Cautiously she stood up and headed for the fridge. No ghost materialized beside it. She took out the milk and put some on the stove to warm, found one of the doughnuts her father had brought home and, firmly putting all thoughts of ghosts out of her head, made hot chocolate and took it and the doughnut to her room.
At her bedroom door, she stopped and looked around her, as if she had never seen the room before. During the two and a half years that she and her father had lived in Soda Creek, they had become fascinated by the history of the place. In the mid-1800’s miners searching for gold came by foot or stage coach up the Cariboo road, as far as Soda Creek. There the steam boats waited for them, the big sternwheelers that carried people and freight up the Fraser River to Quesnel. From Quesnel it was just a few days’ journey into Barkerville and the gold fields.
Fewer than a dozen houses now formed the tiny community on the original Soda Creek townsite, a handful of houses strung along a gravel road on a narrow bench of land between hills that rose steeply on one side and the Fraser River on the other. But once, Soda Creek had been one of the most important stopping places for travellers along the Cariboo Road. When gold had been discovered in Barkerville, people came to the Cariboo area by the hundreds, all of them with the dream of wealth. And, as the hopeful miners came, so did others — hotel owners, stage coach drivers, saloon girls, blacksmiths, carpenters, barbers and more, many more. Soda Creek grew rapidly during the gold rush days. The narrow dead-end road on which Kelly and her father lived had once been a bustling main street, and the Fraser River, which she could see through the living room window, had been thick with river traffic.
There were five homes inhabited in Soda Creek now, only five. They were not the homes that the early settlers had built, for those buildings had decayed and collapsed, in some cases sliding gently into the Fraser River in musty heaps of rotting wood. The many people who had once lived in Soda Creek were gone too, leaving behind only a few well-weathered headstones in the tiny cemetery on the hill. The people, like the hotels and saloons and stores, had left almost no trace of their presence. Nothing remained of the once thriving town except an old jailhouse. It had somehow survived, and still stood, leaning a bit, its logs weathered silver and its doors and barred windows long since vanished. And Kelly and her father owned it.
Her father had bought the acre or so of gnarled crabapple trees and the old jailhouse that stood in front of the ancient orchard at the same time as he had bought their house next door. He had decided to live in Soda Creek, rather than in Williams Lake, as Gibraltar Mine, where he was soon to begin work, was only a short drive away.
Alan Linden had plans for the old jailhouse. “We’re going to fix it up, Kelly, restore it. Turn it into a kind of museum, full of artifacts and things from the days when Soda Creek was booming.”
He had begun to work on the jailhouse just the past summer, removing rotting floorboards, re-framing the glassless windows. But after only a week he had abandoned the project. “It’s too nice to be working inside,” he said, “and, to be honest, the place gives me the creeps when I’m alone in there.”
So the collection of Soda Creek relics — oddly shaped and coloured glass bottles, rusty horseshoes, square-headed nails, unidentifiable bits of machinery— that Alan Linden had unearthed as he worked in his garden or explored the steep banks of the Fraser River, were housed in Kelly’s room, filling a large shelf over her desk.
Kelly drank her chocolate, now cold and scummed across the surface, and looked at the shelf that held bits and pieces of long gone days in Soda Creek. She had just spent the evening in her room close to those relics; her mind must have been subconsciously full of thoughts of the days when the town was alive, busy. Perhaps that was why she had come up with a tiny ghost who was dressed as if she had just stepped across from the last century.
Kelly sighed, brushing her hair away from her forehead. In spite of her rationalizing, she couldn’t get rid of the image of that tiny, lost figure reaching out, her pleading, enormous blue eyes filling with tears.
She picked up a pencil and tore a fresh page from her sketchbook. Then, at two o’clock on a Sunday morning in December, the wind complaining around the house, muttering in the trees, Kelly began to sketch a small, lonely figure with golden ringlets and high-button boots.
Chapter 2
When Kelly awakened the next morning, the sun was streaming through her bedroom windows, the wind had stopped complaining around the house and the clock by her bed said nearly nine o’clock. “Forgot to close the curtains last night,” she thought, and rolled over, away from the sunlight. Eyes tightly shut, she tried to drift into sleep once more, not wanting to get out of bed just yet. She was nearly asleep again when she heard the doorbell ring.
She listened for her father’s footsteps, relieved when she heard him heading for the front door. Kelly didn’t feel at all like struggling out of bed and answering the door. When she first woke up her hair looked wild, strange, and she’d seen the expression on people’s faces when they saw her first thing in the morning.
There were voices in the kitchen now, her father’s comfortable rumble and another voice— man or woman’s, she couldn’t tell. Well, whoever it was planned on staying for a while, because she could hear her father offering coffee. She shut her eyes and tried to ignore the sounds from the kitchen.
She wondered again who the visitor was, then her thoughts drifted away, back to when she and her father had first moved to Soda Creek, two and a half years ago. It hadn’t taken them long to realize that their new community seemed to be almost in a state of war.
Their first visitor the July day they had moved into the log house overlooking the Fraser River had been Clara Overton, a home economics teacher at the high school in Williams Lake. Miss Overton was ‘overdone’ in every way: overweight, overly thick make-up that cracked and crinkled around her eyes, over-elaborate, gaudy clothes and too much flashy jewelry, including an enormous charm bracelet which she wore all the time. When she talked, Miss Overton seemed to put some words in capital letters, and they jumped out of her sentences, startling her listeners. She taught crafts and cooking, and that first morning she had brought a fresh rhubarb pie, topped with whipped cream. Kelly and her father had served coffee and put away two slices of the pie each while they politely answered the teacher’s questions—yes, they came from Ontario, Alan Linden was a millwright and had a job at the big Gibraltar Mine, Kelly’s mother had died last December in a car accident, yes, it was a dreadful shame, no, they were managing quite well and were both learning to handle housework and cooking. After Miss Overton had offered to teach Kelly the “BASICS of good cooking,” and Kelly and her father had shared a smile, thinking of their standard supper—Kraft Dinner—the teacher proceeded to tell them everything they needed to know about their new neighbours in Soda Creek. Everything they needed to know, and a lot of things they didn’t want to know.
The teacher had shifted several pounds of charm bracelet up her arm and, jangling as she gestured, told them about the ‘old timer’, Mr. Crinchley, “and you have no idea what an OBNOXIOUS person he is. He has lived alone all his life, and his house, well he never lets anyone into it, but even from outside it SMELLS! His personal hygiene too, well, without going into details I feel sure that he SELDOM bathes. And, he steals fish from our NATIVE brothers!”
Alan had looked puzzled at the last statement and the teacher explained that, in summer when the spawning salmon head up the Fraser River, the Indians are allowed to ‘dip’ them from the river. Catching spawning salmon is illegal for white people, she went on to explain, but Mr. Crinchley had, for many years, supplemented his old age pension by dipping dozens of the fish and selling them to people in town. “The locals call those salmon, ‘Fraser River turkeys’. And Mr. Crinchley had a long list of regular customers, including some in the TEACHING profession! He was extremely unpleasant when someone reported him to the Fish and Wildlife department, and they came and took his nets and gave him a LARGE financial penalty as well. He has been positively