Texas Gothic

19



“it looks a lot more exciting on television, doesn’t it?”

Emery was officially starting to piss me off. I hated I-told-you-so’s. Especially when they were true.

My back ached from hunching over the shallow trough with the trowel and a soft-bristle brush. I had so much dirt under my nails I could start another Goodnight Farm. Digging for human remains in limestone earth, hard-packed by time, elements, and a whole lot of cow hooves, was grueling work.

We’d been at it all morning, with Mark and Dr. Douglas periodically checking our progress and technique. I was beginning to wonder if the skull might have been separated from its body, since I hadn’t found anything but a rock that I’d thought was a patella but was just a rock.

Then Dwayne uncovered a real kneecap, as well as a tibia and a jumble of bones that had once been a foot.

“Come here and look at this, gang,” said Dr. Douglas. When we’d gathered around, she pointed out the tarsals, metatarsals, and a few tiny phalanges. “Since the bones are in accurate positions, merely collapsed and distorted by the weight of the soil, this body was likely buried before it decomposed, preserving the remains in place.”

“Is this the foot that belongs to the skull Amy found yesterday?” Dwayne asked.

“The position and proximity do seem consistent with that.” Lecturing as she worked, she scooped some dirt into a vial, then labeled it with a Sharpie. “When we find remains that haven’t been moved, we want to get as much information from the soil around the body as possible. Lab analysis will help us to determine the answer to Dwayne’s question, as well as to piece together how the bones came to be here.”

“Look at this,” said Mark. We were all crouched shoulder to shoulder around Dwayne’s trench, and Mark lightly touched a piece of tattered and blackened leather sticking out of the dirt beside the bones. “That could be the bottom of a shoe or boot.”

“Don’t remove anything until Jennie takes pictures,” said Dr. Douglas. “I’ll send Caitlin, too. She’ll be thrilled to have something to catalog that isn’t a bone.” The professor was way too stoic to rub her hands together with excitement, but she definitely had a vibe going on, as Daisy would say. “And call me if you find anything else.”

As she left, I stared at the ragged leather, my mind filling in the gaps, until I saw the sole of a boot, tattered by wear and innumerable miles. A soldier’s boot? A conquistador’s?

Or maybe it was the sole of a monk’s leather sandal.

“Imagine the ground that shoe traveled on the way here, the places it may have been.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until I saw the others looking at me. I cleared my throat, a little embarrassed at my whimsy. “It’s just … here’s this utilitarian thing, like what we’re all wearing now. Whoever wore it walked on this same dirt, had the same mud on his heels, but centuries ago.”

Emery had his own commentary. “Very poetic. Except we try not to do much imagining in science.”

I gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “I can see why you picked a field where you mostly work with dead people.”

“And I imagine things all the time,” said Phin, backing me up. “It’s called ‘invention.’ Or sometimes, ‘making a hypothesis.’ ”

“Don’t provoke him,” chided Mark, not quite hiding his laugh. “We have to work with him all year. So let’s get back to it.”

Emery set his jaw, which emphasized his prominent chin. “Those of us who are actually working, and not just amusing themselves.”

A hand smacked him in the back of the head, and it wasn’t mine. Caitlin had arrived, digging tools in her (non-smiting) hand. “Don’t knock the volunteer labor,” she said. “Of which I’m one. Now show me this thing that might be a shoe so I can earn my unpaid-predoctoral-candidate-archaeologist’s keep.”

Phin tugged at my shirt. “Come on, Amy. If that troglodyte finds something significant before I do, you are going to owe me big-time.”

I suspected the debt might involve being her test subject in a school project, so I got back to work as ordered. My whole life felt like an experiment since the ghost had appeared.

Over the rest of the morning, Lucas and Dwayne worked together and uncovered a femur, then the iliac crest of a pelvis. That caused another flurry of excitement as they dug down to expose the rest of it so Dr. D could identify its gender as male. I realized I’d been already thinking of the remains as male. Was that a hunch or just bad science? Emery found the other tibia and another piece of rotted leather, and at Phin’s dark look, I bent my head to my work and didn’t look up again.

The only problem was, digging and sifting didn’t take much brain power, so my mind was free to wander and worry.

What would happen if finding the whole skeleton didn’t satisfy the specter?

Maybe these remains had nothing to do with the ghost. It seemed like if I was wedded to this thing somehow, I would sense something when I touched the bones. I’d felt the age and mortality of the skull yesterday, but nothing that really tied it to the apparition.

I was pinning my hopes that digging here would lead me to some clue, but if this didn’t work, what did I do then?

