The House Between Tides Read Online Free PDF

ever since her parents’ death. An accident, yes, but sudden and violent, and even now, three years later, the thought of it could still overpower her.
    Loss, was what people called it.
    Such a little word.
    But with enough potency to blow a hole right through her as ithad done that day when she had answered an early morning phone call. A failed take-off, and then a crash, just beyond the runway. It had been weeks before the raw shock had begun to fade into grief, and even as grief numbed into acceptance, the void remained. Then her grandmother’s death two months ago had finished the job which dementia had begun years earlier, and she had found herself quite alone.
    Sometimes she felt that she’d been sleepwalking ever since.
    She went over to the window and looked out across the strand. The sky was overcast and the scene before her colourless. Coming here, without Giles, was the first real initiative she had taken in three years. The planned restoration work would give her a focus, she had told herself; it would mark a new beginning. But now this! She watched two sheep pass in front of the window, then stop to crop the grass on the little headland.
    The bones didn’t actually change anything, of course, and were a matter for the police. Ruairidh Forbes seemed to think that the crime was an old one, but even so . . . And coming so soon after seeing the appalling state of the house, it felt as if her new start was over before it had begun.
    She turned away from the window. Perhaps a fire would lift her spirits, if she could get the wretched thing to light. Last night the unfamiliar peat had defeated her. But it was worth another go, so she knelt at the hearth and began assembling paper and kindling, thinking that no one had explained to her how it was that James Cameron had been digging into the foundations in the first place. She’d have to ask. And she imagined the guffaws there’d be at the bar if he chose to describe the ludicrous picture of her climbing through the window, tearing her jeans as she was ordered out of her own property. It had evidently amused him at the time— Perhaps she’d ask Ruairidh Forbes instead. She’d warmed to him, a kindly man in this strange new world.
    She watched the flicker of a flame come to life in the hearth, and remembered that surge of optimism she had felt the day before, when she had felt the rightness of coming here. For a while, as the hills of Skye faded over the churning wake of the ferry, she had been left in a sort of limbo where all around her the margins of sky, sea, and land had merged into a blue-grey wash, masked by clouds. But as they drew closer, the sun had backlit the clouds with a mother-of-pearl sheen and slowly burned through the veil, revealing the low contours of islands in a glorious welcome.
    And arriving that way, at the end of a long journey, had seemed the right way to come, giving her a true sense of the remoteness of the place. Of its separateness.
    Giles had tried to persuade her to come directly after her grandmother’s funeral. “Just to look. Get a measure of the place?” There was an airfield on a neighbouring island, he told her; they could fly up. “And there’s bound to be some old banger to hire once we get there.”
    But that would have made the transition too sudden, and difficult as it was to make him understand, she had needed to come alone.
    Giles had been enthusiastic about her plans for the house from the start, too enthusiastic. This was to be her scheme, her new beginning. And if he’d come with her he’d have taken control, taken the initiative away, as was his wont. She’d tried to explain to him how she felt, how she wanted to take things slowly, to consider, but he thought she should push things along, get started, and he’d offered to find investors, maybe put money into it himself. Typical Giles behaviour.
    She stared into the fireplace, where the flame