The Ghost at the Point (5 page)

Gah raised an eyebrow. “Dare say I’ll live with it.”

The roadster backed around and was about to move off when Mrs Crickle, scarlet in the face, leaned across and shrieked, “There was nothing worth taking, anyway!”

“Mavis-ss,” hissed her husband, “be quiet!”

“Don’t you tell
me
to be quiet,” she cried, thumping him in the chest.

“Ow!” he roared. “Desist, woman!”

But Mrs Crickle did not desist – she thumped him again. The Ford leaped forwards with a jerk, then kangaroo-hopped its way down the hill and out of sight.

Dorrie and Gah turned to one another. “Charming,” they said, as one.

“I hope they
didn’t
take anything,” said Dorrie, starting towards the door.

“There was nothing in the car.” Gah frowned. He stared after the departed Ford, then at his granddaughter. “But tell me this. What were two so-called historians doing with a pick and shovel in their boot?”

It was a good three quarters of an hour’s ride from the point to school the next day. Sampson wasn’t getting any younger and Dorrie didn’t like to push him too hard, so she mostly let him clomp along at his own pace, his huge feathered hooves puffing up the dust.

He was so big it felt a bit like riding a camel, or an elephant. A piebald Clydesdale, he had pulled their dray before Gah had got the truck. She must feel like a flea on his back, Dorrie thought, but he never took advantage of his size. He’d been her great friend since she was tiny and was as gentle as a dove. Once at school, the children who rode let their horses and ponies loose in the adjoining paddock.

The changeable island weather was starting to become stormy again, and the horses were spooked and skittish when the children went to catch them after school.

Or, at least, they pretended to be.

“You little horror!” Dorrie’s friend Sarah cried, as her pony, Treacle, snatched the piece of crust Sarah was offering, then wheeled away before the bridle could be put over his head. He trotted across to Sampson and stood behind him, peeking around from behind the big horse’s rump.

“Hang on while I grab Sampson,” said Dorrie, “then he might give in.”

There was a clap of thunder; several of the horses jumped and rushed about. Ned Brown didn’t help matters by sneaking up on his mare, Queenie, grabbing her around the neck with both arms and shouting, “Gotcha!” at the top of his lungs.

Queenie took off straight through the other horses, Ned clinging on like a monkey.

“Ned!” Dorrie and Sarah shouted in unison. “For goodness sake.”

“Telling Miss Taggart on you,” screamed Sarah’s little sister, Annie, who was six.

Ned was forever being told to watch it, or stop it, or behave himself. He couldn’t sit still. Miss Taggart, who always called him by his full name of Edward, said he had ants in his pants.

By now he’d managed to scramble up onto Queenie’s back, where he proceeded to give an impromptu demonstration of rodeo riding. He whooped and hollered, clinging by the mane to his bucking horse.

It took him about five seconds to be tossed off. He scrambled to his feet and bowed to his hooting, cheering audience.

When the girls had finally caught the naughty Treacle, and Dorrie had slipped the bridle on Sampson (he obligingly lowered his great head, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to reach without standing on something), all three girls set off. Annie sat behind Sarah on Treacle. They never bothered with saddles – Sarah and Annie because there wasn’t enough room, and Dorrie because Sampson’s broad back was warm and comfortable without one.

The thunder seemed to have rolled away a bit, but black clouds were massing to the south-west, and the air felt prickly and heavy.

“Annie,” said Sarah after a while, “wake up.”

The rocking motion of Treacle was sending Annie to sleep, her thumb in her mouth. Her head rested on her sister’s long red plait. “Tired,” she mumbled, through her thumb.

“Yes, I know,” said her sister in a soothing tone, “but you’ll fall off in a minute. We’ll be home soon.” She smiled across at Dorrie and murmured, “I used to do the same thing myself when I was little, riding behind Bill.”

Sarah and Annie’s fourteen-year-old brother, Bill, had finished school and was working on fishing boats. There was no high school on the island. Senior school meant attending boarding school on the mainland, something which most islanders, including Sarah’s parents and Gah, couldn’t afford.