My work was much more orderly than my thoughts. Back and forth across my three-by-two rectangle of ground, on each pass I dug down another layer. Six inches deep didn’t sound very impressive, but I had to put every shovelful of dirt through a sieve, to make sure I didn’t miss any tiny bones or artifacts.

A pair of very worn boots stepped into my line of sight. They crumbled the edge of my nice, neat trench. You could have measured the sides with a ruler, until then.

“Hey.” When I didn’t respond right away—digging was sort of hypnotic—he gave a whistle. “Earth to Underwear Girl.”

I didn’t need the boots or the horrible nickname to tell me who it was. Because it figured.

“You’re collapsing the side of my trench. I worked very hard on that.”

Ben stepped back, sending clods of dirt skittering down the sides of my excavation. I tried to look up at his face instead of his feet, but my neck was knotted tighter than a toddler’s first shoelaces.

I could only turn my head enough to see that Phin and the others were gone. “Where is everybody?”

“Ordinary mortals have to stop and eat.” His feet shifted, and I could picture him hooking his thumb in his belt the way he did. “My mother brought lunch.”

“Your mother?” Surprise made me move too fast, and I bit off a gasp as the muscles between my neck and shoulder seized into one big, searing spasm.

“Don’t sound so shocked,” he said. “I told you I had one.”

“Cramp,” I choked, dropping my trowel and grabbing my shoulder.

“Oh for Pete’s sake.” He slid a hand under my arm and pulled me smoothly to my feet—a move I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own, since my leg muscles were kinked and knotted, too.

“Careful—” I flinched as he touched my neck, but despite the manhandling, his fingers were gently firm. Not enticing or soothing, but effective. He kneaded the tightly wound muscle that ran from behind my ear down to my shoulder, and the blinding pain of the cramp began to ease.

“Relax,” he said.

Was he kidding? All the voluntary tension was running out of me, leaving only the knots. My insides were melting, too, at the steady, capable strength of his hands.

“You do this a lot?” I asked, not nearly as snarky as I wanted to be.

“Sure,” he said, oblivious—I hoped—to the breathless catch in my voice. “I do this to my horse all the time.”

“Lucky horse.” No lie. I was willing to bet he treated his horse better than some guys treated their girlfriends. His thumbs worked the cords in my neck, and I bit my lip to hold back an embarrassing sigh. “You have a funny way of showing how much you don’t like me.”

“I don’t like gophers, either, but I wouldn’t leave one to suffer. I’d shoot it to put it out of its misery.”

“Nice.” I started to slide out from his hold, but his fingers tightened just enough to stop me.

“Almost got it,” he said, working out the very last of the cramp. He also answered my unasked question. “Phin sent me. She said no one else annoyed you enough to break your concentration. Not even Emery. I think she likes me.”

I gave my head an experimental turn. “If your skin hasn’t turned green and bumpy, then she likes you.”

“If she didn’t, she’d turn me into a frog?”

“Why mess around with transformation when an embarrassing rash will do?”

He exhaled on a chuckle, a half laugh that stirred the hair at my nape. I fought a shiver, despite the hot sun. The cramp was gone, but he continued to work on the kinks, thumbs on either side of my neck. “Have you looked up at all in the last hour?”

No. I hadn’t. I’d been working with a mindless intensity, my thoughts on the ghost, trying to make this dig count. Some clue to the mystery had to be here.

“I guess I lost track of time.”

“Thinking about your ghost?”

I spoke before I could chicken out. “About yours, actually. The Mad Monk.”

His hands fell away. “Seriously? That ridiculous story?”

“Yes, the story.” I emphasized the word and turned to face him. “Just hear me out—”

Then I stopped, because he looked like five miles of bad road. His eyes were shadowed, and he hadn’t shaved, and though it kind of worked on him, in a work-hard-play-hard sort of way, I didn’t think it was a styling choice. “How late were you out last night?”

He gave me a pointed once-over. “No offense, Amaryllis, but you look a little haggard yourself.”

“I had horrible nightmares and couldn’t sleep. You?”

A rueful grimace, and he admitted, “Got a call about cows on the road in the wee hours. We’ve got fences down all over the ranch. I was up all night repairing the ones by the highway. Steve’s got a crew out working on the rest.”

“You were? By yourself?”

He scowled and slipped into the exaggerated accent he used when he was mocking me about the ghost. “Well, I couldn’t rightly ask any of the men to do it, what with the Mad Monk bashing people on the head.” Then honesty made him relent. “I had some volunteers, though.”

I wondered if Jessica’s boyfriend was one of them. “Isn’t that sort of weird? So many fences going down at once?”

