The Lake House
James Patterson
Copyright © 2003 by James Patterson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown And Company
Hachette Book Group
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The Little, Brown And Company and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2784-3
First eBook Edition: June 2003
Contents
Copyright
Prologue: RESURRECTION
Part One: CHILD CUSTODY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Two: FLYING LESSONS
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part Three: HOUSE CALLS
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part Four: YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Part Five: THE HOSPITAL
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Part Six: A BRAND NEW DAY
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Epilogue: THE LAKE HOUSE
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Also by James Patterson:
The Thomas Berryman Number
Season of the Machete
See How They Run
The Midnight Club
Along Came a Spider
Kiss the Girls
Hide & Seek
Jack & Jill
Miracle on the 17thGreen
(with Peter de Jonge)
Cat & Mouse
When the Wind Blows
Pop Goes the Weasel
Black Friday
Cradle and All
Roses Are Red
1st to Die
Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas
Violets Are Blue
2nd Chance
(with Andrew Gross)
The Beach House
(with Peter de Jonge)
Four Blind Mice
The Jester
(with Andrew Gross)
This is for the other Max, Maxine Paetro,
who has been involved with the bird children
from the beginning.
She knows and loves them as I do.
And they love her back!
IT SURPRISES SOME READERS that When the Wind Blows (featuring Max and the gang) is my most successful novel around the world. Who knows why for sure, but I suspect it’s because an awful lot of people, myself included, have a recurring fantasy in which they fly. They treasure it. On the other hand, there are plenty of folks who won’t fantasize or play make-believe. They wouldn’t have gotten to the Neverland with Peter Pan. There is one other thing that might be interesting to those who read this book. When I researched it I interviewed dozens of scientists. All of them said that things like what happens in The Lake House will happen in our lifetime. In fact, a scientist in New England claims that he can put wings on humans right now. I’ll bet he can.
So settle in, you believers, and even you Muggles.
Let yourself fly.
Prologue
RESURRECTION
The Hospital, somewhere in Maryland
At about eleven in the evening, Dr. Ethan Kane trudged down the gray-and-blue-painted corridor toward a private elevator. His mind was filled with images of death and suffering, but also progress, great progress that would change the world.
A young and quite homely scrub nurse rounded the corner of the passageway and nodded her head deferentially as she approached him. She had a crush on Dr. Kane, and she wasn’t the only one.
“Doctor,” she said, “you’re still working.”
“Esther, you go home, now. Please,” Ethan Kane said, pretending to be solicitous and caring, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. He considered the nurse inferior in every way, including the fact that she was female.
He was also exhausted from a surgical marathon: five major operations in a day. The elevator car finally arrived, the doors slid open, and he stepped inside.
“Good night, Esther,” he said, and showed the nurse a lot of very white teeth, but no genuine warmth, because there was none to show.
He straightened his tall body and wearily passed his hand over his longish blond hair, cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses on the tail of his lab coat, then rubbed his eyes before putting his glasses back on as he descended to the subbasement level.
One more thing to check on . . . always one more thing to do.
He walked half a dozen quick steps to a thick steel door and pushed it open with the palm of his hand.
He entered the dark and chilly atmosphere of a basement storage room. A pungent odor struck him.
There, lying on a double row of gurneys, were six naked bodies. Four men, two women, all in their late teens and early twenties. Each was brain-dead, each as good as gone, but each had served a worthy cause, a higher purpose. The plastic bracelets on their wrists said DONOR.
“You’re making the world a better place,” Kane whispered as he passed the bodies. “Take comfort in that.”
Dr. Kane strode to the far end of the room and pushed open another steel door, an exact duplicate of the first. This time rather than a chilly blast, he was met by a searing wave of hot air, the deafening roar of fire, and the unmistakable smell of death.
All three incinerators were going tonight. Two of his nighttime porters, their powerful workingman bodies glistening with grime and sweat, looked up as Dr. Kane entered the cinder-block chamber. The men nodded respectfully, but their eyes showed fear.
“Let’s pick up the pace, gentlemen. This is taking too long,” Kane called out. “Let’s go, let’s go! You’re being paid well for this scut work. Too well.”
