the direction of the British Airways bag Sadie’s father had brought back from his business trip to Frankfurt the year before. “That’s everything then?”
Sadie tightened her grip on the bag’s handles and dragged it across the concrete until it touched her thigh.
“A light traveller. Mr Gardiner will be impressed.” The woman swatted at a fly by the end of her nose and Sadie thought of Peter Rabbit. Of all the things to enter her head as she left home for good, a nursery rhyme character. It would have been funny except that right then Sadie couldn’t imagine anything ever being funny again.
She hadn’t wanted to do anything as wet as turning back to look at the house she’d lived in all her life, but as Mr Gardiner steered the great vehicle away from the kerb, her faithless gaze flickered sideways. There was no one home and there was nothing to see that hadn’t been seen a thousand times before. At the window next door, a sheer curtain twitched and then fell, an official signal that the brief rupture of Sadie’s exit had ended and the sameness of suburban life was free to continue its flow. Mr Gardiner’s car turned at the end of the street and they started west towards London, and Sadie’s own fresh start at the home of the grandparents she hardly knew, who’d agreed to take her in when she had nowhere else to go.
* * *
A number of soft thuds came from overhead and Sadie let go of the memory, blinking herself back into the dimly lit, whitewashed bedroom with its sloping ceiling and the dormer window overlooking the vast, dark ocean. A single picture was hanging on the wall, the same framed print Ruth had put above Sadie’s bed in London, of a storm-whipped sea and an enormous wave threatening to engulf three tiny fishing boats. “We bought it on our honeymoon,” she’d told Sadie one night. “I loved it at once, the tension of that great wave caught on the v
erge of its inevitable collapse. The brave, experienced fishermen, heads bowed, holding on for dear life.” Sadie had glimpsed the thread of advice; Ruth hadn’t needed to spell it out.
Another thud. Bertie was in the attic again.
Sadie had discerned a pattern in the week she’d been staying at Seaview Cottage. While her grandfather’s days were busy, filled with his new life and friends, his garden and endless preparations for the upcoming festival, nights were a different story. Sometime after dinner each evening, Bertie would take himself up the rickety ladder under the guise of searching for a particular saucepan/whisk/cookbook he suddenly needed. There’d be an initial series of bumps as he rummaged about in the moving boxes, and then the spaces between would lengthen and the sweet, cloying smell of pipe smoke would drift down through the gaps in the floorboards.
She knew what he was really doing. Some of Ruth’s clothing he’d already given to Oxfam, but there was still a large number of boxes full of things he couldn’t bear to part with. They were the collections of a lifetime and he their curator. “They’ll keep for another day,” he’d said quickly when Sadie offered to help him sort through them. And then, as if regretting the sharpish tone, “They’re doing no harm. I like to think there’s so much of her here, under this roof.”
It had been a surprise when her grandfather told her he’d sold up and was moving to Cornwall. He and Ruth had lived in the one home all their married life, a home Sadie had loved, that had been a haven for her. She had presumed he’d stay forever, loath to leave the place where happy memories moved like old projector images in the dusty corners. Then again, Sadie had never loved another person with the sort of devotion shared by Bertie and Ruth, so what would she know. It turned out the move was something they’d talked about doing together for years. A customer had put the idea in Bertie’s head when he was still a boy, telling him stories about the fine weather in the west, the glorious gardens, the salt and the sea and the rich folklore. “The time just never came,” he’d told Sadie sadly some weeks after the funeral. “You always presume there’s time ahead, until one day you realise there isn’t.” When Sadie had asked him whether he’d miss London, he’d shrugged and said that of course he would, it was his home, the place he’d been born and grown up, where he’d met his wife and raised his family. “But it’s the past, Sadie, love; I’ll carry that with me wherever I go. Doing something new, though, something that Ruth and I talked about—in some way it feels like I’m giving her a future, too.”
Sadie was aware, suddenly, of footfalls on the landing, a knock at the door. Quickly, she hid the envelope behind her pillow. “Come in.”
The door opened and Bertie was there, cake tin in hand.
She smiled too broadly, her heart racing as if she were guilty of an indiscretion. “Found what you were looking for?”
“The very thing. I’m going to bake tomorrow, one of my signature pear cakes.” He frowned lightly. “Though it occurs to me I haven’t any pears.”
“I’m no expert, but I’m guessing that could be a problem.”
“I don’t suppose you’d pick some up for me in the village tomorrow morning?”
“Well, I’ll have to check my diary . . .”
Bertie laughed. “Thanks, Sadie, love.”
He lingered in such a way that Sadie knew he had more to say. Sure enough: “I found something else while I was up there.” He reached inside the tin and took out a dog-eared book, holding it up so she could see the cover. “Good as new, eh?”
Sadie recognised it at once. It was like opening the door unexpectedly to an old friend, the sort who’d been along for the ride during an especially difficult and bruising period. She couldn’t believe Bertie and Ruth had kept it. Hard to imagine now, the prominence the book of brainteasers had had in her life back then, when she’d first come to live with them. She’d cloistered herself away in the spare bedroom at her grandparents’ house, the little room above the shop that Ruth had done up specially for her, and she’d worked through the whole thing, page by page, front to back, her commitment verging on the religious.
“Got them all out, didn’t you?” Bertie said. “Every puzzle.”
Sadie was touched by the pride in his voice. “I did.”
