‘Now can we go and stay at The Lake House?’ said Marcus.
Ignoring him, Jake started the engine, put the car into reverse gear and reversed in a wide arc to face the direction he had come; he did it fast.
‘Oh, god,’ came from the back seat.
‘Don’t spew in the hire car,’ Jake said over his shoulder as he put the car into gear and sped back down the track, kicking up a cloud of dust in his wake.
Chapter 25
‘Follow the lark,’ Jake mumbled to himself, frowning as he drove slowly back through Aviemore without a clue as to what exactly he was meant to be looking for. What had Mr Addison meant when he’d saidfollow the lark?The holiday was getting weirder by the hour. He felt like he’d stepped into the Land of Oz. It brought to mind Eleanor’s favourite childhood movie, the one she had watched over and over, especially her favourite scene: Dorothy closing her eyes, tapping her shoes together, and saying,one, two, three – there’s no place like home.
Jake sighed heavily. This place brought back too many memories. That was why there was no way he would stay at The Lake House. Instead, he’d chosen to take Mr Addison’s advice and find Lark Lodge; he just hoped there were vacancies.
He concentrated on the road ahead, conscious of the fact that the end of the town was in sight, still with no sign of Lark Lodge. He was beginning to think the search was futile when he spotted a small, bird-shaped sign stuck to a tree. Another sign further along had the lark sitting in a nest, presumably indicating a bed. Jake began to smile. ‘Somebody’s got a sense of humour,’ he murmured as they headed away from the centre, where the larger properties nestled on the fringe of the town near thelakeshore.This looks promising, thought Jake. Next up, the bird had a stockpile of nuts and seeds, representing, Jake assumed, that it offered bedandbreakfast.
The beak pointed left.
‘Shit!’ Jake stopped the car. He sat at the crossroads, looking left down the familiar street.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Marcus, rising from the back seat.
Jake glanced over his shoulder. Marcus looked very pale, and he was shivering. Jake thought that it wasn’t a hotel he needed but a doctor. He said as much.
‘I just need to rest, that’s all.’
Jake eyed him; he wasn’t convinced. ‘You’ve been resting all day.’
‘Oh, shut up!’
A car horn sounded behind them. Jake turned further in his seat to look out of the back window. A middle-aged woman sitting in a muddy Land Rover was gesturing for Jake to get a move on.
Jake turned left.
The beak now pointed straight on.
He no longer found it amusing.
Jake kept his eyes peeled for further signs. The houses backed on to the grounds of a house he was all too familiar with. There was a cut-through that led to a locked gate into the grounds of the Rosses’ Scottish holiday home. He hadn’t anticipated that Lark Lodge would be so close.
He hoped to goodness it wasn’t one of the houses towards the end of the road that might have glimpses of The Lake House from its bedroom windows at the back.
Jake followed the signs, taking in the properties as he slowly passed them by. The were all large, all detached, some brick, others rendered, and all with their own substantial secluded gardens up long drives, hidden away from the bustle of touristsand day-trippers in Aviemore, and yet not too far from the amenities the town had to offer. It was the sort of street with the sort of houses where tourists, overcome by the beauty of the place, came to wander and to dream of owning that holiday retreat, that something very special, that something very Scottish.
Jake kept an eye out for the sign.
He was running out of street.
‘I really hope this is not what I think it is.’ He remembered the last house along this road, with its broken porch, peeling paint and rotting windows. When they were kids, up from London for the holidays, he and Marcus had sometimes sneaked into the cellar, daring each other to stay the night in a ‘haunted’ house. It had seemed like a big adventure then; now it just seemed like two rich kids trespassing on some poorer neighbours’ property.
The couple who had owned the rambling wreck had forever been running local kids off their property who had come to do the exact same thing as Jake and Marcus. But they were good people, and in time they’d done the place up a bit, although Jake wondered whether it had fallen back into a bit of a state.
Mr Belafonte had been a well-respected GP in the community. He’d come over with the Windrush Generation and had then adopted Scotland as his home. He’d served the community with such dedication that he’d worked well into retirement. William had been treated by him one Christmas – he’d thought it was a heart attack, but it had turned out it was indigestion; he always overdid it at Christmas dinner.
It hadn’t been Dr or Mrs Belafonte who had sent Jake and Marcus racing for home on the night of that dare. It had been a girl sitting at the top of the cellar steps saying, ‘I see you.’ If anybody had asked them at the time, they would have all sworn blind they had seen a ghost.
What they had found out later was that they had been lookingat the couple’s youngest child, a sixteen-year-old girl who, as it turned out, took great delight in scaring little boys hiding fearlessly, or so they thought, in her parents’ cellar.
As the car edged ever-closer to what Jake guessed would be Lark Lodge, his feelings of foreboding grew. He didn’t know what Mr Addison was prepared to put up with in the name of ‘the company’ as he called it, but Jake was on holiday, and he really did not want to spend it in some dive. Yes, the place was old and imposing, in one of the loveliest streets in Aviemore, which should on paper be a good omen, but unlike many of the other properties in this patch that had changed hands over the years, this one, as far as Jake was aware, had remained in the same family. He vaguely recalled that William might have mentioned that the elderly couple had recently passed away, and the property had been left to one of their daughters.
