Texas Gothic

  We stood a little ways from where the remaining searchers were debriefing. “I’ll get someone to take us back to Goodnight Farm,” I offered, but hoped he would say no, that he wanted me to come with him.

  Which goes to show that you shouldn’t ask questions, even unspoken ones, that you don’t want the answer to.

  “That would probably be best,” said Ben, without meeting my eye.

  In the grand scheme of things, getting dumped just hours after hooking up didn’t rate a blip on the world radar. But all the same, it hurt like hell.

  Later, I’d give in to it. Now, I reassured him, “Granddad Mac will be okay.”

  He raised his brows with a sardonic edge, more cutting than I’d seen in a while. “Did you see that in your crystal ball?”

  I flinched at the hit. He hadn’t even given me an en garde. “Seriously?” I asked. “You want to do this now?”

  “I don’t know,” he parried. “Is there ever a good time to ask what the hell were you thinking doing magic on my grandfather?”

  “I—” I wanted to explain that it hadn’t been magic so much as psychology and the Phin Effect turned up to the maximum. But the door I’d thrown open to Ben had been slammed in my face, and the instinct to now bar it was too strong for me to ignore.

  He leaned close, keeping his voice low, but tight with anger. “I specifically told you not to talk to my family about the ghost. About any of that mess. Even for a trespassing, busybody ghostbuster, that takes a lot of balls.”

  I could hear the fuse sizzle in my head, but I was helpless to stop the inevitable explosion of verbal shrapnel. “Well, maybe if you weren’t such a secretive, neurotic control freak, you could have told me what I needed to know.”

  “Want to know.”

  “Need. Ben, you saw what happened tonight at the dig.” It seemed so long ago, so much had happened since Daisy had channeled the ghost’s warning.

  He scrubbed his hands over his face, like he was trying to rub off the fatigue and emotion of those intervening hours. “I don’t know what I saw anymore.”

  I should have guessed that without Phin there, his acceptance would unravel. I could see the thread, but I couldn’t catch it, and I didn’t have the power to knit it back together, except with my words.

  “You saw what you saw, Ben McCulloch. If you can’t believe me, why can’t you at least trust me?”

  “Because all I can see is my grandfather lying in a ravine telling me that a flipping ghost knocked him down there.” He swept a hand toward the drop-off, but encompassed the entire breadth of our relationship. “You talked to Granddad Mac about the ghost, and then he went wandering off to find it!”

  I didn’t need help feeling guilty for that. “Do you really think he hadn’t heard the rumors from anyone else? His memory is shot, not his ears.”

  “So now you’re telling me how to handle my own family?”

  “No!” The protest burst out of me, and I wanted to burst, too, the pressure was so strong in my chest. Beside me, Lila whined, and I lowered my voice because I knew people would be straining to hear. “How did you even get that? Could we please stick to my actual offenses? Which, as far as I can tell, are simply, A, existing and, B, treading on your hallowed domain.”

  “It’s about you existing in complete chaos and bringing that here. When I’m around you,” he said, sounding as miserable and frustrated as he did angry, “I get caught up in you and your crazy world. I can’t handle that. I just want to go back to a time when I didn’t know that people could see ghosts or find people with magic or make me forget my responsibilities in the cab of my pickup truck.”

  I blushed, certain every one of the search party had heard that last part. “That wasn’t magic,” I murmured, low and hurt. “That was just you and me.”

  He sighed. “It was, Amy, because you’re you. You’re the most dangerous one of all, because people can’t see you coming. They just think you’re this quirky, nosy, annoying, adorable girl who yells at cows in her underwear. Then before they know it, they’re relying on spells instead of good sense.”

  His words cut my heart. They stabbed at the weakest part—the stitched-together edges of my divided life.

  “That’s a lousy thing to say, Ben McCulloch.” I hated the catch in my voice and I hated him for putting it there, and I hated myself for letting him. “You’re just as bad for making me think you’re a sweet, stand-up guy who takes care of his family, when you’re just an uptight jerk trying to control every facet of his life. Well, you can’t. Life is too full of crazy things that don’t fit in neat boxes.”