His eyes narrowed. “Odd, but not out of the question. This place is full of limestone caves, and sinkholes open up.… ”

“Did sinkholes open up?” I asked.

“Well,” he admitted, “not that we’ve found yet. But they could have.”

“All over the place?”

“Of course not all over the place,” he snapped.

“That’s what you said!”

“Maybe it wasn’t sinkholes,” he said, “but it sure as hell wasn’t the Mad Monk!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because why the blue blazes would a ghost tear down a bunch of fences?”

“I don’t know! But I need to find out.”

That stopped us both. Him because I’d come right out and said it, and me because … well, because I guess I’d found my next step. Just like local folklore helped archaeologists find actual buried sites, following the legend of the Mad Monk could be the thing that led me to the real ghost. But I needed to ask questions, piece together the internal logic of the story.

“Why?” Ben finally said. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

Because it wouldn’t leave me alone, and I didn’t want to be saddled with a spectral shadow my whole life. But I couldn’t tell him that. I had to find another way to convince him I was doing a crazy-sounding thing for noncrazy reasons.

“Look, Ben,” I said. “Whether the Mad Monk is real or not, people are scared. If I get to the bottom of this legend, find out how it started and what’s stirring it up, maybe it will help.”

It was a good argument, though I felt a little guilty because I’d implied I was going to disprove the Mad Monk story. But maybe I would, if my specter and the monk were two different things.

He narrowed his eyes, still doubting. “So, you want to do a ghost stakeout, like on television?”

I didn’t see a reason to tell him I already had. “More like detective work. Ask questions, talk to people who’ve heard the stories before they’ve been warped by time and rumor.”

“Like who?” he asked, as if he was chewing it over.

“Well, I could start with you.” He snorted, but I was undeterred, even though he wasn’t going to like my next suggestion. “Your mother …”

“No.”

“Your granddad.”

“Hell no!”

He turned at that and stalked up the hill toward the copse of trees where Phin and I had sat the day before. Today there was a huge SUV there, its tailgate open to serve as a makeshift buffet table. The students sat on the ground and on a few camp seats from the work areas. Dr. Douglas lounged in one of the chairs, chatting with a woman I couldn’t see behind her enormous sunglasses.

None of them, fortunately, was paying attention as I trotted after Ben. I’d totally mishandled him—again—and trying to repair my case was like trying to bail a leaky rowboat.

“I would only talk to him if he was having a good day,” I bargained. “Alzheimer’s patients sometimes remember the past more clearly than the present—”

He stopped. Turned. Leaned down so he was right in my face. “No. Do not talk to Grandpa Mac about ghosts. He sees enough of them already.”

My mind snagged on that for a moment, wondering if he saw them in the present or the past. Was his Emily like Uncle Burt, or was she only in his mind?

The question wouldn’t matter if I didn’t fix things with Ben.

“Look,” I said, “the only stories I have are via the Kellys. What the Kellys said they saw or heard, or what their cattle-rustling grandfather said.” In fact, it seemed like the Kellys had done a lot more talking about the ghost than Aunt Hyacinth could have, given that she’d been on a slow boat to China for a while now. But I didn’t point that out, since Ben was mad enough already.

“Fine,” he said, proving how angry he was. “Why don’t you take Joe Kelly out to dinner and ask him about the Mad Monk.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, because apparently I was five.

“Wear a raincoat for the beer and your rubber boots for the bull—”

A woman’s voice, syrup thick and laced with maternal disapproval, rolled heavily down the hill. “Benjamin Francis McCulloch! I told you to bring that young lady up here for some lunch, not to yell at her like a hooligan.”

Francis? I was never going to let him tease me about Amaryllis again.

The triple-name whammy had an astounding effect on Ben. He colored to the tips of his ears and, after one last acid glance, wiped his face of anything but pleasant solicitude and gestured me onward to the picnic. With the same exaggerated courtesy, I swept by him … and knew I was just as red-faced as he.

Most of the gang were too busy eating and talking to pay much attention, but Mark looked vastly amused. Caitlin’s expression implied she was updating her taxonomy to include Freshmanicus buttheadius. And as I passed Phin, she murmured, “What was that you said about not antagonizing the law?”

I ignored her and focused on the blond woman who literally greeted me with open arms. “Amy! I’ve just been chatting with Phin. It’s so delightful to meet you both.”

Mrs. McCulloch had a big Texas drawl to go with the big Texas hair, and she seemed utterly genuine. Her warmth threw me off balance. If there was any bad blood between her and Aunt Hyacinth, it didn’t affect her greeting at all, and she clearly didn’t hold my public argument with Ben against me.

