The Lake House

by Kate Morton

  The Edevanes, it turned out, were just a footnote in the house’s history. Three paragraphs from the end of the chapter the author noted that Eleanor deShiel, the last in the family line, had married Anthony Edevane in 1911, after which Loeanneth was restored and retained for use as their country residence. There was no mention of Theodore Edevane’s disappearance, a fact that had surprised Sadie until she established that Notable Cornish Families had been published in 1925, almost a decade before the little boy went missing; indeed, a good eight years before he’d been born.

  In the absence of this intrigue, the author had focused on Eleanor deShiel’s status as the inspiration for Daffyd Llewellyn’s Eleanor’s Magic Doorway, a children’s storybook that had enjoyed great success in the first decade of the twentieth century. “If not for the unlikely rapport between Llewellyn and the perspicacious daughter of his friend, he might have remained a physician, never discovering his gift for storytelling, and generations of children would have been deprived of a treasured tale.” Llewellyn had continued to write and illustrate and in the 1934 Honours was awarded a posthumous OBE for services to literature. According to Alastair Hawker the book was still around but hadn’t stood the test of time as well as some of its contemporaries. Sadie had had to take his word for it. She hadn’t read the book as a child; there’d been a copy, she thought, a gift from her grandparents, but her mum and dad had declared it “nonsense’, taking predictable exception to the magical elements of the story and filing it distastefully wherever the Enid Blytons went to die.

  The edition she had now on her lap had been published in 1936. The paper was soft and powdery, interspersed with shiny picture pages that were starting to spot around the edge. Plates, Alastair had called them, when she borrowed it from him on Monday. The story was about a little girl who lived in a big, lonely house with her kind but ineffective father and an ice-cold, social-climbing stepmother. One day, when her parents were away in London, the girl was rattling around the draughty house and found herself before a door she’d never noticed. On the other side she found a wizened, white-haired man, “like Old Father Time himself’, the walls around his bed covered from floor to ceiling in hand-drawn maps and carefully sketched landscapes. “What are you doing here?” she asked, as well one might; “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said in response, before beginning the tale of a far-off magic land in which once upon a time a terrible wrong was done that ruptured the peace and allowed war and strife to flourish. “There is only one person who can make things right, and that is you,” he said.

  By following his maps, the girl discovered a tunnel in the overgrown garden that took her to the magic land. There she joined with a trusty band of oppressed locals and undertook a number of adventures and battles to trounce the wicked usurper and restore peace and happiness to the land. When at last she made her way back through the tunnel, it was to discover that no time has passed at all and yet her home had changed entirely. Her father was happy, her mother still alive, and the house and garden had lost their gloom. She ran to tell the old man of her success, only to find the room was empty. Her parents told her she must have dreamed the whole thing, and the girl almost believed them until she found, hidden beneath the wallpaper in the spare bedroom, a single map of the magic land.

  Sitting on the rim of the fountain, Sadie took a bite of the cheese sandwich she’d brought in her backpack and held the book up in front of her, comparing an illustration of the storybook house to the real one behind. She’d asked Alastair to find her some additional information on the author, Daffyd Llewellyn. According to the preface at the beginning of the book, he was a close family friend to the Edevanes, and there was no doubting he’d taken his inspiration from Loeanneth. The house in Llewellyn’s illustration was a dead ringer for the real thing; he’d even captured the leaning angle of the window on the far left-hand side. It had taken Sadie days of close inspection to notice that the window wasn’t square. She turned to the plate marked fig. ii, an illustration of a wild-haired little girl in old-fashioned clothing, standing beside a stone pillar with a brass ring at its base. The sun’s glare was impossibly bright and Sadie had to squint to read the line of text beneath the picture: There, under the deepest, darkest, most whispering willow, Eleanor found what the old man’s map had promised. “Pull the ring,” the air around her seemed to breathe, “pull the ring and see what happens.”

