Texas Gothic

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 girl 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 a*shole 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.