Finding Sky by Joss Stirling Read Free Book Online Page A

was mostly left to myself. I wished I had a dog to make my presence less conspicuous. Perhaps I should suggest it to Sally and Simon. A rescue pup that needed a home because someone had abandoned it—I’d like that. Problem was we were only certain on staying a year—not long enough to be fair on a pet.
    I followed a track up, hoping to reach a viewpoint I’d seen marked on the map at the park entrance with the intriguing label of ‘ghost town’. My leg muscles were burning by the time the path led me out on to a rocky outcrop that had a great vista of Wrickenridge and the rest of the valley. The label hadn’t lied: the ledge was home to a street of abandoned wooden buildings; it reminded me of a movie set when filming had finished. I read a plaque hammered into the ground.
    Gold Rush township, built 1873 when the first nugget was discovered in the Eyrie River. Abandoned 1877. Seven miners died when the Eagle shaft collapsed in Spring 1876 .
    Only four years and the miners had thrown up a whole little community of lodging houses, saloons, stores, and stables. Most of the dark wood buildings had lost their roofs, but some were still thatched in tin which creaked ominously in the breeze. Rusting chains dangled over the edge of the escarpment, swaying over the golden wild flowers that clung to the ledges, mocking the lost dreams of the pioneers. It would make a great backdrop to a really spooky story—‘Revenge of the Miners’, or something. I could hear the spine-chilling themes already, incorporating the lonely clank of the chain and the hollow notes of the wind blowing through the abandoned buildings.
    But it was a sad place. I didn’t like to think of the miners buried somewhere in the mountainside, crushed under tons of rock. After poking around in the buildings, I sat down, crossed my legs on a bench, wishing I’d thought to buy a Coke and a chocolate bar before climbing all the way up here. Colorado was just so big—everything on a scale unfamiliar to a British person. Mist drifted off the mountain slopes, cutting the sunlit summits off from the dark green base like an eraser rubbing out a picture. I followed the progress of a yellow van winding its way along the main road, heading east. Cloud shadows moved across the fields, rippling over barns and roofs, dimming a pond then moving it on to leave it a bright eye gazing up at the heavens again. The sky arched over the peaks, a soft blue on this hazy morning. I tried to imagine the people living up here, faces turned to the rock rather than the sky, watching for the glint of gold. Had any of them stayed on and moved down to Wrickenridge? Did I go to school with descendants of people who arrived in the madness of the Gold Rush?
    A twig snapped behind me. Heart thumping, head full of ghosts, I twisted round to see Zed Benedict hovering at the point where the track left the trees. He looked tired, shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there last week. His hair was mussed, as if he’d been running his fingers through it repeatedly.
    ‘Perfect, just what I need,’ he said with cutting sarcasm, backing away.
    Words not calculated to make a girl feel good about herself.
    I got up. ‘I’m going.’
    ‘Forget it. I’ll come back later.’
    ‘I was just heading home in any case.’
    He stood his ground and just looked at me. I had the strangest sensation that he was drawing something out of me, as if there was a thread between us and he was winding it in.
    I shivered and closed my eyes, holding up a hand, palm towards him. I felt dizzy. ‘Please—don’t do that.’
    ‘Don’t do what?’
    ‘Look at me like that.’ I blushed a furious red. He would now think I was completely mad. I’d imagined the thread after all. I turned on my heel and strode off into the nearest building, leaving him the bench, but he followed.
    ‘Look at you like what?’ he repeated, kicking aside a fallen plank of wood in his pursuit. The whole place groaned; one puff of a