  Sadie threw the crust of her sandwich to an insistent cluster of cygnets and wiped her hand on her track bottoms. From what she could gather, these kids’ books were all alike. Isolated child finds doorway into magical world; adventures and heroism ensue. Evil is vanquished, old man storytellers are freed from the curses that detain them, and everything is made right with the world. It seemed a lot of kids dreamed about escaping childhood, of having power over their own destiny. Sadie could relate to that. Some went through the back of a wardrobe, others to the top of an enchanted tree, Eleanor had found an escape hatch in the garden. Unlike some doorways, Eleanor’s had been real. Sadie had been chuffed when she found it on Tuesday morning, the brass ring and the pillar, just like the story said, hidden beneath a particularly virulent willow on the far side of the lake. Naturally, she’d tried to open it, but despite summoning all her strength, the trapdoor hadn’t budged.

  Their childhoods might have been decidedly different, but Sadie felt a kinship with Eleanor Edevane all the same. She liked the little girl in the fairy story, with her spirit of honour and bravery and mischief; she was just the kind of girl Sadie would have loved to be when she was small. But it was more than that, too. Sadie felt bonded to Eleanor because of something she’d found in the old boathouse the other day, down by the stream. She’d climbed through a broken window into a room that had been set up with a bed, a table and a few other basic furnishings. Everything was covered in dust and dirt and a moist blanket of age, and after a thorough search Sadie had turned up nothing useful and only one item that could rightly be termed interesting. The envelope had slipped behind the head of the bed and been lost for the better part of a century. Inside was a single sheet of paper with an elaborate design of deep green ivy leaves around the edges, the second page of a letter with Eleanor’s name at the end.

  It was a love letter, written while she was pregnant, in which, amid intimate declarations that his love had saved her life, she tried to convey to her husband the miraculous changes taking place as their baby grew—a tiny mix of you and me. Sadie had presumed at first that the baby was Theo Edevane, until she noted Eleanor’s poignant lament that her love was too far away, that she wished he could be near, that she missed him desperately. She’d realised then that the letter must have been written when Anthony was in France during the First World War. According to “The deShiels of Havelyn’, the Edevanes had had three daughters: Deborah born before the war, Clementine afterwards, and Alice smack bang in the middle. Thus, the baby whose birth Eleanor anticipated with such longing must be Alice. Passionate and honest, the letter provided such a strong insight into Eleanor’s character that Sadie could almost hear the other woman’s voice, clear and true, across the passage of ninety years.

  Now, she closed the library book with a clap, sending a colony of dust spores hurtling. The sun was high and moisture was leaching from the lake’s surface. Reflected light danced on the underside of leaning branches and leaves glistened, impossibly green. Despite the day’s warmth, Sadie shivered as she looked up towards the house. Even without its link to Eleanor’s Magic Doorway, this place still gave her the uncanny sense of having stumbled into the pages of a fairy story. The more time she spent in the Loeanneth garden, the more she learned about the house and the people who’d lived inside it, with each new imprint of a-l-i-c-e she discovered, the less she felt like an intruder. And yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that the house was watching her.

  Ridiculous, fanciful nonsense. It was the sort of thing Bertie’s new friend Louise might think; Donald was guffawing in her mind. It was
the stillness she was responding to, the lack of human habitation and its legacy. Houses weren’t meant to stand empty. A house without occupants, especially one like this, still filled with a family’s possessions, was the saddest, most pointless thing on earth.

  Sadie followed a flock of mirrored clouds as they drifted across the leadlight windows on the top floor, her gaze stopping at the window on the far left. The nursery, the last place Theo Edevane had been seen before he went missing. She took up a pebble, rolling it thoughtfully between her thumb and index finger, judging its weight idly in her palm. That, there, was the crux of it. This house might easily have been forgotten but for the story attached to it, the infamy of that little boy’s disappearance. Over time the infamy had gained an echo and eventually it had ripened into folklore. The fairy story of a little boy lost and a house cast into an eternal sleep, holding its breath as the garden continued to tumble and grow around it.

