The Porpoise

By George Vaughan

Cameron Rose. A legend. Confident, charming... yet secretly tormented by doubt.
Beatrice Young. Gentle, quiet and wonderfully trusting... totally unprepared for the things she will learn.
On a fateful midwinters’ night in the town of Seagrange, these friends make an astonishing discovery... and neither guess the consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Vaughan
• Release date: Apr 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370792689

George Vaughan

George Vaughan is a lover of all things creative from Tasmania, Australia, who has been writing stories for the last fifteen years. His books will be especially enjoyable for fans of Marcus Sedgewick, Lauren Kate and Laini Taylor.First published in 2013 with Out There On Bruny, a story serialised in a local newspaper, George's first actual book, Through Unseeing Eyes, arrived in 2016 to raise money for the conservation of local birdlife.He loves trying all genres and styles, but especially loves it when people have fun reading the end result!

Book preview

The Porpoise

George Vaughan

Copyright 2018 by George Vaughan

This edition 2019

Distributed by Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

Thank you for downloading this eBook. This book may not be redistributed for commercial or noncommercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favourite retailer. Thank you for your support.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents either are a product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover photographs and design by George Vaughan.

CHAPTER 1

To all of the kids in the room, be they partying raucously or conversing in quiet groups, it seemed that Cameron Rose had everything.

Easily the most loved guy in the town of Seagrange, South Australia, he breezed around the huge gathering with the confidence of a king, yet the warmth of an old friend. Tens of boys shook his hand or clapped his back, with just as many girls cheerfully hugging him in greeting. Cameron could hold a whole conversation with a few, well placed stabs of subtle irony; always self-effacing.

 It didn’t matter that he only held court with one person at a time when he did it so well, leaving a trail of merriment and admiration in his oh-so-casual wake.

 Many noticed with approval when he found his closest friends, the pair who both lounged patiently by the fireplace of that huge front room. The party’s impeccable host, the immaculately bearded Archie Stoner, and the girl named Molly Clark, who perched cross-legged beside him… they both waved frantically as their veritable brother approached.

 Archie’s family were among the richest people in the Eyre Peninsular, and it showed in his every idle gesture and ready, warm laugh. Molly was the opposite in so many ways; a sweet natured yet blunt-as-all-hell pop singer, whose razor short hair and tank top clashed vibrantly with everything about this house…

 It didn’t matter that they were as different as people could be. Cameron Rose was an inseparable friend of both. He’d welded the three of them into the tightest knit group imaginable.

 No one chose to notice when a vague look of surprise crossed Cameron’s face, a short way into his chat. The slight tilt of his eyebrow behind black sunglasses was as uncool as he ever got... and it was happening now. Was he stressed?

 Of course he wasn’t stressed!                 

 Stress and Cameron Rose were mutually exclusive. 

 His casual cool, his untouchable composure, were as much a part of him as his leather jacket and perfect jeans. It fell on everyone else to imagine him coolly dissecting problems in his mind and ignoring them.

 Problems were below Cameron’s type.

 It seemed that, if indeed anyone had noticed his lapse, the boy soon recovered. He chinked glasses with Archie; cool as a fist bump, and laughed at yet another of Molly’s myriad blunt comments.

 And then he excused himself.                              

 He gave Molly his glass for safekeeping, raised a half-humorous eyebrow Archie’s way, and slipped from the room with stealth that grabbed more attention that it lost.       

CHAPTER 2

Cameron went over the evening in his mind and realised one thing to be true. Opening the door of the Stoner family mansion, he stood awhile upon the huge lawn; hands on hips, gazing out across grass that stretched nearly to the night-cloaked ocean.

 The simple truth rolled off his tongue, masked by his trademark, dry chuckle.

 ‘They think it’s easy.’

 How amusingly, perversely wrong they were!

 As he drifted silently down the manors’ lawn, towards dune grass that formed the only barrier to the beach, he began thinking other desperate thoughts. Desperate thoughts,