Texas Gothic

  “Still cold?” Ben asked.

  “A little.” I rubbed my hands together, even though it was my insides that didn’t want to warm up.

  He went to the cab of the truck and came back with a Thermos and a bunch of cookies in a zipper bag. “Mom packed us a lunch.”

  I laughed, and a lot of the chill left me. Turning to sit cross-legged, I took the Thermos cup of coffee he offered and a chocolate chip cookie.

  “So, this is your life,” he said.

  Mouth full, I shook my head, then swallowed. “This is unusually exciting. Is your life full of skeletons and ghost-hunting trespassers?”

  He frowned. “Only since you got here.”

  “That’s not fair! Or true.”

  “I’m teasing you, Underwear Girl.”

  He was. His amusement heated my skin, and I sulked to hide my discomposure. “It’s hard to tell with you, McCrankypants.”

  He chuckled, and I smiled, then we munched in silence for a few minutes, sharing the coffee cup, since apparently Mrs. McCulloch hadn’t thought of everything.

  “So, tell me the deal with the Los Almagres mine,” he said.

  I wiped at a crumb on my lip. “It’s a lost Spanish mine. No one knows exactly where it is, but there are records of it …” Then what he actually said caught up with me. “Which you must know, since you called it by the proper name.”

  “What does it have to do with the …” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, and I didn’t make him.

  “It’s a theory that came up when we found the ore. What if this expedition”—I gestured to the field—“was returning from the mine, taking samples of the gold they’d found back to Mexico? If they were attacked, and never made it, and the location of the mine died with them?”

  He refilled the coffee cup slowly, as if organizing his thoughts. “Los Almagres means ‘the ochre hills.’ The color is supposed to show mineral deposits, like gold and silver. So folks have been speculating about the location being everywhere from Enchanted Rock to Sugar Mountain.”

  “So basically, all over the Hill Country from San Antonio to … right around here?”

  “Yep. Your Mad Monk”—I started at the name, because he’d never spoken it voluntarily before—“was supposedly on one of the expeditions sent to bring back sample ore to Mexico. That’s all I know. Except some people say he was scalped and that’s why he’s always striking people in the head.”

  His reaction to the mention of the tale had always been so vehement that I was expecting some kind of scandalous tale, maybe even about his own family. I was more incredulous than angry—almost—when I snapped, “Why couldn’t you just tell me that?”

  “Because I hate that story. Joe Kelly and his asshole cousins scared the crap out of me with it when I was a kid. They put on monks’ robes and … Okay, it’s stupid now, but when you’re six, and someone in a scary hooded cloak locks you in a feed silo for a couple of hours, it makes a big impression.”

  My anger faded. That would make a big impression on me now. “Why do the Kellys hate your family so much? Seems like it’s more about the land thing than the cattle rustling.”

  “I don’t know.” He emptied the coffee cup, then screwed it onto the Thermos. “I don’t want to talk about Joe Kelly anymore.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “I don’t want to talk at all.”

  “Oh.” What did that mean? We’d actually been having a conversation without yelling or much name-calling. We’d broken cookie together. Or maybe he just needed to think about what a nutty world I’d dragged him into. Or just wanted me to shut up. I wrestled with hurt and disappointment, and told myself not to be silly.

  “I can go into the cab of the truck. Give you some space.”

  He gave a laughing sort of sigh. “Seriously, Amy? Do I need to draw you a map?” He grabbed the waistband of my jeans and slid me across the tailgate, closing the space between us. I fell against his chest and he wrapped his arms around me. My squeak of surprise was colored with approval, but it still made him pause, holding me against him, his gaze roaming my face, lingering on my mouth before coming back to meet my eye.

  “This would be the time to tell me if you still hate me,” he said.

  “I don’t hate you, you moron.” He didn’t even waste time laughing. All my kisses so far had started tentative, inquiring, diffident. Ben had gotten the inquiry out of the way, and captured my mouth with his in a kiss that took permission as given. Which it was. Totally. Even if I’d called him a moron.

