The Lake House Read online

  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

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  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.