  Before I could waver, I grabbed Lila’s harness to go. “But at least you’ll have one less crazy thing in yours. Have a nice one.”

  Then I marched past him to find my own ride home. For the first time ever, I’d managed a great parting line and a grand exit. And it still felt like crap.

  36

  deputy Kelly drove Lila and me back to Goodnight Farm in tactful silence. I unkindly suspected that he was glad to see a McCulloch get dumped—though only on the technicality of my being the one who walked away. Which I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been pushed.

  “Quite an adventure,” the deputy finally said. His first name must be Obvious.

  I stared out the window, stroking the dog’s soft fur. “I’m just glad Lila was able to help find Mr. McCulloch.”

  “Yeah. I’ve worked with Ms. Hyacinth a time or two when someone goes missing in the hills or out on the river. You Goodnights are real good at finding things.”

  “So I’ve heard.” The sun was coming up. It didn’t seem possible how much had happened between dusk and dawn.

  “Too bad what you find is usually trouble.”

  That got my attention.

  The deputy pulled in at the Goodnight Farm gate, put the Blazer in park, and regarded me with his beady wolverine eyes. “I’m getting really tired of hearing your name attached to wild rumors and factual reports, Miss Amy.”

  The old-fashioned address didn’t sound strange at all coming from him. He wanted me to think he was an old-fashioned lawman. A law unto himself, and he was laying it down.

  “I think that after tonight,” he warned, “you’d better keep to the farm for a bit. The university students are headed home, and things’ll quiet down at the river. I don’t think Mr. Ben is going to much want to see you around his place anymore, either.”

  He paused. “And really, we’re lax about the eighteen-to-twenty crowd at the roadhouse, as long as they don’t drink, but technically, I could come down on you. And your sister. I don’t think Ms. Hyacinth would like to come back from her slow boat to China and find out her nieces were in jail.”

  I was not in the mood to be threatened by this sawed-off lawman two generations away from cattle thieves and rumrunners. “Deputy Kelly,” I said, in a clipped but polite tone, “you can’t put us in jail, as long as we didn’t drink. And if you came down on us, you’d have to come down on the Hitchin’ Post, and I’m betting their taxes pay a big chunk of your salary. Also, I might have to mention all the pot smoking that goes on outside the back door, that people might wonder why you haven’t noticed. So I’m going to get out now and walk down to the house, because I don’t want to see you anymore, either.”

  I was just full of great exit lines today, none of which was making me feel any better.

  Daisy had gone, and she’d left a note. Got a call. Wouldn’t leave you but it’s a kid. God and St. Luke bless Aunt Hyacinth’s headache powder. Love and kisses, Daisy.

  The notepaper had skulls on it, and she’d dotted the i in her name with an appropriate flower. At least she advertised her weirdness. I supposed Ben would approve of that.

  I told myself I didn’t care. I just wished I weren’t already feeling so adrift and far from my own comfort zone.

  What would I be if I weren’t the normal one? The gatekeeper and the fix-it girl? Phin thought I had some connection with the restless dead. Was I going to be the fix-it g
irl for the spirit world, too?

  Hell, I already was for one surly, ungrateful ghost. And would be forever if I didn’t busca him. The San Sabá Mission seemed as good a place as any to start looking for la mina, and it gave me a reason to get away from McCulloch Ranch for a while. Maybe the drive would clear my head.

  I fed the menagerie, threw some stuff in a backpack, left a note for Phin, and headed for the door. But as I passed the coffee table, I saw that Daisy had left the Haunts of the Hill Country book on top of the carton from Mom. She’d stuck a skull-paper note in it at the appropriate page, and I could tell from her shaky script that she’d written it this morning, post-migraine.

  The name is bunk. He’s not a monk. So I don’t know how much of this is true. But if it is, be careful.

  When Daisy told me to be careful of a ghost, I listened.

  What had I tied myself to? Surely Aunt Hyacinth wouldn’t have asked me three times to take care of a real baddie. I scanned the entry Daisy had marked, my fingers shaking.