  His hand slid up to the back of my head, and he kissed me more deeply. I cupped his face with my hands and answered some questions of my own. He had a rough chin this late at night. He tasted like chocolate and coffee.

  When he pulled back, he was gloriously out of breath, and so was I. “You still want to go inside the truck?” he asked.

  “Here is good,” I said, and kissed him again.

  “I haul manure in this truck,” he said when I gave him the chance to speak.

  That had to be the weirdest way to phrase a proposition ever, but it worked. “Inside is better.”

  33

  it’s hard to walk while you’re kissing someone. Harder still to work a door handle. And that’s not a euphemism for anything dirty. So don’t ask me how Ben and I managed to get where we were, tangled up together on the bench seat of the truck, somehow working around the console and the steering wheel and the gearshift, and only once blowing the horn.

  That’s not a euphemism, either.

  I only know that when Ben was kissing me, the whole world retreated. I felt things I’d never felt before, in places I never knew were connected.

  But I was pretty sure that whatever was buzzing against my thigh was not normal. For one thing, it was ringing.

  Ben dragged his mouth away from mine and mumbled a curse that was a little shocking and kind of hot.

  “Ignore it,” he said.

  That was easy for him to say when his cell phone was rounding third base. If anyone got a home run tonight, I didn’t want it to be Verizon Wireless.

  “I can’t,” I said when it buzzed again. “It’s in a really distracting place.”

  He shifted his weight enough to reach into his pocket—I sucked in my breath at how high his hand grazed my thigh-took out the phone, and tossed it toward the dash. It fell to the floorboard and kept ringing.

  “Problem solved.” And then he kissed me again, and I forgot about the ringing, until there was a chirp of a voice message and oh my God how was I even paying attention to that?

  I turned my head, asking breathlessly, “Aren’t you going to see who it was?”

  “No,” said Ben, his voice tickling the spot behind my ear. I shivered all the way to my toes, and I wanted to lose myself in that sensation, but a really unwelcome worry kept tugging me back to earth.

  “What if it’s your mother?”

  “It probably is. I don’t care.”

  My insides melted at the rough edge in his voice. Mr. Responsible wanted to be with me so badly, he didn’t care who was calling. It was, quite possibly, the most flattering thing a guy had ever said to me. Verbally or nonverbally, and trust me, he was really eloquent with the nonverbal just then.

  “What if something is wrong? It’s really late.”

  He tensed, and it had nothing to do with me, or with the way his weight pressed me into the cushion of the truck seat or the way our shirts had worked up so that the skin of my stomach was so hot against the hard muscle of his.

  “I don’t care.” He touched his forehead to mine, his voice frayed at the edges with a conflict that went beyond us and the cab of his truck. “I’ve given up my fraternity and my apartment and my band, and I’ve been wanting for three whole days to see your underwear again, and for just one hour I’m not going to let the ranch interrupt.”

  That was really presumptuous, that he was going to get to see my underwear again. But considering he was kind of seeing my bra by Braille at the moment,
maybe not so much of a stretch.

  And God, if anyone understood about wanting to just be there, breathing the warm air that he exhaled, seeing how long we could prolong the moment before my head cleared or his did or we started arguing again … that person was me.

  Which was why I couldn’t let it go. I wouldn’t have been there with him like that if he hadn’t been the uptight control freak that he was.

  “What if it’s something with your granddad?”

  And that was that. He drew back a fraction and looked at me. I could see him pretty well, thanks to a clear night and a country sky. It’s amazing how bright the stars can be, and all of them shone down on us just then, as we were caught between what we wanted to do and what we—both of us—knew had to happen.

  “Dammit,” he said.

  “I know.” Boy, did I know.

  He pulled his hand out from under my shirt, letting his fingers trail over my stomach. I shivered and wished I could be an enabler.

