Free The Ghost at the Point by Charlotte Calder

sprang, but was simply left scrabbling at a mark in the sand.
    Dorrie felt as though her knees were melting.
    “Poppy!” She snatched up the furious cat, searching anxiously through the bushes where the snake had exited. But it had well and truly gone; it was probably thirty yards away by now. “You
mustn’t
do that – ever again. You hear me?”
    Poppy had once deposited a still-alive but paralysed tiger snake at the front door, two neat teeth marks on the back of its neck. Dorrie had felt quite sorry for it as Gah dispatched it with a shovel. Poppy was fast, but her battle with the snake could easily have gone the other way.
    What of the loud thump that had distracted the snake? It had sounded like a rock.
    And now she saw that there
was
a rock, a big white one, lying to one side of the path, half under a bush. She stared at it. The top part of it was crusted with dirt, but when she picked it up, the underneath was smooth and clean. If it had been lying there for a while, the reverse should have been true.
    Somebody must have thrown it.
    Her eyes darted up the hill and over the scrub, but nothing moved. Only the breeze stirring the leaves of the tea-trees and the stubby gums around the thunderbox.
    Her palms were damp and her throat was dry, and all at once she’d had enough – of whoever or
whatever
was lurking nearby, helpful or otherwise.
    “Who are you?” she yelled. Poppy took fright and leaped out of her arms. “Please, come out. Show yourself!” Then she waited, but there was nothing. She wondered if she was going mad.
    Dorrie felt idiotic, but she had to know. She ran up the rest of the path. When she reached the clothes line, she sheared off down the path to the thunderbox, stopping in roughly the area where she imagined the rock would have come from. If it
had
been thrown. Then she shinnied up the nearest tea-tree, scrambling to where the branches forked and she could get a bird’s-eye view of the scrub.
    Dorrie perched in the fork. She could see all the way to the path and the low cliff, the rocks and sea beyond. But nothing stirred; it was all ridiculously normal.
    Perhaps she
was
going mad. She twisted around and looked in the opposite direction. Over the orange roof of the garage, the top of the tank, the white stones of the drive. And then back again, over the big sweep of bushland running down to the road. She turned her head slowly, taking it in.
    Then she stopped. The sun was glinting on something, something a little way down the hill from the garage, in a thick clump of scrub. Something she’d never seen before, not in all her wanderings in the bush.
    From where she sat it appeared to be a couple of sheets of corrugated iron propped up against a tree.

Chapter 6
    Dorrie climbed down and made her way around to the garage. When she got to the tank on the other side, she stopped and listened, every muscle in her body taut. But the only sound was the twittering of a wren in a nearby bush.
    And the sound of her own heart, thumping as though it were between her ears, not in her chest. She felt almost sick with fear.
    Again, she thought about the little wave that Jacky had given, to someone, or
something
, when he was standing in this very spot. It must be a someone, surely. Ghosts didn’t prop sheets of iron up against trees, did they?
    If the intruder was human, what kind of human would make a hiding place in the bush like this? And steal stuff from the house?
    Perhaps the boy she’d seen
was
Aunt Gertrude’s ghost, and this was someone else. A robber, or an escaped prisoner.
    But whoever it was, she couldn’t just ignore it – she had to find out.
    Poppy had followed her; Dorrie bent and stroked the warm fur. “Come on, Pops,” she whispered, plucking up courage. “Shall we see what it is?”
    She started into the scrub, in what she hoped was the right direction, pushing past scratchy bushes and overhanging branches. Poppy followed, her tail high. When Dorrie’d gone a little way in, she