Texas Gothic

  “Can’t think why I’d want to go there,” I said, lifting my chin and arching my brows.

  Hand on the gate, he said with matching disdain, “I don’t know. To return my shirt, maybe? I’d ask for it back, but I’m a gentleman.”

  Past embarrassment, I shucked off the garment in question with reckless fury and threw it at him. Of course, he caught it easily. “Thank you for the loan,” I said. “See you on the other side of never.”

  “Here’s hoping that’s true.” Shirt balled in his fist, he slammed the gate, so hard the whole fence wobbled. The horse had been placidly cropping grass, and looked resigned when Mr. Personality swung onto his back and kicked him into a canter. It was a matinee western move that would have impressed me if I hadn’t completely, irrationally, irrevocably hated the guy’s guts.

  3

  in the shower, I soaped my hair with a minty green shampoo from the collection on the shelf, letting the hot water carry away my anger so I could figure out at what point I had totally lost my mind.

  Sure, Ben McCulloch had been a jerk (other than lending me his shirt and helping me round up the goats, I mean). But you don’t have a family like mine without developing some defenses. So why had my umbrella of sarcasm so utterly failed me just now? I really didn’t want to think it had anything to do with the blue eyes and the biceps.

  Austin, where I’d grown up, was a pretty big city, but it could also be a bit of a small town if you lived there long enough. Everyone at my school knew about the Goodnights—possibly due to Phin’s blowing up the chemistry lab during her junior year, when trying to enchant the football team’s jerseys for indomitability. Something about batch lots and logarithmic synergism, she’d explained while Mom trimmed off the singed ends of her hair. As if I cared about anything other than having to pass the class now that my last name was mud.

  Let’s get this straight. Magic is a fact. When other kids were chanting “Rain, rain, go away,” Phin and I were in the kitchen with Mom, cooking up spells to keep the tomatoes in the backyard from getting root rot. My cousin Daisy’s invisible friends were the children of a pioneer family who died of a cholera epidemic in 1849, and Violet’s crystal collection could cure a headache and pick up Mexican radio if she arranged them just right.

  Maybe if these things were more flashy, or overt, the Goodnight reality would be everyone’s reality. But magic was more about tendencies and probabilities, and, like Uncle Burt, worked best where you couldn’t quite see it.

  Being in on the secret might be a lot of fun when you’re a kid, but not so much once you realize how often life hinges on everyone agreeing—at least outwardly—on the same reality.

  Especially if you’re the only one in a very eccentric family to realize that.

  So now I was walking a tightrope between worlds, pretending I didn’t believe in ghosts and magic. And my family? Oh, they were just having fun. The Bell, Book and Candle was just a gift shop with eccentric merchandise. The Iris Teapot sold herbal teas that cheered you up only because they were so delicious. No, of course magic had nothing to do with my sister blowing up the chemistry lab.

  I’d become very good at deflecting comments about my family without actually denying anything. Aunt Iris, the most sympathetic of my aunts, said I was too concerned with what other people thought. But it wasn’t that I wanted my family to be normal. I just wanted them to be safe. Magic might be as real as Copernican revolution, but I was sure Galileo had kin who didn’t want him excommunicated over that, either.

  God, that made me sound like a coward. A coward and a hypocrite. No wonder my defenses failed me out in the yard. There was no sarcasm shield against the inner saboteur of my guilty conscience.

  Oh hell. I froze midlather. That little piece of self-awareness was way too insightful to be random.

  I rinsed my hair, squinting through the sluice of soap and water to aim a suspicious glare at the bottle on the shelf. Goodnight Farm’s Clear Your Head Shampoo.

  Crap. I picked up the bottle, rubbed my eyes, and read, We can’t say this will sort out your troubles or unknot thorny questions, but it will smooth your hair and untangle your tresses. Instructions: Lather, rinse, repeat with an open mind. Vegan, not tested on animals.

  That was the thing about the Goodnight world. No matter what the label said, you could never assume anything only worked like magic.

  • • •

  Once dressed, I turned my clear head to the next question: What the hell had Cowboy McCrankypants’s denim knickers in a twist? And why hadn’t Aunt Hyacinth warned me about it?