  “Where’s the phone?” he asked, tactfully looking for it while I straightened my clothes.

  I found it on the floor and handed it over. He thumbed through the menu until he got to voice mail, and listened. In the cool glow of the phone, I could see the animation leech out of his face. The nagging worry that had tugged at the shirttail of my conscience bloomed into an ominous dread that pushed everything else out of my head.

  “What is it?” I asked when the message was done and he clicked open the keypad to send a quick text.

  “We have to go.” He dropped the phone into the console between our knees. “Granddad’s missing. Mom doesn’t know where he went.”

  “Where could he have gone?”

  He’d turned on the engine and put the truck in gear. “If I knew that, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”

  I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm, and that was not the tone you took with someone you’d been making out with just three minutes ago. The pitch of his brows, the tightness in his jaw—those I got. It was his grandfather. But I didn’t understand the walls going up, pushing me back.

  Those worries, however, could wait. “He can’t drive, right? And none of the cars are missing? So he’d have to go on foot or on horse. How far could he go?”

  “That’s just it. Mom doesn’t know how long he’s been gone. She’s got Steve looking in the stable to see if Grandpa took one of the horses. They’re also checking to make sure none of the guns are gone.”

  My stomach dropped. It was an abrupt, elevator sensation, and I really thought, for a moment, that it might come back up again. I hadn’t thought about that. Aunt Hyacinth had a .22 rifle just because she lived in what was pretty much wilderness, but otherwise the Goodnights were not a gun-toting family.

  “The gun cabinet stays locked, and it’s in the ranch offices, which are also locked. Granddad doesn’t have a key to either. Hasn’t for a while.”

  The reasons for that would be pretty obvious. And I knew that Alzheimer’s patients could turn in a moment to depression—and Grandpa Mac definitely had some mood swings. But he wasn’t so far along he couldn’t almost pass for a forgetful curmudgeon.

  “He’s probably headed over to Goodnight Farm.”

  “Because you know him so well?” he snapped.

  “Oh, don’t be an ass, Francis.” The words burst out of me, because what I wanted to say was Please don’t go back to being an ass because I like you, and I’m not the kind of girl who likes guys who are asses. “I’m trying to help. I really like your grandpa, and I can tell Aunt Hyacinth does, too. And he seems to really like to visit her.”

  “Yeah, to chat about the Mad Monk and my dead grandmother.”

  “Well, maybe she’s the only one who doesn’t act like he’s crazier than a sack of weasels because he talks to his departed wife.”

  He was silent for a moment, hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead. But I could tell he recognized his own description of my aunt, because I could see the muscle working in his jaw. So square, strong, and stubborn.

  “I get your point.” The words seemed dragged out of him. And they were far from an apology. “Except that it’s not my grandma Em who sends him out searching in the pasture like he’s on a freaking snipe hunt. And even if he heads straight for your place, there’s miles of terrain to cross. You already know what that’s like, even without ghosts or grave robbers and people pretending to be Mad Monks.”

  “Just drive,” I said. That was all he could do at the moment, and no amount of willpower would make the truck faster or the road straighter.

  But when we reached the gate, I realized what I could do.

  “Turn left,” I said.

  Ben looked at me like I was crazy. “I need to get home to join the search.”

  Right was the way to the McCulloch house. Left would take us to Goodnight Farm.

  “We need Phin and Lila.”

  “I need to get home to my mother and the search party.”

  “Ben,” I said, letting my conviction color my voice. I turned in the seat so that I could look him in the eye. “Your mom has called in the cavalry, right? So they’re searching already, spreading out from your house. You lose nothing by coming at it from a different direction. Literally and figuratively. And Lila is a search dog. She has a vest and everything.”

  It was an impassioned plea, rooted in logic. I could see him try to dismiss my points, and fail.

  He closed his eyes and gripped the wheel. “He’s my grandpa, Amy. He’s not always himself anymore, but losing him completely … And after Dad …”

  I touched his arm. “I know, Ben. And I know it’s a lot, on top of everything else you’ve seen tonight, but please believe that we can help.”

