‘I am?’ Jake didn’t remember seeing aNo Trespassingsign. ‘What happened to the lodge?’ Jake pointed at the mound of earth where it had once stood.
‘Oh, that old place. It was bulldozed.’ The young man nodded his head, and Jake watched his plastic hard hat bob back and forth. ‘It was practically falling down anyway. It’s a wonder they didn’t do it years ago.’
Jake nodded his head in agreement. It had been over fifteen years since he had seen the place, but even back then it had beenin a dilapidated state. ‘Who tore it down?’ Jake asked with a tinge of regret that the old place hadn’t survived.
‘The company,’ said Mr Addison, as if that explained it all.
Jake looked at him blankly.
‘Only local people used that place,’ he said. ‘It’s unusual that somebody from out of town should remember it.’ Mr Addison let the remark hang in the air, as though he was waiting foran explanation.
Jake shrugged his shoulders. ‘I used to holiday in this area. I thought this would be a nice place to stay.’ Which didn’t fully explain how he had known about the lodge in the first place, but he wasn’t feeling very conversational. He’d just driven from the airport hotel, visited a police station to collect a recalcitrant passenger, and since then, all he’d had was a quick stop to get a coffee at a service station. And now his plan to stay in this most tranquil of settings had been stymied by some land-grabbing company with a total disregard for the local community.
Mr Addison tapped his clipboard impatiently. ‘Well, I’d better get back to work.’
‘Somebody bought the land?’ said Jake.
‘Yes, I’m the site manager.
‘What have they got planned here?’ Jake asked offhand, not really that interested in hearing about the next phase of super-deluxe lodges or whatever they were planning to build in their quest to deface the landscape in the pursuit of money.
The young man appeared to be caught off-guard by the question. He looked down at his clipboard, and then looked up at Jake. He shook his shoulders. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t really know. I mainly work on the new development just out of town, which is nearing completion. I was asked to come here and prepare the site. I’m looking at where a temporary site office will go, that sort of thing.’ He turned full circle. ‘It’s an amazing location – isn’t it?’
Jake didn’t comment.
After an awkward silence, he said, ‘Do you need directions back to the main road?’
Jake gave him a bemused look. ‘No, I think I can figure it out.’ He only had to follow the dirt track back the way he came. It wasn’t difficult.
Jake ambled back to the car and turned to take one last look. Mr Addison was on the edge of the clearing, about to disappear back into the trees. ‘By the way,’ Jake shouted at him.
Mr Addison stopped and turned around.
‘When was the last time you took a holiday?’
‘Why?’ Mr Addison shouted back.
‘Take one, trust me.’ Mr Addison needed to put work in perspective; nobody should be that enthusiastic about a work project they seemed to know next to nothing about – it was weird.
Jake realised belatedly that he was the last person who should be advising people to take a holiday. He had been so dead against taking one himself. But in the two days Jake had been away from the job, he had discovered something – not going to work wasn’t going to kill him.
The fact that his holiday had not gone to plan from the very outset was probably a good thing. If he had stuck to his original idea, and stayed home, he knew that things would be very different. He’d have had too much time on his hands to think about things, to dwell, and he knew that would be a bad thing. Nobody could change the past, but what Jake had discovered in the intervening months since losing Eleanor was that at least he could change the future.
Jake opened the car door.
‘Hey!’ a voice shouted.
Jake turned around to see the young man still standing at the edge of the clearing. ‘Yes?’ he threw back.
‘If you’re looking for somewhere to stay, may I suggest Lark Lodge? It’s a great place. I should know. I’m staying there myself. Just follow the lark.’ He disappeared into the trees. His yellow hat glowed before it, too, vanished.
Jake sat in the driver’s seat in silence, listening to the rustle of dead leaves on the forest floor as the wind picked up. After a restless night at the airport hotel, worried about the following morning and collecting Marcus, not to mention his impending return to Aviemore, Jake was just about exhausted, and he still had to visit Mr Wright before he could really call it a day.
‘What was all that about?’
Jake nearly jumped out of his skin at the unexpected sound of Marcus’s voice right behind him.
‘The place is gone,’ said Jake wearily, pulling the car door shut. And now he had to find somewhere else to stay.