Either that, or she was the best actress in the world. I glanced at Phin, who shrugged—her mouth full of sandwich—which I interpreted to mean she’d taken the woman at face value and so should I.

Holding me at arm’s length, she gave me a rather matriarchal inspection. “Aren’t you adorable! Look at those dimples. I expected you to be taller.”

“Understandable,” I said, still a little bewildered by the reception. Phin and I bookended average height, but Aunt Hyacinth was something approaching Amazonian. “My aunt Iris always said Hyacinth married Uncle Burt because he was the first man she met who didn’t insist she wear flats on their dates.”

She laughed. “I can’t imagine anyone insisting your aunt do anything. As we well know.”

“Mom,” Ben chided her in a long-suffering sort of tone.

Mrs. McCulloch breezed along. “Come have a sandwich. Ben, get Amy a drink.”

He shot me a warning glance behind his mother’s back, as if I was going to ask her about the Mad Monk right then. Which I might have, but not while he was within earshot. Or while I was so hungry.

Mrs. McCulloch chatted while I cleaned my hands and made a cheese sandwich. “Can you believe all the excitement down by the gate? Who knew one bridge would lead to all this?”

Mark ambled over for some more potato chips. “You never know what’s going to turn up in construction, Mrs. McCulloch. When the highway department expanded the road through the town where I grew up, they uncovered a graveyard. That’s how I got interested in anthropology. A team came from the university, identified the graves, and relocated them so the highway could go through.”

I wondered about Ben’s sharp look. I got that the bridge would make their lives easier, but they’d done without it this long. What difference did a few months make?

“Good heavens,” said Mrs. McCulloch. “That must have taken forever.”

“Years,” answered Mark. I coughed in surprise, and he realized the tactless hole he’d dug for himself. “That was an extreme case, of course. Property rights and legal issues, as well as identifying the remains from very old church records …” Ben usually played things close to the vest, but all the color drained from his face as the scenario kept getting worse. Mrs. McCulloch looked rather stricken herself.

From his seat on the ground, Lucas offered tentative reassurance. “Those shoe remnants we found should rule out a Native American burial ground, at least. The construction technique is more sophisticated than the foot coverings of the local tribes.”

Dr. Douglas sighed in displeasure. “Let’s please, if at all possible, keep anything else from leaking to the press. It would be nice not to make this any harder on the McCullochs—and me—than it has to be.”

“I appreciate that, Serena,” said Mrs. McCulloch, and it took me a second to realize who she meant, because Dr. Douglas did not look like a Serena. “Now, I hope this question doesn’t seem rude, but how much longer do you think you’ll be here at this stage of things?”

The professor surveyed the field, as if picturing what might be below the surface. “We’ll finish excavating the B site today, then tomorrow we’ll dig some test trenches between the two.”

“What about all this?” I pointed to the big grid the guys had relaid this morning. The baseball diamond.

“That’s much too big a project to tackle without a grant and a dedicated team. I only have these guys for one more day. Well, I have Caitlin for the summer, and I’m stuck with Mark and Emery full-time. But Dwayne, Jennie, and Lucas are almost finished with the mini-term.”

She rose from her seat and stretched. “What we’ll do is dig some holes at regular intervals and see if we turn up anything worth investigating. Then we can come back with funding and a few willing bodies.”

An awkward pause weighted the hot, dusty air. I think we were all thinking about Mark’s story. I wondered if the McCullochs had a Plan B for their bridge.

“Well,” said Mrs. McCulloch with determined cheer, “whatever you find tomorrow, at the end of your day you should come to our Fourth of July party. That includes you girls, too,” she added to me and Phin. “Your aunt never misses it. Your uncle, either, when he was alive.”

Uncle Burt had been gone for fifteen years. My surprise must have shown, and Mrs. McCulloch laughed. “Yes, it’s a hundred-year-old tradition. No one misses it.”

“Not even the Kellys,” said Ben, who’d been quietly sitting on the tailgate of the SUV.

I smiled at him very sweetly. “Then I won’t, either.”

Ben’s mom either missed or ignored the exchange. “And in the meantime, girls, if you need anything, you just give us a call. There’s no cause for you to ever feel spooked or anything in that house all alone. You have Ben’s phone number?”

“Um … I, uh … No,” I stammered. Ben, with a careful absence of expression, dutifully took out his cell for the ritual exchange of digits. Not at all awkward with an audience. I gave him my number and he called me to send me his. Fortunately, my ringtone was the UT fight song, and it would have been unpatriotic to smirk during “Texas Fight.”

Dr. Douglas marshaled her troops. “Break’s over. Let’s see if we can get the rest of our John Doe out of the ground before dinnertime.”