Susan Carlisle - One Summer At The Lake

The twins exchanged worried glances.

‘We didn’t think,’ Georgie admitted.

Isandro steeled himself against the quiver in her voice and struggled to maintain his stern expression as he ushered them towards the car. The sniff was too much for the ruthless captain of industry to withstand.

‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed. ‘I’ll ring your aunt and let her know—’

‘You can’t,’ they said in unison.

He shook his head. ‘Why can’t I?’

‘Her phone wasn’t charged. It died on her when Aunt Chloe was talking.’

He exhaled. If he had been in Zoe’s position—which was unlikely, because not only would he not have let his phone battery run down, he certainly wouldn’t have taken on responsibility for this pair of demons—he would now be retracing his footsteps.

The demons regarded him with the expressions that said they had total faith that he would come up with a solution.

‘Right, then, where were you when you ran away, and where were you before that?’

The terrible clawing panic in her stomach when she had turned to tell the twins to get a wriggle or the car would be clamped would stay with Zoe for ever. When she found them she would never let them out of her sight again…always supposing she didn’t throttle them.

She jogged along the pavements, retracing her footsteps, stopping occasionally to ask people if they had seen two children, oblivious to the stares that followed her progress. She kept telling herself over and over like a mantra, Tomorrow this will just be a memory. I’ll laugh about it with Chloe.

Tomorrow seemed a hell of a long way away, though, and Chloe was still in Boston!

By the time Zoe had worked her way to the boat-hire booth her heart was thudding so hard she felt as if it would crack her ribs. She was only kept going by the strong conviction that had gradually taken hold that the twins were out there on the river.

It was so obvious. Why hadn’t she smelt a rat when the wilful youngster who would never take no for an answer had not argued or even tried to cajole when she’d refused to take them out in a kayak. Now of course it made sense. Georgie hadn’t suddenly become malleable, she’d simply cut out the arguing, and she’d dragged Harry with her.

The ticket booth was closed, but before a frantic Zoe could think of what to do next a boy came around the corner carrying a padlock and a large bunch of keys. He removed the earphones from his ears when he saw her.

‘Sorry, we’re closed.’

‘I’m looking for my niece and nephew,’ she said before he could put the earphones back in. ‘They’re seven years old. I think they might have gone out in one of your kayaks.’ The effort to stay calm and not sound like an unbalanced lunatic made her voice shake, but she was pretty proud of her effort.

‘Sorry, we’re closed.’

She watched, her pent-up fear tipping over into rage, as he began to insert the earphones.

Her eyes narrowed, she stepped forward and snatched them out, drawing a yelp from the boy. ‘My niece and nephew—they wanted to go out in a kayak. Have you seen them?’ she yelled, fighting the impulse to shake the information from the stupid boy who was backing away from her.

‘I don’t know what your problem is, miss, but the public are not allowed here. There’s a sign. It’s health and safety.’ He pointed to a no-entry sign on the wall of the booth.

Give me strength! ‘I’ve been trying to tell you what the problem is. I’m looking for two children, a boy and girl. So high…’ She held her palm at the appropriate height. ‘They wanted to go out…’ She closed her eyes, seeing Georgie’s expression when she had refused their request. God, but she really should have seen this coming. ‘I think they might be out there.’ She swallowed as her eyes moved to the horizon where the grey water of the river met the darker grey sky. ‘In one of your canoes.’

‘No children allowed in the kayaks without a responsible adult. Besides, we’re closing early—there’s a storm coming.’ His phone rang and he wandered away with it pressed to his ear.

When Zoe took the situation into her own hands the youth was close enough for her to hear him say, ‘No way…outside the pub at five.’ But not close enough, thanks to a tree, for him to see her wade into the shallow water and push out a stray canoe that had not yet been dragged onto the artificial beach.

She’d been kayaking before, she reminded herself as she managed on the third try to clamber into the swaying boat. Of course on that occasion Laura had been paddling, and she’d been only five years old, but this was a detail. How hard could it be?

Five minutes later Zoe had gone several hundred yards. But she had no idea whether she was heading in the right direction. She didn’t have the faintest idea where they were! She was acting on intuition, but wasn’t that another name for blind panic?

She squared her shoulders and dipped her oar into the water. She had to stay positive.

The obvious sensible thing to do would have been to go to the police…so why was she just realising that now when she was literally up the creek? Then the rain started.

The downpour was of biblical flood proportions. Within two minutes she was drenched. Her hair plastered against her skull; the water streamed down her face, making it hard to see. More worrying than her wet clothes was the water sloshing around in the bottom of the canoe.

Trying to see past the rain that was now being driven horizontally by a gale-force wind into her face, she recalled the weather man’s prediction of light showers and laughed.

The hysterical sound was whipped away by the wind, which was again blowing her in the wrong direction. Head bent, she paddled hard but, despite the fact her arms felt as though they were falling off, she made no headway. She put oar down for a moment to ease the burning pain in the muscles of her upper arms and shoulders, flexing her stiff fingers as she balanced it across the canoe.

She saw it happening as if in slow motion. She lunged forward, one arm outstretched and the other holding onto the edge of the wildly rocking kayak. Just as her fingers touched the oar a current carried it away out of reach. Her centre of gravity lost, Zoe struggled to pull back, but just when it seemed inevitable she would be pitched into the grey swirling water she managed to recover, collapsing back with a sob of laughing relief into the canoe.

It hardly seemed possible that a couple of weeks ago she had decided that this stretch of the river, with its series of shallow waterfalls and half-submerged stone slabs where people sunbathed and children paddled in shallow pools, made for a really lovely afternoon stroll. Pretty, but not dramatic.

Today it did not lack drama. The river was wild white water, full of dark swirls and hidden obstacles. The boulders she strove to avoid were only just visible above the foaming white water. Zoe paddled with her hands but soon recognised it was hopeless. The kayak would never survive.

Feeling surprisingly calm in the face of impending disaster, Zoe was in the middle of telling herself she was overreacting when the kayak hit a submerged rock. The jarring motion as it glanced off sent the flimsy craft rocking sideways. Thrown off balance, Zoe lurched sideways, throwing her body weight sharply to one side to right the canoe. For a moment it seemed to work, but it was hit by an extra-strong squall of wind and simply carried on going.

This time there was no reprieve and the immersion in the shockingly cold grey water took her breath. For a moment she panicked, flailing around blindly as she tried to free herself from the upturned canoe, hampered by clothes that dragged her downwards. When she did she surfaced almost immediately, choking as she gasped for air. Behind her the canoe was making its way upside down through the churning white water, before it vanished over the top of a weir.