The Ghost at the Point Read Online Free PDF Page A

its holder on the chest of drawers. Even in the half-light she could see that the wax was cold and hard, and the box of matches beside it closed.
    The little room was the same as it always had been, with its narrow bed, chair, chest of drawers and washstand with the bowl and jug. The faded picture of a lighthouse hanging next to the window. And the cupboard space behind the dusty, yellowed curtains along one wall.
    She gestured at the curtain, pretending to joke. “Not even behind the curtains?”
    “Nope.” With a flourish, Gah pulled back one and then the other, revealing nothing but a few coathangers, a white chamber-pot and a ball of fluff in the corner.
    Nobody had slept in this room for ages.
    As they went back into the courtyard, Gah patted her on the shoulder. “You must’ve eaten something that didn’t agree with you, Ducks!”
    She made a face at him.
    “Now, off to bed! A good sleep is what you need.”
    But Dorrie didn’t sleep very well. The loose shutter kept on banging and rain pelted the roof like hails of bullets.
    And in her dreams, a hand kept lighting a candle, only to have the wind snuff it out again.

    By the next morning the storm had blown over and the world was washed clean.
    Dorrie stood on the front verandah in her nightdress, her bare toes curling over the edge, staring out over the cliff at the flat grey sea. She breathed in the tang of wet sand and tea-trees.
    “Dorrie, come see this.” Gah was standing behind her at the sitting room door. “Darn possums are getting too smart for their own good.”
    Dorrie followed her grandfather through the house and out the back door into the courtyard. And there in the far corner stood the meat safe, open. The latch had been turned and most of the apples and carrots had gone. In his or her haste, the thief had obviously dropped an apple; Dorrie bent down to pick it up from where it had rolled underneath.
    “S’pose it was only a matter of time till they worked out how to open it,” said Gah, stroking his chin. “Little blighters – I’ll have to work out a more difficult clasp.”
    Dorrie tried to picture a possum leaning down from the top of the safe as it twisted the latch with its paw. They were cunning, cheeky little creatures, but were they
that
cunning?
    Gah’s mouth twitched. “Unless, of course, it was the ghost. Gertrude’s poltergeist. A hungry poltergeist, at any rate.”
    Dorrie made a face and gave him a little shove, but her mind was racing.
    “It was most probably the little devil we disturbed last night,” Gah went on. “We wouldn’t have noticed in the dark.”
    It was true. The safe was tucked away in the corner, where the circle of lamplight wouldn’t have reached. Anything could have been lurking there – animal, human, or …
    Her mind went again to that fleeting, hazy face in the dusk.
    What if she and Gah hadn’t been alone last night? What if someone, or
something
, had been crouched there in the shadows, only a few feet away, eyes wide in the darkness?

    Later that morning Gah and Dorrie went crayfishing. The long, bumpy drive to Beard’s Bay, craypots bouncing about in the back, was hardly worth it because they only managed to bag one crayfish and a few whiting from the deep pools between the rocks. They decided to keep them for themselves for supper. There was no point in going all the way to Jasper’s Cove just to sell one cray.
    By the time they got back from their expedition, Dorrie was starving. As they rattled up the drive, her mouth watered at the thought of her first mouthful of fresh crayfish. But when they rounded the last bend there was a strange motor parked beside the verandah. Gah leaned forwards, frowning through the windscreen. “Who the devil?”
    There were very few motor vehicles down their end of the island, and this battered Ford roadster wasn’t one they recognised. All vehicles had to be ferried from the mainland on a ketch, then winched off by crane onto the wharf.
    They never