By the time they reached Sarah and Annie’s place, Sarah had moved her little sister to the front and clasped her freckled arm around Annie’s small frame. The sisters slid off Treacle at the gate, just as their mother, baby Charley in her plump arms, came out to meet them. Trixie the kelpie came too, barking a welcome.

“Hello, girls. Have a good day?”

“Bah!” shouted Charley, smiling and reaching out for them.

“Was all right,” said Sarah. “What’s to eat, Ma? We’re starving.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows. “How unusual.”

Dorrie tied up Sampson, Sarah let Treacle go in the paddock, and then they made a beeline for the kitchen.

Today Mrs Jennings had made rock cakes. They sat plump and golden on a plate on the table.

“Scrummy, Mrs J,” said Dorrie, halfway through her first.

“Mmm, good,” said Sarah, dreamily.

“Don’t talk with your mouthful, you two,” said Annie, automatically. She was carefully picking out the sultanas from her rock cake.

Sarah rolled her eyes at Dorrie. “Excuse
me
, Miss Goody Two Shoes. Mind your own manners. Eat it, instead of picking it to bits.”

Annie had made two piles – one of sultanas and one of crumbled rock cake – before a morsel had even touched her lips.

“Bah!” said Charley from his highchair. He stretched out his arm and dropped his cake on the floor. His mother absent-mindedly picked it up and put it back on his tray.

Something seemed to be preoccupying her.

“Anyway,” she said, crossing to the stove and lifting off the whistling kettle, “’fraid there’s been some bad news.”

“What?” asked Sarah, cake halfway to her mouth. “What’s happened?”

Mrs Jennings paused. “Well, there’s been a wreck,” she said, “on the south coast.”

Dorrie and Sarah stared at her in astonishment.

She sighed, pouring the boiling water into the teapot. “Joe and Dan Heggarty had a fishing expedition yesterday, right out to Hogg’s Holes. They were going to camp out there overnight. When they climbed the headland at the end of the first beach they could see the wreck – a small steamer, or what was left of it – out on the reef off Black Cape.”

Black Cape
.

The words jumped out at Dorrie. Wasn’t that where great-great-grandfather Ned was supposed to have been wrecked?

“There was timber and debris all over the beach …” Mrs Jennings trailed off; she shook her head. “And–” She stopped, her face grim. The children waited for her to go on, but she simply put the lid on the teapot and said, “Enough of that. What happened at school today?”

The girls were silent, realising why she’d changed the subject. Dorrie felt sick.

“And bodies – on the beach?” asked Sarah. “People who drowned?”

Her mother glanced at Annie, who had been feeding Charley her sultanas. “Annie,” she cried. “I think I can hear your father coming. You can be the first to say hello to him. Run, quickly!”

To be the first at anything was irresistible – Annie was off like a shot.

“Yes,” said her mother quietly, when Annie’d gone. “Poor souls. There were three drowned people. Two men and a woman washed up on the sand.”

“Oh.” Dorrie and Sarah sat very still, half disbelieving. The stories of the old shipwrecks, many of them on the south coast, were frightening and sad, considering all the lives lost. But the fact that they had mostly happened a long time ago made them seem distant, and a bit unreal. This wreck was now – in 1931.

“They don’t even know where the boat came from yet,” said Mrs Jennings. “Joe Heggarty said from what they could see it seemed pretty old and rusted. More like a coastal steamer than any ocean-going vessel.” She sighed and shook her head. “A tub like that’d be no match for the south coast, with all those storms we’ve been having lately. It could easily have been there for a while – just luck that the Heggartys happened to come along.”

Dorrie thought of the storm of a few nights ago. And there had been another one, several days before that.

“But apparently the poor dead souls all looked foreign,” Mrs Jennings continued. “They had dark hair and complexions. And the name of the boat sounded foreign too. The
Santa Rosa
, it was called–”

“Mu-um!” Annie was back, standing accusingly in the doorway. “Dad’s not there!”

