GUIDE STAR a gripping and emotional rollercoaster of a novel about love, life and not giving up by JOY ELLIS

Author:JOY ELLIS [ELLIS, JOY]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Joffe Books
Published: 2017-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Every town and village has a haunted house. The one in Sutterthorpe was simply called The Laurels and no one, including Beth, had ever known it to be inhabited.

Nine-year-old Stella came running into her kitchen, her clothes dusty and her eyes wide. ‘Gran! You have to come and see this!’

Beth indicated the mixing bowl and asked, ‘Is it more important than chocolate brownies?’

‘Oh yes!’

‘Then I’d better wash my hands.’ Chocolate brownies were Stella’s favourite.

Beth followed her into Love Lane, where Stella suddenly slipped through a gap in a rickety fence and into an overgrown garden. ‘Did your father ever explain about something called trespassing?’ she asked, picking her way past a bed of six-foot-high nettles.

Stella had clearly thought it through. ‘Oh yes, but it’s a bit of a grey area. I think if anyone stops us we should just act dumb.’

Beth wasn’t too sure about the law herself. When did an abandoned building — and this one had been abandoned for many years — cease to be private property? If her dog ran into the garden was she entitled to go after it?

Stella was beckoning to her impatiently. ‘This is an old downstairs toilet,’ she whispered. ‘And the window catch has fallen off. Look.’ She pushed the small sash window. It juddered and stuck a bit, then slid up.

‘And I’m going to climb through that, am I?’ Beth was beginning to have serious doubts about her suitability to be a surrogate parent.

‘You will be gobsmacked, Gran! Honest!’ Stella swung easily through the window. ‘Come on, hurry up!’

The house was intact, as if the owners had gone out for a moment and never come back. It was like wandering into one of those Second World War museums where they enacted scenes from nineteen-forties life.

She followed Stella from room to room, wondering why no one had ever been inside. There was no graffiti, no rubbish and strangely, very little dust.

Stella pulled at her hand and pointed out some of her finds: a red-and-white metal Oxo tin filled with yellowing cigarette cards, a bottle of something called Brilliantine, and a piece of apparatus that was like a strange swirled cane tennis racket. ‘It was used for cleaning rugs, Stella. You threw the rug over your washing line and gave it a damn good thumping with the beater.’

‘Cool!’

But the things Stella most liked were the carved wooden staircase, tiled fireplaces and the stained glass panels set into the tops of the doors. Beth watched her. She disturbed nothing.

‘I have to come back with my camera,’ she whispered urgently. ‘We got in so someone else might, and they could wreck it. That would be terrible, Gran, really terrible.’

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