The Lake House by Kate Morton Page A

say that observation had since taught him people tended to follow Alice Edevane’s instructions. He’d rung the doorbell at midday sharp and been admitted to the jade-green sitting room on the ground floor. Alice had been dressed handsomely in a pair of twill trousers and a silk blouse, a combination he now thought of as her uniform, and she’d worn a large gold locket on a chain around her neck. Her white hair had been neat and unfussy, set back from her face in waves that terminated with an obedient curl behind each ear. She’d seated herself at a mahogany desk, indicated that he should take the upholstered chair on the other side, and then made a bridge of her hands over which she proceeded to fire off a series of questions that didn’t seem remotely relevant to the position she meant to fill. He’d been mid-sentence when she glanced sharply at a ship’s clock on the mantelpiece, stood abruptly and reached to shake his hand. He could still remember how unexpectedly cool and birdlike it had felt. The interview was over, she’d said curtly. She had things to see to now; he should start the following week.
    The 168 bus slowed to pull in against the kerb at the top of Fitzjohn’s Avenue and Peter gathered his things. That meeting with Alice had been three years ago. The permanent person had mysteriously never returned and Peter had never left.
    * * *
    Alice was working on a particularly knotty scene, a transition. They were always the hardest to write. It was their very insignificance that rendered them problematic, the seemingly simple task of getting one’s character from important moment A to important moment B without losing the reader’s interest in the process. She’d never admit it to anyone, certainly not the press, but the wretched things continued to bring her unstuck even after forty-nine novels.
    She pushed her reading glasses further up the bridge of her nose, flicked the typewriter’s paper guide out of the way, and reread her most recent line: Diggory Brent left the morgue and started back towards his office.
    Perfunctory, clear, directional, and the following lines should be just as straightforward. She knew the drill. Give him some thoughts pertinent to the novel’s theme, an occasional update on his physical progress to remind the reader he’s making some, then a final sentence bringing him through his office door to where— voila! —the next surprise is waiting to propel him further through the narrative.
    The trouble was she’d already written just about every scenario she could think of and Alice was bored. It was not a feeling with which she was familiar, nor one she intended to indulge. Boredom, as her mother had always told them, was a state to be pitied, the province of the witless. Fingers poised above the keys, Alice considered weaving in some thoughts as to the quilt piece he was working on; an allegory, perhaps, for the unexpected turn the case had taken.
    They were useful, those little fabric squares. They’d rescued her more than once. Terrific to think they’d been a happy accident. She’d been seeking to give Diggory a hobby that would highlight his instinct for patterns at precisely the time her sister Deborah had fallen pregnant and, in a wildly uncharacteristic turn, taken up needle and thread. “It relaxes me,” she’d said. “Keeps my mind from worrying about all the things that might go wrong.” It had seemed just the sort of remedial activity a man like Diggory Brent might adopt in order to occupy the long night-time hours his young family had once filled. Critics continued to claim the hobby was an attempt by Alice to soften her detective’s rough edges, but it wasn’t true. Alice liked rough edges; and she was deeply suspicious of people determined not to have any.
    Diggory Brent left the morgue and started back towards his office. And . . . ? Alice’s fingers