“Oh, well,” said her mother, vaguely. “Finish your rock cake.”

“The name sounds foreign,” said Sarah. “Italian or Spanish or something.”

“Or maybe they came from a South American country,” said Dorrie. She shivered as she pictured a tiny, battered ship ploughing thousands of miles through mountainous waves and howling winds. Then she had another thought. “Surely there must’ve been more than three people on board.”

“Oh, for sure.” Mrs Jennings poured the tea. “A steamer like that would normally have a crew of at least four. Not to mention any passengers.”

There was another silence, only broken by the clink of cups and saucers as she passed them around.

Annie had climbed back up onto the chair and was popping sultanas in Charley’s mouth. “Where are they all then?” she asked, adding cheerfully, “Gobbled up by the sharks, most prob’ly.”

“Annie!” cried Sarah. “Don’t say that!”

But they all knew it could be true. The reef- and rock-spattered south coast was teeming with fish of all sizes – including, of course, great whites. Dorrie had heard fishermen’s tales of schools of them lurking beyond the breakers.

“We may never know the final count, God rest their souls,” said Mrs Jennings. “Anyway, apparently the harbourmaster wired the authorities on the mainland about the identity of the boat, but there’s no record of any
Santa Rosa
expected in these waters.”

“A mystery ship,” said Dorrie, “from nowhere.”

Despite the hazy afternoon warmth of the kitchen, she suddenly felt quite cold.

By the time Dorrie got home, towers of grey clouds had hidden the setting sun and everything seemed later than it was. She let Sampson go in his paddock and watched smiling as he lumbered down onto his knees and had his usual roll. Then she made for the kitchen and dumped her bag, wondering idly whether Gah was still out fishing.

She went onto the verandah and peered down along the beach. To her surprise she spied the dinghy pulled up on the sand.

Hadn’t he been fishing today? It took much more than a bit of unsettled weather to deter Gah. And if he had been out and had already come in, he would have left the dinghy anchored in the shallows, for her to help pull it up when she got home.

“Gah!” she called, squinting around the verandah again. “Ga-ah.”

Dorrie hurried to his bedroom and flung open the screen door. She breathed in the familiar salt-and-sand tang of Gah, but he wasn’t there. Everything looked normal. There was his neatly made bed, the framed photograph of Gan and the bookmarked novel – a Charles Dickens one as usual – on the bedside table. His brown jumper hung over the back of the chair next to the washstand. Everything sat still and silent.

Dorrie went outside again, jumped off the verandah and ran down the point. She stood out on the end, gazing over the cliffs on either side.

“Gah!” she yelled, her voice bouncing slightly on the jumble of boulders and rocks. “GAH!”

The wind was getting up. It moved in little gusts across the water, lapping loudly in the tiny, secret inlets below. A lonely gull screamed and wheeled off out to sea.

Could he have gone off somewhere in the truck? She tried to remember if she’d seen it as she passed the garage. But if he had, he would’ve left a note, and she hadn’t seen one on the kitchen table.

She hurried back around the house and past the vegetable patch, still calling. But she could already see the back of the truck, peeping out from the edge of the garage. She pulled up, her breath raw, wondering whether to go and check inside or whether to head straight down the path to the beach.

Something made her spin around quickly and glance back at the house. But there was nothing. Just the stone walls and the gaps of darkening sky through the verandah posts.

The back of her neck prickled and she realised she was holding her breath. She could have sworn she was being watched.

All at once her heart was beating like a drum in her ears. She ran down to the truck and flung open the driver’s side door.

The cabin was empty. There was just the usual sight of the springs poking through the cracked leather seats, the ground showing through the gaps in the floor. She went around to the front and felt the bonnet. It was stone cold.

It was then that she heard it. A faint cry.

“Dorrie … Dorrie …”

She gasped, looking up at the rafters. For a moment it had seemed to come from the roof.