Free Lost Lake House by Elisabeth Grace Foley Page A

drifted further off, and the hem of her
skirt clung wet above her knees. But her guide’s hand gripped her
elbow from behind, helped her over the side, and let go. Dorothy
tripped over the first seat and fell into the bottom of the boat,
skinning her knee and elbow and bruising her shoulder, and for a
second the frustration, pain and humiliation was enough that she
only wanted to stay there.
    She felt the boat grind off the pebbly
bottom, heard the ripple of water close by her ear, and the sound
of the boy’s boots on the floorboards as he stepped into the boat.
As he set the oars in place Dorothy managed to crawl up onto the
other seat, and sat with her hands braced on either side of her,
bedraggled and still short of breath. The first shove from shore
carried them out far and smoothly, and then, working one oar, he
turned the boat around in its own current. Dorothy looked back at
the lights of the Lost Lake House through the trees—saw the small
stabbing flickers of electric torches come into the grounds behind
it.
    The boat rocked a little, and she gripped at
the side. Down she came, and found a boat…beneath a willow left
afloat…
    Where did that come from…? The poetry-book
that she had spent the last two nights curled up with in her room,
trying drearily to forget about her father—her father, and the
library, and the committee and the new shoes…only she would never
have found her own way off the island; she had been hustled off by
a surer hand in the midst of her confusion.
    The oars dug deep in the water; there was no
sound from the oarlocks. The rowboat moved swiftly, cutting a
glittering, washing wake through the light cast on the lake from
the windows of the Lake House. And there was a paler light around
them now, too, that broke into ripples on the surface of the
water—Dorothy realized that it was moonlight.
    There was utter silence, except for the
washing of the water and an occasional faint shout from the island.
Dorothy could hear her own uneven breathing. Her companion seemed
wholly concentrated on the task of getting away; he did not even
look at her. He took a quick glance over his shoulder, assessing
what lay ahead. Dorothy followed the glance. Across the lake, to
the left, a long headland ran out from the further shore, cutting
off the moonlight and cloaking all the shore inside it in utter
blackness. The shadow ran diagonally out across the water to nearly
touch the tip of a short promontory off the back of the island, out
on their right, and it was for this point that her companion seemed
to be making with a swiftness indicating he knew it was the
shortest way to cover. But it seemed to take forever. Dorothy
looked up at the moon almost with dread—its light had never seemed
so bright and revealing before. Under the lights of the Lake House
she had never seen it at all.
    The island promontory slid past, with
maddening slowness—there were only a few yards of open moonlit
water ahead. Dorothy could feel the rowboat quicken and pull
against the water with every deep stroke of the oars, like a living
thing. Then they slipped from light into shadow; the darkness
dropped over them like a cloak of invisibility.
    Her eyes adjusted slowly, and she could see
little, but she knew that her companion held the oars out of the
water, resting for a moment while the boat’s momentum carried them
forward. Then, after a moment, he began rowing again, steadily and
rhythmically, further into the dark and still giving the impression
that he knew where he was going. Dorothy stared ahead, trying to
find some recognizable shape or form in the silent lake shore. It
was still quite a ways away.
    After a few minutes, a vague sense of trees,
of rushes, of trailing branches began to take shape, as her eyes
adjusted to the dark. They seemed very close to shore now; just
ahead a thick cluster of rushes whispered in a slight night-breeze,
and the chirp of a frog came from among them. But the rowboat
glided past, checked