  Reading as I went, I walked out to Stella, brushing aside the dogs, who seemed determined to get in my way despite the fact that I’d fed their thankless furry faces. The latch on the gate stuck, but I gave it a hard yank between paragraphs and slipped out, closing it behind me.

  It wasn’t exactly engrossing literature, and the prose was as purple as you might expect from an author named Dorothea Daggerspoint. But I gulped it down like nasty medicine.

  The book said the ghost was a monk but didn’t explain why he was accompanying an expedition to locate a mine in Texas. The expedition was, as we’d theorized, attacked on their way home, and massacred. Except the “Mad Monk” wasn’t killed with the others. The story went that he turned on them, conspired with the Apache, or a French explorer, or both, to kill the party, and absconded with the gold. Only, his allies then turned on him and left him for dead.

  I was so immersed in the tale—or rather, in the wild, spiraling extrapolations my mind was making from it—that I only dimly registered the sound of an ATV approaching. I chalked it up to kids out joyriding, or to Aunt Hyacinth’s field help, who came twice a week, or to anything other than what it was: something important.

  “Hey, Ghost Girl.” I whirled, but it wasn’t Joe Kelly standing between me and the gate to the yard. It was Dumb, or Dumber, and I wondered if these were the asshole cousins who had helped Joe torment Ben as a kid, or if they were just his random pothead buddies.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. The dogs were barking so hard, I thought they were going to tear down the fence. Dumb shifted like he had ants in his pants, either because of the dogs or because we were standing just outside Aunt Hyacinth’s defenses.

  Just outside her defenses.

  Oh. Hell.

  Right about the time I wondered where Dumber was, pain exploded in the back of my head, and blackness blossomed in front of my eyes, and unconsciousness saved me from lecturing myself on what an idiot I was.

  37

  my first memory, on waking in stuffy, cramped darkness, was of Phin speculating on how much brain damage Nancy Drew must sustain from getting hit on the head all the time.

  Which wasn’t the only inaccuracy in those books. I couldn’t recall the girl detective ever waking up in an attic or stable or basement prison with the acrid taste of vomit in her mouth.

  I vaguely remembered puking on one of the guys as they moved me. At least my unconsciousness had been intermittent and not prolonged. And when I touched my head, there was a huge lump. Out was better than in. Yay for first-aid training.

  My prison was not an attic, stable, or basement. It was moving. I could hear the crunch of a gravel road, and as I bounced around, unable to uncurl my arms or legs from my fetal position, I realized I was in the trunk of a very small car. Like a Mini Cooper. The ride was ever so slightly lopsided, so I knew it was Stella, with her donut spare tire.

  What kind of morons drove a sports car with a donut tire over hilly gravel roads? All I knew was they better not put a scratch on my car, or I’d kill them.

  I could just barely hear them talking, one of them yelling at the other. “You dumbass. We were supposed to talk to her about finding the gold mine for us. Not knock her brains out.”

  “Not steal her car, either, but you did that.”

  “All I could think about was getting away from there.”

  “Me too. It was freaky. That whole family is freaky.” There was an anxious pause. “We probably shouldn’t have messed with them.”

  “You think?”

  I couldn’t hear them for a while, and I thought maybe they had lowered their voices, but they must have been thinking, and the effort was too much for them to talk at the same time.

  “Let’s do this: We’ll drive over to where those old abandoned shafts are. We’ll park, and we’ll offer her a share in whatever gold she helps us find.”

  “And if she won’t help us?”

  Whatever they would do was lost, because they hit a hard bump and the loose tire iron tapped the bump on my head, and the sparkles of white across my vision were so pretty, I had to fall into them and go to sleep for a while.

  When I woke up again, Stella was stopped at a distressing angle, the engine was off, and the moron pair was—I listened intently—not just silent, but absent. The stillness was too complete.

