The Ghost of Soda Creek Read online

  The Ghost of Soda Creek

  Ann Walsh

  Copyright © Ann Walsh, 2009

  Originally published by Beach Holme Publishing in 1992.

  Third printing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Cover art by Ron Lightburn

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Walsh, Ann, 1942-

  The ghost of Soda Creek / by Ann Walsh.

  ISBN 978-1-55002-830-0

  I. Title.

  PS8595.A585 G5 2009 jC813’.54 C2009-900815-7

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  This book is for John (W.)

  who doesn’t believe in ghosts

  but who has always believed

  in me

  Although the small community on the old Soda Creek townsite exists today much as described in this book, all the characters in the story are my own invention and not in any way based on real people . . . except, perhaps, for the little ghost.

  Ann Walsh

  Chapter 1

  Kelly was the first one to see the ghost. It stood in a corner of the kitchen, beside the refrigerator, eyes big, staring, never leaving Kelly’s face. The ghost wore a red dress, all ruffles and lace, and a floppy red velvet bow in her hair, holding back a long, golden ringlet. Under the dress, lacy edges of pantaloons reached down towards tiny boots that buttoned up one side. Her face was pale, not the sheet-white that ghosts are supposed to be, but a healthy paleness with a soft flush of pink across her cheekbones and, perhaps, one or two freckles over the bridge of her nose. She looked as if she had been crying, and she couldn’t have been more than two years old.

  Kelly took a step backwards, bumping her hip against the kitchen counter. The dishes left to drain in the rack clattered, the sound loud in the early morning silence. Kelly jumped at the noise, but the ghost didn’t move, just stood there, reaching out with tiny hands, her eyes large and sad. Just stood there looking little and lonely and lost. Kelly rubbed her eyes, but the ghost didn’t go away. She put out a hand to the counter, steadying herself as her knees felt weak and she wasn’t sure she could stand up anymore. “I should say something to her,” Kelly thought. “But what does one say to a ghost? Hello? How’s it going? Hi, there?”

  The ghost lowered her hands, still looking at Kelly. Tears filled the large blue eyes, and suddenly she didn’t look real and substantial anymore, but watery, misty. Then she was gone. Completely, absolutely gone, as if she had never been there at all.

  Kelly took a few slow steps to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat down heavily. Her heart was beating faster than it should, and she was breathing as if she had just finished a race. She took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t react this way,” she told herself firmly. “I don’t even believe in ghosts.”

  It was just after one o’clock on a cold December night. Kelly’s father slept soundly, his almost-snores sounding familiar and reassuring through his open bedroom door. The rest of the small community of Soda Creek was also asleep; there were no lights in the other four inhabited houses as Kelly glanced out the kitchen window and looked down the main, and only, road.

  Kelly was sixteen, and it was Saturday night, actually early Sunday morning. Saturday nights were often quiet for Kelly. Living in Soda Creek, perched on the banks of the Fraser River a good forty kilometers from Williams Lake, the nearest town, she was isolated from the weekend activities of the larger community. Once in a while she’d spend the weekend with a friend in Williams Lake, or have a classmate stay overnight with her, but many weekends she was alone. It was a long drive to town, and the roads could be treacherous in winter, especially the winding gravel road that led down to Soda Creek from the main highway.

  Kelly had been in her room working on an assignment for her art class, and she had become involved in watching her sketch grow, the penciled outlines of spring flowers blooming with her watercolours, the white paper coming alive with colour and energy. Realizing that she was hungry, she had pushed the painting aside and looked at her watch, surprised to find it so late. The trip to the kitchen had been to make herself some hot chocolate and get something to eat. She hadn’t even been thinking about ghosts, so why would she see one?

  “That’s peculiar,” she thought. “I’m Kelly Linden, mature for my age, sensible— or so everyone says. Not the sort of person to see ghosts at all.” She thought briefly about the event that had made her so ‘mature’— her mother’s death in a car accident three years ago. Her mother: always quiet, but with a way of listening to people, a way of showing her caring through her eyes, her smile. Kelly shook her head, pushing those thoughts away. She had tried to be mature about her mother’s death, had taken over many of the household chores, been strong for her father, sometimes listened helplessly as he wept softly late at night, alone.

  But she couldn’t think about her mother right now. Now she would concentrate on the little ghost and, sensibly, maturely, try to figure out why she thought she was seeing ghosts. The whole thing would make some kind of peculiar sense if the ghost had looked like her mother. She had been using her mother’s watercolours, maybe subconsciously thinking of her, just before she walked into the kitchen. But the ghost was a blonde child, not at all like her mother whose heavy, dark hair had framed her face like an ebony curtain. Kelly had envied her mother’s hair. Her own hair was wiry and red, very red, and it remained untamed no matter how many cream rinses she used, no matter how tightly she braided it.

  The ghost’s blonde ringlets fell tidily into place, ringlets that someone had lovingly tied up in soft rags at night, then carefully combed out the next morning and caught back with a red ribbon. The ghost’s mother must have used rags for those ringlets because there weren’t curlers or electric curling irons in those days.

  “Those days?” Kelly spoke out loud, startling herself. “I’m really slow tonight,” she thought. “That wasn’t a modern ghost. The button boots, the pantaloons — my little ghost comes from history, probably sometime in the last century. Why, she’s quite historical.”

  Historical? Kelly grinned at herself. Well, hysterical maybe. Ghosts didn’t have mothers who carefully curled their hair before sending them out to haunt the kitchen of a perfectly ordinary millwright and his almost perfectly ordinary daughter.

  Cautiously she stood up and headed for the fridge. No ghos
t 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 UNCIVILIZED to his neighbo
urs since then; he suspects that someone here reported him, and he has hardly spoken to ANYONE in Soda Creek for years.”

  Shortly after Miss Overton left, with promises to keep an eye on Kelly and give her a “mature, FEMININE role model”, Mr. Crinchley himself arrived.

  “Good to see some new faces,” he said, holding out a pint jar of a murky pinkish substance. “Here. Housewarming. Smoked salmon. I smoke it myself, process it too.” He turned down Miss Overton’s rhubarb pie with a snort, and then started his own commentary on the inhabitants of Soda Creek.

  “This used to be a fine place to live, back ‘till some of them folks moved in. I ain’t set foot in another house in Soda Creek in years. That Overton woman, she’s a sneak and a gossip. Wouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t her that reported me to Fish and Wildlife. Nothing wrong with a man making a bit extra on the side. Why, the Indians from the Soda Creek reserve, just down the road, why they sell those turkeys all summer long, and they ain’t supposed to. ‘Course, when a white man does it, it’s worse, somehow. Oh, I still dip me a couple or so, like that jar I gave you, but there ain’t no percentage in taking any to town to sell, now that the wardens keep their eyes open for me.”

  It was Ed Crinchley who had explained to Kelly and her father about Soda Creek’s name. “It’s a real creek around here,” the old man said. “The water in it comes out fizzy, sort of like soda water. It’s the soil or limestone rocks or something that causes it. There’s supposed to be a ‘whiskey creek’ nearby, too—whiskey to go with the soda, you know—but I ain’t ever heard of anyone finding it, though I bet there’s many who have gone looking!”

  Before he left, Mr. Crinchley, like Miss Overton, had complained about everyone else in the small townsite of Soda Creek. There were the Terpens, Mr. and Mrs., and their twins, Tommy and Trisha. According to Ed Crinchley, the twins were ‘hellions’. (Clara Overton had called them ‘DISRUPTIVE children’.)