He glanced at a naked young woman’s corpse laid out on the cement floor. She was white-blond, pretty in a music-video sort of way. The porters had probably been diddling with her. That’s why they were behind schedule, wasn’t it?
Gurneys were shoved haphazardly into one corner, like discarded shopping carts in a supermarket parking lot. Quite a spectacle. Hellish, to be sure.
As he watched, one of the sweat-glazed minions worked a wooden paddle under a young male’s body while the other swung open the heavy glass door of an oven. Together they pushed, shoved, slid the body into the fire as if it were a pizza.
The flames dampened for a moment, then as the porters locked down the door, the inferno flared again. The cremation chamber was called a “retort.” Each retort burned at 3,600 degrees, and it took just over fifteen minutes to reduce a human body to nothing but ashes.
To Dr. Ethan Kane, that meant one thing: no evidence of what was happening at the Hospital. Absolutely no evidence of Resurrection.
“Pick up the pace!” he yelled again. “Burn these bodies!”
The donors.
Part One
CHILD CUSTODY
1
IT WAS BEING CALLED “the mother of all custody trials,” which might have explained why an extra fifty thousand people had poured into Denver on that warm day in early spring.
The case was also being billed as potentially more wrenching and explosive than Baby M, or Elian Gonzales, or O. J. Simpson’s battle against truth and decency. I happened to think that this time maybe the media hype was fitting and appropriate, even a tiny bit underplayed.
The fate of six extraordinary children was at stake.
Six children who had been created in a laboratory and made history, both scientific and philosophical.
Six adorable, good-hearted kids whom I loved as if they were my own.
Max, Matthew, Icarus, Ozymandias, Peter, and Wendy.
The actual trial was scheduled to begin in an hour in the City and County Building, a gleaming white neoclassical courthouse. Designed to appear unmistakably judicial-looking, it was crowned with a pointy pediment just like the one atop the U.S. Supreme Court Building. I could see it now.
Kit and I slumped down on the front seat of my dusty, trusty beat-up blue Suburban. It was parked down the block from the courthouse, where we could see and not be seen, at least so far.
I had chewed my nails down to the quick, and there was a pesky muscle twitching in Kit’s cheek.
“I know, Frannie,” he’d said just a moment before. “I’m twitching again.”
We were suing for custody of the children, and we knew that the full weight of the law was against us. We weren’t married, we weren’t related to the kids, and their biological parents were basically good people. Not too terrific for us.
What we did have going for us was our unshakable love for these children, with whom we’d gone through several degrees of hell, and their love for us.
Now all we had to do was prove that living with us was in the best interest of the children, and that meant I was going to have to tell a story that sounded crazy, even to my closest friends, sometimes even to myself.
But every word is true, so help me God.
2
THE AMAZING STORY actually started six months ago in the tiny burg of Bear Bluff, Colorado, which is fifty or so miles northwest of Boulder on the Peak-to-Peak Highway.
I was driving home late one night when I happened to see a streaking white flash—then realized it was a young girl running fast through the woods not too far from my home.
But that was just part of what I saw. I’m a veterinarian, Dr. Frannie, and my brain didn’t want to accept what my eyes told me, so I stopped my car and got out.
The strange girl looked to be eleven or twelve, with long blond hair and a loose-fitting white smock that was stained with blood and ripped. I remember gasping for breath and literally steadying myself against a tree. I had the clear and distinct thought that I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing.
But my eyes didn’t lie. Along with a pair of foreshortened arms, the girl had wings!
That’s correct—wings! About a nine-foot span. Below the wings, and attached somehow, were her arms. She was double-limbed. And the fit of her wings was absolutely perfect. Extraordinary from a scientific and aesthetic point of view. A mind-altering dose of reality.
She had also been hurt, which was how I eventually came to capture her, in a “mist net,” and sedate her, with the help of an FBI agent named Thomas Brennan, whom I knew better as Kit. We brought her to the animal hospital I operated, the Inn-Patient, where I examined her. I found very large pectoral muscles anchored to an oversize breastbone, anterior and posterior air sacs, a heart as large as a horse’s.
She had been “engineered” that way. A perfect design, actually. Totally brilliant.
