Lady Sativa Read Online Free PDF

conviction as she leaned forward to peer through the windshield. “Let’s wait to see where he takes us.”
    Orient stared ahead into the night, trying to make out some crude signs of habitation. There was nothing except the empty road.
    “I hope he’s going somewhere” Sybelle grunted. “I have the exact address and phone number written down, but it’s packed. Carl is usually so prompt about sending the car. Perhaps he didn’t get my wire. Didn’t we send a wire from the train station?”
    Orient shook his head slowly. “No wire. All we did was buy a box of candied fruit.”
    Sybelle brightened. “Oh yes, for Hannah. That explains it.”
    “Explains?”
    “Why Carl didn’t send the car. We bought the candied fruit instead”
    “Right on.” Orient sat back and watched the lights drill forward through the tangled darkness. “I hope the driver sees it your way.”
    “Oh, I’m sure,” Sybelle muttered. “It’s so lonely out here.”
    A few minutes later the driver brought the car to a stop. He got out of the car and disappeared into the shadows, leaving the motor running. He came back a few moments later, took his post behind the wheel, and - without any word of explanation resumed driving through the brooding forest.
    “Did he stop to wee wee or get directions?” Sybelle whispered.
    “Probably getting his bearings. Look.”
    Sybelle followed the direction of his finger and looked out the window. The wall of trees parted, revealing a. three-quarter moon that sent orange streaks rippling across an ebony surface of water.
    “The lake,” Sybelle exclaimed. “I’m sure he’s going the right way.” A fork appeared in the road and the driver turned onto the smaller, rougher path. The car crawled along the edge of the lake toward a luminous dot in the distance. The dot became the outline of a window on the second floor of a small wooden house set off the lake. The driver parked the taxi in front of the house and went to the door. A light winked on in the first floor and the door opened. Orient could see the driver talking to someone through the steamed windows, but all he could hear was the gentle rumble of the idling motor. The door shut and the light went out as the driver came back to the car. The return of the darkness was somehow comforting to Orient. The driver opened the door.
    “Bestmon?” he growled at Sybelle. “Bestmon Herr-gard. ”
    Orient told him in Swedish that Bestman Manor was correct.
    “You speak the language!” Sybelle was outraged. “You could have told him all the time.”
    “I just hope that we understood each other properly,” Orient said. “I don’t think he’s going to give us a second chance.”
    “If you speak Swedish, why didn’t you translate my directions for him?”
    “He speaks dialect,” Orient explained, closing his eyes. Twenty minutes later the taxi turned off the road into a grove of huge trees and continued along a high stone wall until they came to a gate. Before Orient could ask Sybelle, the driver guided the car through the open gate and headed for a group of lights back above a rolling, terraced lawn. The lights were part of a house which stood on the highest slope. The structure rose in jagged silhouette against the star-dusted sky as they approached.
    “Thank goodness.” Sybelle patted her hair and tried to see her reflection in the rear-view mirror. “Here we are. I can’t wait to have a hot brandy.”
    The driver stopped at a door lit by an ornate overhanging lamp. Orient took the suitcases from the rack on the car and paid the driver while Sybelle ran ahead to the door. As he watched the lights of the cab recede, he began to entertain visions of an open fire and a snifter of cognac. When he joined Sybelle, however, he found that no one was answering the bell.
    “Those lights are from Carl’s study,” she whispered in the stillness that crept in around them as the noise of the departing taxi faded into the shadows.
    “Try again.” His