Free Lost Lake House by Elisabeth Grace Foley

to the right…a few yards on she
found a set of curving granite stairs and saw they were empty, and
rushed up them.
    She was on the ground-floor level again; the
hall she found herself in was empty, but the loud confusion of
voices seemed just around a corner to her left. Dorothy turned the
other way and fled through the empty halls, the sounds of the raid
still behind her; shying away from open doors to other rooms,
seeking only some escape to the outside. Ahead of her in the
V-shaped juncture of two dim corridors, a French window stood open
to the darkness. Dorothy made for it; she went through without
stopping and her heart leaped into her mouth as her foot found
nothing outside and she shot down into the jungle of a rhododendron
bed.
    She landed on her hands and knees in damp
wood mulch, shaken by the two-foot drop. It was dark here, with
only a faint glimmer from the shiny flat leaves of the
rhododendrons reflecting what light came from within the French
window. Dorothy scrambled to her feet, bits of the wood sticking to
her palms and her knees, and pushed through the bushes. The smooth
leaves slapped her; the dew-soaked wilted blossoms were cold
against her skin like soggy wads of tissue paper, and she nearly
turned an ankle when the heel of her shoe caught in the loose bed.
She ran across a bit of dark lawn, vaguely aware of huge oak trees
looming up overhead, and then her feet crunched on small gravel—it
was a path and it ran down the hill away from the House and she
swung left and followed it.
    She flew down the dim gray gravel, between
vague shapes of shrubs and plants whose spicy wet scents told her
of the thick garden on either side, down the steep path with a
momentum that could only be stopped if she fell—panting, but unable
to think of anything but running, running away from everything that
was behind her. She did not know where she was going. It was an
island—but there must be some way—
    Ahead the ghostly lightness of another path
sloping down joined hers from the left—Dorothy saw a figure move
into the juncture but had no time to check herself or even to gasp.
She collided violently with someone, bumped her nose and sprained
her wrist so that for a moment it hung stinging and useless. Her
feet skidded on the gravel—hands caught her and kept her from
falling. Dorothy gave a gasp, of combined fear and breathlessness,
and looked up, trying to see in the dark. A man—or a boy—someone
taller than her. For only an instant he held onto her as if making
a decision, and then said, “Come with me. This way!”
    The voice was young, but firm and
authoritative. It was at least something sane to grasp at. Dorothy,
all her life one to act on impulse, made another breathless
instant’s decision and followed him. Anything that would take her
further away; anyone who seemed to know where they were going.
    He pulled her along with him, and they went
further down the path between more shrubberies, half running, and
turned left along a high stone wall heavily overgrown with drooping
green. Here they stopped; Dorothy’s arm was released and she heard
the metallic whisk of keys on a ring as her companion unlocked an
arched door in the wall, pushed her quickly through and pulled it
closed behind them. Another quick stair-step descent on a narrow
path shelved with slabs of slate, and they emerged in the open on
what Dorothy realized was the far side of the island. Off to the
left was the boathouse, a jumble of posts and roofs in the
moonlight, with the twinkling leaves of breeze-stirred poplar trees
overhanging it. Nearer at hand a rowboat was drawn up on the
pebbled shore of a little cove. Directed by a whispered signal from
her companion, Dorothy scrambled down the beach and tried to climb
into the rowboat. She leaned too hard on the gunwale and the boat
slid a few inches down the pebbles; as it escaped her Dorothy
stumbled forward into the shallows, her shoes and stockings filling
with chilly water. The boat