The Lake House Read Online Free PDF Page B

what’s got into you lately, but Ashford isn’t stupid, he’s going to be watching like a hawk. Your grandfather’s in Cornwall now, isn’t he? For your own sake—for both our sakes—get yourself down there and don’t come back until you’ve got yourself sorted.”
    A fallen log came at her from nowhere and Sadie leapt over it, catching the tip of her running shoe. Adrenalin spread beneath her skin like hot syrup and she harnessed it, ran harder. Don’t come back until you’v e got yourself sorted . That was a whole lot easier said than done. Donald might not know the cause of her distraction and blundering, but Sadie did. She pictured the envelope and its contents, tucked away in the bedside cabinet of the spare room at Bertie’s place: the pretty paper, the flowery handwriting, the iced-water shock of the message inside. She could mark the start of her troubles from the evening, six weeks ago, when she’d trodden on that bloody letter lying on the doormat of her London flat. At first it had just been occasional lapses in concentration, little mistakes that were easy enough to cover, but then the Bailey case had come along, that little motherless girl, and kapow! The perfect storm.
    With a final burst of energy, Sadie forced herself to sprint to the black stump, her turn-around point. She didn’t ease up until she reached it, lurching forwards to strike one hand against the damp, jagged top, then collapsing, palms on knees, as she caught her breath. Her diaphragm swung in and out, her vision starred. She hurt and she was glad. Ash was nosing around nearby, sniffing at the end of a moss-covered log that jutted from the steep, muddy rise. Sadie drank greedily from her water bottle and then squeezed some into the dog’s ready mouth. She stroked the smooth glossy darkness between his ears. “Where’s your brother?” she said, to which Ash cocked his head and just stared at her with his clever eyes. “Where’s Ramsay?”
    Sadie scanned the wild tangle of greenery surrounding them. Ferns were striving towards the light, spiralled stems uncoiling into fronds. The sweet scent of honeysuckle mingled with the earthiness of recent rain. Summer rain. She’d always loved that smell, even more so when Bertie told her it was caused by a type of bacteria. It proved that good things could come from bad if the right conditions were applied. Sadie had a vested interest in believing that was true.
    They were thick woods, and it struck her as she looked for Ramsay that Bertie was right. It would be possible to become lost forever in a place like this. Not Sadie, not with the dogs by her side, keen noses trained on the way back home, but someone else, an innocent, the girl from a fairy story. That girl, her head filled with romance, might easily venture too deep inside woods like these and be lost.
    Sadie didn’t know many fairy stories, not beyond the obvious ones. It was one of the gaping holes she’d come to recognise in her experience compared with that of her peers (fairy tales, A-levels, parental warmth). Even the little Bailey girl’s bedroom, though sparsely furnished, had contained a shelf of books and a well-thumbed volume of Grimm’s tales. But there’d been no whispered stories of “Once upon a time’ in Sadie’s childhood: her mother hadn’t been the whispering type, her father less so, the two of them equal in their adamant distaste for the fanciful.
    Regardless, Sadie had absorbed enough as a citizen of the world to know that people went missing in fairy tales, and that there were usually deep dark woods involved. People went missing often enough in real life, too. Sadie knew that from experience. Some were lost by misadventure, others by choice: the disappeared as opposed to the missing, the ones who didn’t want to be found. People like Maggie Bailey.
    â€œRun off.” Donald had called it early,