“Didn’t even need to look at the answers.”
“Certainly not.” She eyed the rough edges at the back where she’d torn out the solutions so she wouldn’t, couldn’t, be tempted. It had been very important to her, that. Her answers must be her own, her achievements clean and absolute, above suspicion. She’d been trying to prove something, of course. That she wasn’t stupid or hopeless or “a bad egg’, no matter what her parents might think. That problems, no matter how big, could be solved; that a great wave could crash and the fishermen survive. “Ruth bought it for me.”
“That she did.”
It had been the perfect gift at the perfect time, though Sadie suspected she’d been less than grateful. She couldn’t remember what she’d said when her grandmother gave it to her. Probably nothing; she hadn’t been particularly communicative back then. A sixteen-year-old knot of insolence and monosyllabic disdain for everyone and everything, including (especially) these unknown relatives who’d swept in to rescue her. “I wonder how she knew?”
“She was good like that, kind and clever. She saw people, even when they did their best to hide.” Bertie smiled and they both pretended talk of Ruth hadn’t made his eyes glisten. He put the puzzle book down. “Might have to get yourself another one while you’re down here. Maybe even a novel to read. That’s the sort of thing people do when they’re on holiday.”
“Is it?”
“So I hear.”
“Perhaps I will then.”
He lifted a single brow. He was curious about her visit, but he knew her well enough not to force the matter. “Well,” he said instead, “time for me to turn in. Nothing like the sea air, eh?”
Sadie agreed and wished him a good night’s sleep, but when the door closed behind him she noticed his footsteps went back up towards the attic rather than across the hall to bed.
As pipe smoke drifted through the floorboards and the dogs dreamed fitfully beside her and her grandfather confronted his own past upstairs, Sadie glanced through the book. Just a humble collection of brainteasers, nothing fancy, and yet it had saved her life. She hadn’t known she was smart until her grandmother gave her that book. She hadn’t known she was good at puzzles, or that their solution would deliver her the kind of high other kids got from skipping school. But it turned out she was, and it did, and so a door was opened and her life was set upon a path she’d never imagined. She grew up and away from her teenage troubles and found herself a job with real puzzles to solve and consequences if she failed that went far beyond her own intellectual frustration.
Was it a coincidence, she wondered, that Bertie had given it to her tonight, this book that so strongly signified that other time? Or had he guessed somehow that her current visit was linked to the events fifteen years before that had first brought her to stay with him and Ruth?
Sadie retrieved the envelope, studying again the censorious handwriting, her own name and address spelled out like a criticism across its front. The letter inside was her own personal time bomb, tick-tick-ticking while she worked out how to diffuse it. She needed to diffuse it. It had made a mess of everything and would continue to do so until she fixed it. She wished she’d never received the damn thing. That the postman had dropped it from his bag, and the wind had whipped it away, and a dog somewhere had chased and chewed it until all that remained was a soggy pulp. Sadie sighed unhappily and tucked the envelope inside the book of puzzles. She wasn’t naive; she knew there was no such thing as “fair.” Nonetheless, she felt sorry for herself as she closed the book and tucked it away. It didn’t seem right, somehow, that a person’s life should be derailed twice by the one mistake.
* * *
The solution came to her on the edge of sleep. She’d been slipping, as was normal now, into the dream about the little backlit girl in the doorway, holding out her hands and calling for her mother, when she opened her eyes, instantly awake. The answer (to all her problems, it seemed to Sadie in the clarity of night) was so simple she couldn’t believe it had taken her six weeks to find it. She, who prided herself on her ability to unravel puzzles. She’d wished the letter hadn’t reached her, and who was there to say it had? Sadie threw back her duvet and retrieved the envelope from inside the book of brainteasers, rummaged about on her bedside table for a pen. No Longer at this Address, she scribbled hastily on the front, eagerness making her writing more jagged than usual. Return to Sender. A great sigh of relief escaped her as she studied her handiwork. Her shoulders lightened. Resisting the urge to look again at the photograph, she resealed the envelope carefully so that no one would be any the wiser.
Early next morning, while Bertie and the dogs slept, Sadie pulled on her running gear and jogged along the dark silent streets, letter in hand. She dropped it into the village’s only postbox to be spirited back to London.
Sadie couldn’t stop smiling as she continued around the headland. Her feet pounded with renewed energy, and as the sun rose golden in the pink sky, she basked in the knowledge that the whole unpleasant business was over and done with. To all intents and purposes, it was as if the letter had never found her. Bertie would never need to know the truth behind her sudden visit to Cornwall, and Sadie could get back to work. Without the letter’s contents clouding her judgement, she’d be able to let the Bailey case go once and for all, and creep out from under whatever madness it was that had cloaked her. The only thing left to do was to tell Donald.
* * *
When she went out again later for Bertie’s pears, Sadie walked the long way into the village, over the cliff towards the lookout and then down the steep western path into the playground. There was no denying this was a beautiful part of the world. Sadie could see why Bertie had fallen in love with it. “I knew immediately,” he’d told her, with unexpected, born-again zeal. “There’s just something about the place that called me.” He’d been so keen to believe there were mysterious external forces at work, that the move was somehow “meant to be’, that Sadie had merely smiled and nodded, and refrained from telling him there were very few people who wouldn’t have felt that life here was calling to them.