  I chewed it over as I took my filthy clothes to the washer and carried a basket of clean towels to the living room. Even in the Goodnight world, laundry didn’t fold itself. Though I wouldn’t have minded a crystal ball to tell me what had Phin taking so long, and whether or not I should worry.

  Dad once said that Phin didn’t have the sense God gave a duck, but this was not true. She had a remarkable homing instinct. I’d never known her to get lost. Not geographically, anyway. But when she got distracted by a project, or a stroke of genius, or a random thought … For all I knew, she might be building a DNA model out of bendy straws in the Sonic parking lot.

  All the same, I called her cell, let it ring until it went to voice mail, then hung up without leaving a message. Phin was notorious for not answering her phone. But right at that moment, I felt convinced she was doing it to annoy me.

  I drummed my fingers on the counter, eyeing the door to Aunt Hyacinth’s workroom. My laptop was upstairs, but to go up and get it was so … deliberate. Whereas if I just wandered into the next room to surf a little on my aunt’s computer, and just happened to Google a name or two …

  And, I figured, I should at least send my aunt a note to let her know I’d antagonized her neighbor.

  It was as good an excuse as any.

  The dogs seemed happy with my new sense of purpose and trailed after me to the back of the house, their nails ticking on the tile floor, my own Bremen Town Musicians.

  I headed for the desk where Aunt Hyacinth ran the business of Goodnight Farm. With the lights on and the ceiling fans turning, the workroom didn’t look much like a sorceress’s inner sanctum, though Phin’s equipment gave it more of an alchemist’s-lab vibe than usual, and I was pretty sure Aunt Hyacinth would have hated the blackout curtains. The room had once been the back porch, but Uncle Burt had enclosed it years ago. Potted plants crowded the space, and shelves of jars and bottles—green and brown and clear glass, all hand labeled—lined the walls, along with books of every vintage. Bundles of drying herbs and flowers dangled from the ceiling, and copper and iron pots hung near a large fireplace, their bottoms blackened by flame. At home, Mom cooked plenty of potions over the gas stove in our kitchen. I’d even seen her use the Crock-Pot. But Aunt Hyacinth was a traditionalist.

  The dogs flopped onto the cool stone floor, sighing deeply. Not even I was immune to the peaceful energy that permeated the house and grounds. It was the same at my mom’s shop, and my aunt Iris’s, too. Positive magic—the only kind that Goodnights do—has that effect. Even people who don’t recognize it as supernatural feel it.

  This was why I’d been reluctant to come to the farm. It was part of the figurative bubble where my family lived, where magic was reasonable and tangible. It messed with my thinking and blurred the lines I’d carefully drawn between my private, family world and my determined public normalcy. It made me do stupid things like get into an argument about ghosts—ghosts, of all things—with a jackass cowboy.

  After the computer booted up, I dashed off a note to Aunt Hyacinth, feeling virtuous. And then I opened a browser window and typed “McCulloch Texas ranch.”

  There wasn’t much. No homepage, just a business listing. Primary Location: Llano County. Production: Cattle and calves. Owner: Dan McCulloch.

  The second link led to a Texas Monthly article: “The Disappearing Independent Rancher.”

  I had a rudimentary understanding of the industr
y. Cattle were raised on pastureland, like the acreage surrounding Goodnight Farm. There were many small independent ranchers, but a large spread took a lot of money and resources. The article was basically about how drought, the cost of transportation, and the economy made things hard for the ma-and-pa operation. Cattle barons had given way to corporations. The author cited the McCullochs as one of the largest ranches in the state to remain a family-owned business. No shareholders, just Ma and Pa McCulloch.

  Impressive, especially after I saw a map of the ranch. It was big. Really big, sprawling on both sides of the Llano River. Except for one small white spot in the middle—Goodnight Farm.

  A book fell off a shelf with a heavy thump that made me jump. I spun the chair toward the sound, but everything was still. The dogs had barely roused from their snooze, and the rest of the books were lined up neatly, nowhere near the edge. It seemed Uncle Burt had decided to be helpful.