  Sadie cast the pebble in a lazy arc towards the lake, where it landed with a rich plink. No doubt about it, the fairy-tale element was one of the trickiest aspects of the case. Cold cases were always a challenge, but this one had the added folklore factor. The story had been told and retold so many times that people had come to accept its mystery. If they were honest, most people didn’t want an answer—outsiders, that is, people who weren’t involved; that the mystery was unsolvable was part of its appeal. But it hadn’t been witchcraft or magic, and children did not spontaneously dematerialise. They were lost, or stolen, or trafficked. Killed, sometimes, too, but mostly given or taken away. Sadie frowned. There were so many shadow children out there, separated from their parents, tugging at their mothers’ skirts. Where had this one gone?

  Alastair had been as good as his word, putting in an order for copies of the original newspaper articles, and Bertie’s friend Louise, who seemed to be “just popping in’ whenever Sadie entered the kitchen, had promised to ask around the old people’s wing of the hospital for anyone who might know something. Sadie had confirmed with the Land Registry Office that the house was currently owned by Alice Edevane, but despite proud claims to the contrary, it transpired the “local’ author lived in London and hadn’t been spotted in the village for decades. Sadie had found a street address but no email; she hadn’t had an answer to either of her letters yet. In the meantime, she was making do with the library copy of The Edevane Boy by Arnold Pickering.

  The book had been published in 1955 as part of a series called Cornish Mysteries that also included a volume of collated fairy sightings and the story of a notorious ghost ship that appeared in the bay. These stablemates had not filled Sadie with confidence, and sure enough, Pickering’s account suggested a far greater love for intrigue than for truth. The book didn’t venture a sensible theory, preferring to remain in thrall to “the mysterious disappearance that Midsummer’s Eve.” It did, however, contain what appeared to be a decent summary of events, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  Sadie took out her notes, newly encased in a folder she’d labelled Edevane. It was becoming something of a daily ritual to read them through, here on the edge of the old fountain. It was how Sadie always worked, inputting every detail of a case, over and over, until she could recite the contents of a file by memory. Donald called it obsessive (he was more a ponder-by-pint man), but Sadie figured one man’s obsession was another girl’s devotion, and if there was a better way to discover flaws, holes and discrepancies in the evidence, she was yet to find it.

  According to Pickering, Theodore Edevane was last seen at eleven on the night of the party, when his mother went to the nursery to check on him. It was the same time she looked in each evening before retiring to bed, and the boy’s habit was then to sleep until morning. He was a good sleeper, Eleanor Edevane had told police, and he rarely woke during the night.

  Her visit to the nursery on the evening of the party was verified by one of the maids, who saw Mrs Edevane leave the room and stop to speak briefly with another servant on the stairs. The maid confirmed the time as just after eleven and said she knew this because she was carrying a tray of used champagne flutes back to the kitchen in order that they might be cleaned so the guests would have them for the fireworks display at midnight. The footman on duty by the front door reported seeing Mrs Edevane leave the house just after eleven, after which time none of the guests or family members re-entered, except to visit the bathroom on the ground floor, until the end of the party.

  Mrs Edevane spent the rest of the evening at the boathouse, where gondolas were taking partygoers for joyrides down the lantern-lit stream, and retired to bed just after sunrise, when the last guests had left, presuming her children were all where they should be. She fell asleep quickly and stayed that way until she was woken at eight by a maid who informed her that Theo wasn’t in his cot.

  The family carried out a preliminary search, but without any great sense of urgency, and without alerting those guests who’d stayed overnight. One of the Edevane daughters—the youngest, Clementine—had a habit of slipping out of the house early and had been known, on occasion, to take her little brother with her if he were awake in his cot when she passed the nursery. It was presumed to be the case in this instance.

