Page 15 of Summer in Sunset Harbour
Josie could only shake her head. ‘Well, thanks.’
‘Go up garden centre, give ’em that, open me a tab. Tell ’em I’ll settle dreckly.’
‘Right.’
‘That all? Sorry lass, got to get back to work. Inspiration’s like a sea current, don’t you know. Catch it while it’s there or you’re becalmed for days.’
As he shuffled back to his sculpture, Josie turned and trudged back up the path to the road, a radio, a key and twenty pounds better off, but still with little clue how she was going to get the campsite open and running.
By the time she reached Hilda’s place in order to beg for a lift up to the garden centre, she realised she had forgotten to ask Nathaniel about the people living in the treehouses. With a sigh, she wondered if twenty pounds would be enough to bribe them to go away.
Hilda was only toohappy to oblige, and an hour later, she dropped Josie back down at the campsite armed with several bags of cleaning materials—to Josie’s surprise, the garden centre’s manager had actually agreed to set a tab up for Nathaniel—a petrol strimmer on loan from Hilda, and a brand new pair of wellington boots. She had also gone so far as to buy some batteries for the transistor radio. To her surprise, she did manage to find a station airing the commentary for an cricket match abroad, but having no clue as to the rules or what any of the terminology meant, she tuned in to a radio drama station instead.
The barn padlock took a bit of wrestling with, but just as she was about to give up and go hunting for a sledgehammer, the lock turned with a rusty clunk and she was able to get inside. Again, to her surprise, the electric lights still worked, but as soon as she turned them on, half of the bulbs—likely not used for decades—blew out.
The ones that had survived, however, gave her just enough light to see as she padded up a concrete walkway that had once been covered with some kind of flooring, although little more than a few shreds now remained intact. While it might once have been blue, it was now a smeared, water-damaged green. In walled-off sections were ping pong and pool tables, an indoor play area for smaller children, and a seating area that might have once been a café, even if now all that remained was a dirty bar covered in vines that had got inside through a crack in the wall.
As she wandered from section to section, however, she stopped regarding it as essentially a ruin. Instead, she began to do something that she couldn’t remember doing in a long time: dream. Many of the campsite’s facilities were in decent repair, needing little more than a good clean up and a lick of paint. And while some parts revealed more of the passage of time than others, with a bit of work this campsite could be spectacular. And filled with the laughter of holidaymakers and their children, it could be a quite wonderful place indeed.
She was humming a little tune to herself as she walked back through the barn to the entrance. Just as she was coming out of the heavy gates, however, she caught sight of movement among the trees. She hurried to the edge of the barn just in time to see four figures dashing away through the forest in the direction of the treehouse village.
The squatters. Buoyed by her new aspirations, rather than feeling afraid, Josie’s temper rose. It was time they got a piece of her mind. They couldn’t stay here, and she wasn’t going to let them.
She went back to her cabin, where she had left the strimmer and the things she had bought. Everything looked untouched, and she couldn’t see anything that was missing. As she went to pick up one of her shopping bags, however, something fat and green jumped out, bounced off her chest, and hopped away into the undergrowth.
Josie patted her chest, aware she had let out a scream of fright. Only a frog, but it had been a really big one, perhaps a toad, although she wasn’t sure. It had been right inside one of her bags, even though she had put it down on the steps.
The four people she had seen running had been coming from the direction of her cabin.
Had they been responsible for the frog?
She checked in her other bags, but there were no others. Perhaps it had just got in there by itself. She sighed, then sat down on the bottom step to catch her breath, her heart still thundering after the shock.
And then she saw it.
In a patch of sticky mud just to the side of the steps, the print of a human foot.
9
Clearing out the Attic
‘I knowyou can hear me up there,’ Josie shouted, hands cupped around her mouth. ‘I’m willing to be reasonable about this, but you can’t stay up there, and you certainly can’t cause me any trouble. I appreciate that some people like frogs, but I don’t. One more trick like that and I’m calling the police.’
She waited, staring up at the undersides of the treehouses. Safe enough for children, they were only ten feet off the ground, and with a stepladder she could have climbed up, but rather than confront these people directly, she wanted to reason with them first. And in any case, what if they were dangerous? She felt it unlikely; putting a frog in her shopping was hardly an act of mass sabotage, but even so, it showed enough intent that she had to tread lightly.
‘By the way,’ she called up, lowering her voice a little. ‘Can you please pick up your pasty wrappers? Although I applaud your choice. I had a Suncrust for lunch. Best pasty I’ve had in years.’
She thought she heard a murmur from inside one of the treehouses. A wooden board creaked, but even though she waited for a couple of minutes, no further response came. With a sigh, Josie turned and trudged back through the forest to her cabin.
It was best to keep busy. It would take her mind off things—and really, if a bunch of tree-living, grass clothing-wearing hippies thought they were the biggest problem she had, they should consider a costly divorce and a daughter dropping out of medical school—and a bit of exercise was always good for a troubled mind. She tried to remember who had told her that: it was probably Hilda. Her friend had as many motivational sayings as she did botany awards.
Josie guessed it was best to start at the top and work her way down. Taking the strimmer and a couple of scythes also on loan from Hilda, she hacked away the undergrowth around the entrance, then started pulling down the vines from the camp reception and shop. As she worked, she made a mental note of what she would need—and find some way to fund; although she felt confident she could lean on Hilda for a loan if necessary—and what would require specialist skills to repair.
While she could pull down vines, cut away vegetation, hold a paintbrush and change a few lightbulbs, she couldn’t repair frayed wiring or replace a broken window pane, fix a buckled roof or seal a split gas canister pipe. At some point she would have to call for outside help, but the harder she worked, the harder she wanted to work. The hours rushed past, and when she heard the rumble of Hilda’s gardening van bumping down the path, she glanced at her watch and was surprised to see it was nearly seven o’clock. She had been working since before lunch with little more than a break to sip some water.
‘Huh, I never knew that was there,’ Hilda said, pointing at the uncovered reception building as she climbed out of her truck. ‘It looks like you’re doing a great job. I just thought I’d pop down and see how you were getting on.’
Josie smiled. ‘It’s a work in progress,’ she said. ‘But it’s getting there.’