  I retrieved the hardcover volume from the floor. Texas Ranches, Circa 1920. The pages had fallen open to an older map of the area, which showed that a hundred years ago the McCulloch spread hadn’t reached nearly so far. It had been the biggest of about ten ranches in this bend of the river. The family must have bought up all the other land over the last century, because now there was only the one blue blob, wrapped around Goodnight Farm like a fat corpuscle trying to devour a stubborn cell.

  Aha.

  I sank back and the chair sighed beneath me, echoing my disappointment. Was that what Ben McCulloch’s antagonism was about? The fact that Aunt Hyacinth wouldn’t sell? Ninety percent of the world’s conflicts were about property, what someone had and what someone else wanted.

  “This is a bit of a letdown, Uncle Burt.” I talked to him out of old habit. “I just think if you’re going to be a jackass, you should be original about it.”

  But what was all that ranting about ghosts on McCulloch property, then? I tried to sort through my anger-muddled memory of what Ben had said. Something about a ghost, an easement, a bridge—

  I heard a car out front, but the dogs didn’t bark, or even stir in their slumber. That meant Phin had arrived home. Just as I’d been thinking of ghosts. Logic said it was coincidence, but the Goodnight part of me said not to be so sure about that.

  4

  phin bounded into the workroom, a forty-four-ounce soft drink in one hand and a reusable shopping bag in the other. She started talking without any greeting, which was normal, but her words tumbled over each other in excitement, which made me very nervous.

  “Hey, Amy! Guess what.”

  With most people, “Guess what” was a rhetorical opening statement, but Phin clearly expected me to take a stab at clairvoyance. I raised my eyes to the ceiling and sighed loudly. “You’re late and you don’t bother to answer your cell phone.”

  She waved off my tacit rebuke. “That’s not a guess, that’s self-evident.”

  Subtlety really was wasted on her. I eyed the Route 44 in her hand and the straw clamped in her teeth. “It is also evident you have forgotten my cherry limeade.”

  “Oh.” Guilt flashed on her face. “Sorry.” She held out the cup. “Vanilla Coke? There’s still a lot left.”

  “No thanks.” I’d written the drink off as a loss an hour ago. “So what kept you? Extraterrestrials landing at the supermarket?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She plunked her shopping bag beside the rest of her mess and announced, “There’s a ghost on the neighbors’ ranch.”

  I sat up so fast the dogs jerked out of their snooze.

  “What?”

  “They have a ghost on their prop-er-ty.” The last word was broken like she was spelling it out for a moron.

  I ignored that—it was my fault for not saying what I meant, which was, Really? Ben McCulloch wasn’t just making up things to be mad about?—and concentrated on the part that had my heart tap-dancing against my ribs. “You didn’t go over there, did you?”

  “Where?” Phin asked. “ ‘Over there’ is a relative adverb phrase, Amy, and not much use without—”

  “Onto the McCulloch prop-er-ty,” I interrupted. Jeez Louise, sometimes I was sure she could only be that obtuse on purpose.

  “Why would I go there?” she asked.

  “To look for the ghost.”

  “Without any equipment?” Her tone implied that I’d suggested she go snow skiing in a bikini. “Of course not. Besides, it’s still daylight.”

  At just past midsummer, dusk lasted until almost nine o’clock, which let me breathe again. I still had time to make sure Phin didn’t do anything stupid. “How did you find out about this ghost?”

  “In town.” She stabbed the straw into the ice at the bottom of her cup. “Everyone is talking about it.”

  That was what Ben McCulloch had said. Everyone was talking about the ghost, and it was making his life difficult. My brain spun, trying to fit this information into a very fragmented picture. “Then why didn’t we hear about it before this? And why didn’t Aunt Hyacinth say anything?”

  “We haven’t been off the farm in days.” Phin dismissed the question with a shrug. “And Aunt Hy had a lot on her mind before she left.”

  The memory of my aunt on the porch, Mom waiting in the van, rushed back again. I guess there had been something she forgot to tell me. As for not going into town, that was true, too. And even if I’d watched the local news—which wasn’t local at all, but out of Austin—that wasn’t the type of thing most channels would carry except at Halloween.