  Without saying yea or nay, he put on his left turn signal. I exhaled for the first time in minutes, and reached for my phone to give Phin the heads-up. She answered on the first ring.

  34

  delphinium Goodnight, when she got her game on, was a force to be reckoned with.

  Mark and Lila met us at the door. All the other dogs were confined to the mudroom. Daisy was upstairs in one of the bedrooms, her migraine so bad, she threw up whenever she moved.

  “That would be the opposite of helpful,” I said after Mark explained. “Where’s Phin?”

  “In the workroom.” Mark glanced at Ben, who had been silent the whole drive, his tension like an electrical field around him. “How are you holding up?”

  “Let’s just get this done.”

  I’d pushed Ben way out of his comfort zone, and I wasn’t sure we would ever be comfortable together again. I met Mark’s sympathetic gaze and led the way to the back room.

  Phin had covered the center counter with printed-out maps, tiled together into one big plot of the McCulloch Ranch. I was stunned she’d had time to run off all those pages, let alone match them together.

  She was crushing something up with a mortar and pestle. When I came in, she handed both to me and said, like I was her lab assistant, “Keep crushing that until it’s a smooth paste. Then put it in that copper bowl with about an inch of water.”

  I did as she said. A curious sniff identified marjoram, ginger, lavender, and pennyroyal, but I couldn’t begin to say what they were for.

  Phin turned to Ben with the same brusque efficiency. “I don’t suppose you have anything on you that belongs to your grandfather? Something he wears or uses every day would be best.”

  Ben shook his head slowly. “No. I wasn’t expecting to need a toe of bat or eye of newt, either.”

  “Toe of dog,” she corrected him automatically. “What about something that he gave you? Or an item that symbolizes something you do together? I need a link between you.”

  He pulled a guitar pick from his pocket. “How about this? Mac taught my dad to play, and he taught me.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, okay.” She took it from him. “I can make this work. Strong emotional resonance, and three generations. Three is a good number.”

  “What can I d
o to help?” asked Mark.

  “Light that Bunsen burner for Amy. She’s got to heat that potion.”

  We obeyed like trained minions, while Ben stood back and watched. It didn’t take long, and then Phin handed him a silken cord, from which dangled the wrapped guitar pick. It seemed to be weighted, so that it swung like a pendulum.

  “Put this in the potion Amy is heating. And don’t think such negative thoughts. Think about your grandfather. Hold him in your mind. That’s why you need to do this, because you’re close to him.”

  I grabbed the bowl with a pot holder and moved it off the flame. I hadn’t made a potion in seven or eight years, but it comes back to you, like riding a bike.

  “Hold on to the string,” I cautioned. “The water is hot, and you don’t want to have to dig it out with your fingers. Trust me.”

  He did as I said, watching me as I held the bowl between us while the potion steeped. “I thought you were the normal one.”

  I smiled up at him slightly, despite the urgency of the situation. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, relatively.” He watched me as if he were seeing a stranger, and I wanted to plead that I was still the same girl I was an hour ago in his pickup. But this was more important.

  “I’m a Goodnight,” I said. “Some things I just can’t get away from. But we’re going to find your grandfather, Ben.”

  “You can’t promise that.”

  “No. But I believe this is our best chance.” I raised my gaze from the bubbling leaves, a strange purple sort of tea. “Thank you for trusting me.”

  He looked away first. “How long do we have to hold this in here?” he asked Phin.

  “Until you have your granddad pictured in your head,” she chided from over by the map. “So stop talking to him, Amy, and let him concentrate.”

  He closed his eyes, but it had all the sincerity of a kid pretending to take a nap. “This is never going to work.”

  “Ben, listen to me,” I said, tapping into the part I never reached for, because it was too scary, too painful a stretch. “You know your grandfather better than anyone. When you think of him, what does he smell like?”