  Breakfast was still being served in the dining room when Clementine Edevane returned to the house, alone, just after ten. When she professed no knowledge of her brother’s whereabouts, reporting that the door to his nursery had been closed when she passed at six, police were called to the house. The boy was officially declared missing and a massive search was launched.

  Although Pickering seemed happy to believe that the boy had simply vanished into the night, he did include a small summary of the police investigations, outlining two official explanations for Theodore Edevane’s disappearance: the boy had wandered or he had been abducted. The wandering theory was lent credence when it was discovered his favourite toy puppy was also gone, but as the search widened and no trace of the child was found, and in light of the family’s wealth, police became convinced the latter was more likely. At some point between eleven o’clock on Midsummer’s Eve and eight the following morning, someone had crept into the nursery and removed the boy.

  It seemed a reasonable assumption and one with which Sadie was inclined to agree. She looked across the lake towards the house and tried to imagine herself into the night-time party as described by Pickering: people everywhere, lanterns and flares, gondolas with laughing passengers drifting down the lamp-lit stream, a bonfire in the middle of the lake. Music and laughter and the noise of three hundred people chatting.

  If the boy had wandered—and Pickering quoted a newspaper report in which Anthony Edevane said his son had recently started climbing from his cot and had once or twice made his way down the stairs—then what chance was there that no one at the party had seen him? Pickering alluded to a few uncertain reports from guests who “might have’ noticed a child, but evidently there was nothing concrete. And if the eleven-month-old had somehow managed to avoid detection as he crossed the garden, how far was it reasonable to presume he might have travelled? Sadie didn’t know much about children and their milestones, but presumably even an advanced walker would have run out of steam pretty quickly? Police had searched for miles in all directions and uncovered nothing. Besides, it was incredibly unlikely that seventy years had passed without anything turning up: no body, no bones, not even a shred of clothing.

  There were problems with the abduction theory, too. Namely, how someone could have got inside, taken the child and then left again without arousing suspicion. There’d been hundreds of people cluttering up the house and garden, and as far as Sadie could tell there were no solid reports of anyone seeing or hearing anything. She’d spent all of Wednesday morning scouting about the house looking for exits and found two, other than the front door, that seemed viable: the French doors leading from the library and another door at the back of the house. The library was out, surely, because the party had spilled around
to the garden there, but Sadie had wondered about that back door.

  She’d tried to look through the keyhole and had given the door a hearty shake in the hopes it might swing open; there was a difference, after all, between breaking and entering and just plain entering. Ordinarily, Sadie wasn’t one for splitting hairs, and it wasn’t as though there was anyone around to mind if she broke the latch to get inside, but with things as sticky as they were with Donald, and the looming shadow of Ashford, who had the power and possibly the inclination to kick her out of the force, she figured it was wise to be on her best behaviour. Climbing through the window into a virtually empty boathouse was one thing, breaking into a fully furnished manor house was quite another. The room beyond the door would remain a mystery until Alastair was enlisted to find her a floorplan in the county collection. “I’m a nut for maps and plans,” he’d said, barely able to conceal his glee at having been asked to obtain one. It had taken him no time at all and thus by Thursday Sadie had learned that the door was the servants’ entrance into the kitchen.

  Which didn’t exactly help matters. The kitchen would have been buzzing on the night of the party. Surely there was no way anyone could have sneaked out undetected with Theo Edevane under one arm?

  Sadie glanced again at Alice’s name engraved in its secret spot at the base of the fountain. “Come on, Alice,” she said. “You were there. Throw a girl a bone.”

  The silence was deafening.

  Well, no, not silence, for it was never silent here. Each day, as the sun rose higher into the sky, the choir of insects hovering amongst the reeds warmed to a feverish static; it was the lack of clues that was deafening.

  Frustrated, Sadie cast her notes aside. Trying to find gaps in the evidence was all well and good, but the method relied, funnily enough, on having evidence to sift through. Real evidence: witness statements, police theories, reliable information. Right now, Sadie was working with only the flimsiest of outlines.