  “Do you think it’s an actual ghost,” I asked, “or just a legend?”

  “It could be either,” said Phin. “Or both—a minor paranormal event that gossip has blown up into a full-fledged haunting.” She shook the ice in her drink and went on conversationally, “There is a sad lack of firsthand accounts. Mostly hearsay and anecdotal evidence. Nothing even to say what kind of apparition, if it’s a will-o’-the-wisp, or a woman in white, or what. Since it’s by the river, it could even be a variation of La Llorona.”

  The name yanked tight the coiled knot in my gut, making it suddenly hard to breathe. I tried to keep my reaction from showing, and the old emotions pushed into the corner where they belonged. “La Llorona is south of here, on a completely different river. On the San Antonio River, at Goliad.”

  Phin shook her head, mouth full of soda, and swallowed before she answered. “La Llorona—the weeping woman—is just a type of apparition. They fall into categories. Don’t you remember any of this stuff? You read every book on the subject when we were kids.”

  “I’ve had other things to think about lately.” Things like being devoted to reality. “Spectral taxonomy isn’t something they cover on college entrance exams.”

  Her snort said that she found this a serious lack on the part of admissions boards everywhere. I was contractually obligated to love Phin, but she was idiosyncratic, to say the least, and sometimes outright infuriating. Other times, in spite of everything, she made me laugh.

  Which I almost did—until she said, “In any case, I’m keeping an open mind that there’s an actual haunting of some sort. After all, it could have to do with the body by the river.”

  “The what?” This was not a rhetorical question. I mean, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing to come out of my sister’s mouth, but the ultracasual way she’d said it made me doubt my own ears. “As in dead body?”

  “Of course dead body.” She raised her brows. “If it were a live body, I would have said ‘man’ or ‘woman’ or ‘person.’ Semantics are important.”

  I ignored that. “By our river?”

  She nodded and sipped her soda. “A mile or two upstream, judging by where I saw the sheriff’s cruiser when I drove by.”

  “Sheriff’s cruiser?” I echoed. Again.

  Phin’s brows knit in concern. “Have you had some sort of sudden-onset hearing loss?” She bent to speak rather loudly a few inches from my face. “Are you having any dizziness? Ringing in your ears?”

  I brushed her off and
pushed out of my chair. “Of course not. I mean, why the sheriff?”

  “To keep people away, of course. Until the forensic team gets in there and decides if it’s a crime scene or not.” She waved away such trivial concerns as homicide. “But that’s really not important.”

  My mouth worked up and down, a soundless guppy face of … There were no words for my emotion. Finally I managed, “Not important? You didn’t think you should lead with the fact that someone has been killed mere miles from where we’re staying?”

  “Well, not recently,” she said, as if I were the one incapable of conducting a linear conversation. “That’s why they had to wait on the physical anthropology team to come from the university.”

  I thought after “dead body” I could be excused for being a little slow to catch up. “Physical anthropology” meant that what they’d found were mostly bones. But it was summer in Texas. Hot, but dry. How long would it take for a body to become a skeleton?

  “When did this happen?” I asked, trailing her as she went to her laptop.

  “No one knows yet.” Phin ducked under the table to mess with some wires running down to the outlet in the floor. “They just started investigating today.”

  I addressed her rear end. “No, I mean, when was the body, skeleton, whatever, discovered?”

  “A few days ago.” She emerged, straightened, and pushed a few wisps of hair out of her face. “Somebody’s building a bridge, and they’d barely begun when the crew uncovered a skull and some bones, and tomorrow the UT physical anthropology department will excavate the rest. Which is why the sheriff’s cruiser is extremely irritating, because this would be the perfect chance to test my coronal aura visual media transfer device.… ”

  She started talking gadgets and I stopped listening. I was trying to sort through what Ben McCulloch had said in his litany of Goodnight offenses. Something about a bridge, one that they were building because Aunt Hyacinth wouldn’t let them cross the river on her land. Which didn’t sound like her, but I put that part aside. Maybe she’d explain if she emailed me back—