  It was stifling hot, and I’d slid to the side of the trunk, crumpled in a stiff, aching ball. My wits must have been returning, because I had the sense to be terrified at my predicament. Had they decided to just leave me to bake? July in Texas in a closed car. It wouldn’t take long. I might have been dead already if it had been the middle of the day.

  I finally worked through my panic and remembered the inside handle. It took me a minute to find it, pull it, and lever up the hatch.

  The sun had climbed high overhead. Maybe an hour longer and I would have been cooked like a turkey.

  Woozily I climbed out of the trunk, holding on to my head when it threatened to wobble off my neck. Dumb and Dumber had managed to throw my backpack in with me, and I drank half the bottle of water, took an aspirin, and looked at my cell phone.

  No bars. I glanced around at the granite outcroppings that surrounded me, and didn’t wonder why.

  I was at the foot of the ochre-colored mountain that ran through the middle of the McCulloch property. I’d been heading toward this bluff the night I’d fallen into the sinkhole. The dig site was far on the other side, but I’d never seen this area in daylight.

  My kidnappers were nowhere I could see. The keys were still in the ignition, though it didn’t really matter because they’d hit a hole and the spare had blown out like a party balloon. Stella wasn’t going anywhere.

  And neither was I, except on foot.

  Eeny-meeny-miny-mo. I headed for more-open ground. It might be a hike, but the highway was in that direction.

  I didn’t expect to trip over Dumber’s body.

  I didn’t expect to hear the sound of a diesel truck engine approaching over the hill.

  And this time, I didn’t need a ghost to tell me I was in trouble.

  Scrambling for cover, I threw myself into a dry rain gully just deep enough for me to lie in. The truck came nearer, and I could hear booted footsteps approaching from a second direction. Suddenly the ditch that hid me reminded me too much of the graves we’d excavated by the river. Sweat gathered under my shirt, and I wondered if an anthropologist would find me someday and take my remains back to a lab to determine that my cause of death was a bad case of recklessness.

  Too bad I couldn’t imagine my way out of this situation as clearly as I could imagine that scene.

  The truck stopped, the engine rumbling and gasping into silence. A door opened and closed and someone, I think it was the driver, said to Boots, “What the hell happened here? Why is Bob Dyson lying in the dirt where anyone can run over him? Is he alive?”

  “For now.” Both voices sounded familiar, though I couldn’t quite place them. A
gravelly Texas drawl wasn’t exactly unique around there. “Had to give him a conk on the head. It’s going to start being a joke before long.”

  “That’s what the Mad Monk does,” said Truck. “But what was Bob doing out here?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think he saw anything. I can set it up so that someone finds him when we’re clear.”

  “That would be better,” said Truck.

  Better than what? The possibilities took my imagination to ominous places, chilling despite the heat. They talked dispassionately of conking people on the head and something “worse” than leaving poor Dumber—Bob, I mean—lying there to get more brain damaged than the pot had already made him.

  Truck’s next words dribbled icy fear down my neck.

  “Where’s his ATV? And his buddy? Maybe we’d better have a look around.”

  Crap!

  I had to do something. Fire ants of panic ran through my skin. I could lie there, desperately sending psychic 911 calls to my sister—who could be anywhere right now—and let Truck and Boots find me in a convenient, ready-made grave. Or I could make a break for it.

  What if they had a more long-distance weapon than the shovel—or whatever they’d hit Bob with, and Mac, and how many other people?

  Two sets of boots crunched on the sand. The gully hid me from the approach, but once they were up the hill, they had only to look down to see me.

  A cool breeze wafted over my fevered skin. I raised my head, searching along the gully, and saw a hole maybe twenty feet away. A sinkhole, a cave, I didn’t care. I low-crawled through the dirt until I reached it, then peered in. It was a steep but climbable slope, shale hardened into something like concrete. I slid down on my butt into the dark recess, and willed my heart to stop pounding so I could hear what the men were doing.

  I could see surprisingly well, and my stomach dropped at the sight of a pale glow from the recesses of the cave. But it wasn’t the glow of the specter. It was an electric lantern, and it was on, which meant I’d managed to hide in the bad guys’ lair.