But why? And by whom?
Her name was Max, short for Maximum, and it was incredibly hard to win her trust at first. But in her own good time she told me things that made me sick to my stomach and angrier than I’d ever been. She told me about a place called the School, where she’d been kept captive since the day she was born.
Everything you’re about to hear is already happening, by the way. It’s going on in outlaw labs across the United States and in other countries as well. In our lifetime! If it’s hard to take, all I can say is, buckle up the seat belts on your easy chair. This is what happened to Max and a few others like her.
Biologists, trying to break the barrier on human longevity, had melded bird DNA with human zygotes. It can be done. They had created Max and several other children. A flock. Unfortunately, the scientists couldn’t grow the babies in test tubes, so the genetically modified embryos had to be implanted in their mothers’ wombs.
When the mothers were close to term, labor was induced. The poor mothers were then told that their premature children had died. The preemies were shipped to an underground lab called the School. The School was, by any definition, a maximum-security prison. The children were kept in cages, and the rejects were “put to sleep,” a horrible euphemism for cold-blooded murder.
Like I said, buckle up those seat belts!
Anyway, that was why Max had done what she’d been forbidden to do. She had escaped from the School. Amazingly, we succeeded. We even got to live with the kids for a few months at a magical place we all called the Lake House.
Kit and I listened to what Max had to tell us, then we went with her to try to rescue the children still trapped at the School.
When the smoke cleared (literally), the six surviving children, including Max and her brother, were sent to live with their biological parents—people they’d never known a day in their lives.
That should have been fine, I guess, but this real-life fairy tale didn’t have a happy ending.
The kids, who ranged from twelve years old down to about four, phoned Kit and me constantly, every single day. They told us they were horribly depressed, bored, scared, miserable, suicidal—and I knew why. As a vet, I understood what no one else seemed to.
The children had done a bird thing: they had imprinted on Kit and me.
We were the only parents they knew and could love.
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br /> 3
OUTSIDE MY BATTLE-SCARRED Suburban, the crowd was flowing like lava down Bannock Street. I read somewhere that Denver has the fittest population of any major city in America. I’d always loved it here—until now. I was about to force a joke when Kit said, “Brace yourself, Frannie. The kids are here.”
He pointed to a black Town Car slowly parting the crowd and finally coming to a stop in a no-parking zone right outside the courthouse. The hair on my neck stood even before the crowd started chanting her name. My heart was in my throat.
“Max! Max! Max! We want Max!” somebody screamed.
“The freak show has arrived!” Another country heard from.
Car doors flew open and somber-looking gray-suited bodyguards and lawyers scrambled out onto the sidewalk. Then a second car braked behind the first.
A bullnecked man in a tight-fitting black jacket opened the passenger-side door for a petite, blond woman about my age. She opened the rear door of the sedan, then reached into the backseat.
Max emerged from the Town Car. There was a sudden hush over the crowd. Even I caught my breath. She was stunning in every way. An amazing girl with extraordinary intelligence and strength—and wings that spanned close to ten feet now. They were feathered in pure white, with glints of blue and silver shining through.
“God, she’s beautiful,” I whispered. “I miss her, Kit. I miss all of the babies. This just breaks my heart.”
I remembered how stunned I had been when I saw her for the first time, and the crowd was having the same reaction now.
“Max! Max! Max!” people started to chant.
Cameras flashed. “Here, Max, look over here!” “Max, here!” “Max, smile!” “Max, fly for us!”
Four people burst through the police line, holding a banner aloft that read ONLY GOD CAN MAKE A TREE. THAT GOES FOR CHILDREN TOO.
Other signs read CELL NO! and SAY NO TO CLONING!
Another banner had birds stenciled on it and read BAKE THEM IN A PIE.
Then the news choppers came in, and it got really loud and unruly. Max swung her head around to take in the astonishing scene. My heart lurched.
We grabbed up our papers for court, and as Kit locked the car doors, he said softly, “She’s looking for us, Frannie.”
“She’s scared. I can see it in her eyes.”
Max has the ultrakeen senses of a raptor. She can hear a caterpillar wriggle from a hundred yards away. She can see the caterpillar from half a mile overhead.
