Texas Gothic

8



ben and I made our way toward the bottom of the hill, where I could see Phin and Mark talking. I was almost more worried about missing something interesting than anything Phin might be saying. After all, I’d just suggested she might raise the dead. Clearly the Goodnight way was rubbing off on me.

The site below consisted of a six-foot-square hole that had been partitioned off into smaller squares. A couple of people were on their hands and knees around the trench, combing through it with small trowels and brushes. Beside that, a handful of students sifted through a pile of dirt that the bulldozer had scraped up; literally sifted, each using a box frame with a wire screen across the bottom, like a sieve.

We had almost reached the cleared area when the sound of an engine made us both stop and turn. A pickup had pulled in behind the SUV my sister had left in the middle of the gravel road, and if I were a whimsical person, I would say the truck gave a throaty diesel grunt of irritation as it backed up and cut across the grass.

It parked near the other trucks, where the ranch hands sat on the tailgates, some of them smoking, some watching the dig, nobody working. A sandy-haired man got out; he was dressed in the cowboy uniform—jeans, twill shirt, sleeves rolled up, T-shirt visible at the neck. His skin was tanned and weathered, making it hard to guess his age, but he seemed old enough to be Ben’s dad. So curiosity kept me where I was.

Truck Guy strode up to Ben, looking harried. “Got a call that the fence needs repair out in the north quarter. If the bone folks are going to be digging here the rest of the day, I’ll take these guys”—he nodded to the idlers by their trucks—“and get to work on it. No sense in their standing around here doing nothing.”

Ben nodded, all businesslike. “Go on. The professor said they’d be done today, but I don’t know what time. Fence has got to be fixed, and it’ll take you an hour to get over there anyway.”

The man, arms akimbo, glared at the river like it personally offended him. “And God knows we’ll never get anyone to work late after last night. Hang that Goodnight woman and her stories. Making life difficult even while she’s on the other side of the planet.”

Two things I noted, standing there being ignored: Ben McCulloch seemed to be in charge, at least nominally, despite the difference in their ages. And I liked Truck Guy even less than I liked Ben McCulloch, who at least had the grace or good sense to look mighty chagrined right then.

Ben cleared his throat. Truck Guy’s gaze flicked my way, and I realized he’d either just seen me, or dismissed me as one of the dig crew. I knew when he became aware of his mistake—boy, there must have been some kind of loot-in-mouth disease in the water—because he pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on, hiding his expression.

Ben seemed to weigh his options, then realized he only had one. “Steve,” he said without inflection, “this is Amy Goodnight. She and her sister are staying at the farm while Ms. Goodnight is away. Amy, Steve Sparks is our ranch manager.”

Mr. Sparks weighed his options and settled on a nod, one hat tip short of a movie western gesture, and a formal “Miss Goodnight.”

I responded in kind, with a chilly “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Sparks.”

“You girls doing okay there at the farm?” The question surprised me until he added, lengthening his drawl with a measure of sarcasm, “Not having any trouble with ghosts, I hope.”

“Just the usual amount of trouble,” I answered, adding an overly sweet, screw-you sort of smile. I was only obliged to be polite to my elders to a point.

With less awkwardness than you’d have thought, Ben shot me a look, then hurried his manager on his way. “Thanks, Steve. Get the fence done today, and hopefully we’ll be able to go back to work here tomorrow. I’ll call you after the university folks clear out.”

“Sure thing.” Sparks gave a tight nod to Ben, then to me, before heading toward the trucks. He didn’t seem too happy with the dismissal, but I couldn’t tell if it was because it came from someone so much younger than him, or because he’d been caught out looking like a jerk. I suspected it was the first thing. And that I might have been unfair in thinking Ben was the only one likely to tell Deputy Kelly he should pay Phin and me a call.

In any case, Sparks gave a sharp whistle and a circular, round-’em-up wave of his hand, and the loitering men pushed off their perches to join him.

I turned to Ben. “My. What a charming lot y’all are over here.”

“Don’t start, Amaryllis.”

He crammed a lot of editorial about my family into my dreadful name, and I decided to give him the point. Pots, kettles, etc. Except that my family was charming. Literally, in some cases.

Besides, I had more important questions. The Texas Monthly article had said this place was big. But I hadn’t considered the practical reality of that until Ben’s comment about travel time. “It’ll take an hour to get to the fence in the north quarter?”

He pulled his Stetson down a bit, hiding his expression, his bland tone an accusation. “It does when you have to go way out of your way to get across the river.”

In other words, another old problem he was laying at Aunt Hyacinth’s door. “It seems to me that you’ve needed a bridge for a while,” I said, “and it’s just bad luck you decided to build one on top of some poor soul’s unmarked grave.”

My own words gave me a moment’s chill, but Ben didn’t notice. “We offered to build a bridge at the Goodnight bend,” he said, not chilly at all. Just the opposite. “Construction would have been much easier there. We would have paid the entire cost in exchange for access. But your aunt refused.”

I didn’t point out that if she didn’t need a bridge, the offer wasn’t as generous as all that. On the other hand, it did seem odd of Aunt Hyacinth to be so unneighborly. “I’m sure she had her reasons.”

His biting glance let me know what he thought of those. “So this was already taking longer than it could have,” he continued, “and that was before it turned into an episode of Bone Detectives.”

“Gosh,” I said, “it’s really disobliging of someone to be dead right where you want to build your bridge. Maybe this ghost everyone’s talking about just wants to apologize for ruining your summer.”

“There is no ghost. It’s the crazy neighbors who stir up rumors about him who are making my life difficult.”

I jabbed back, because there was that word again. “Must be annoying, having one thing you’re not the boss of. Don’t you have parents?”

His hesitation lasted a fraction of a second, but it was weighted and taut, and there was no missing the quick clench of his jaw before he tried to play tension off as annoyance. “Of course I have parents. Man, you’re nosy.”

He must be telling the truth. The magazine article had named his parents. But there was something stricken in that pause. Something that made me blurt out, without knowing why, “I’m sorry.”

He stopped walking and looked at me, his gaze somehow confused and closed and wary at the same time, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. Not a fair target, either, but something deep and out of bounds. And I was sorry.

I waited for him to tell me to butt out of his personal business, his ranch business, to just butt out in general. Only, when his glance finally dropped from mine, what he said was “You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

“Your arm.”

I bent it to look. A string of crimson droplets had oozed from where I’d scratched myself on the mesquite tree. The blood collected into an unimpressive trickle, and a lonely drop fell from my elbow and onto the earth, making a tiny spot in the limestone dust.

The blood sank quickly into the soil, looking like a rusty raindrop, turning the pale dirt to umber. It was nothing. Just a drop from a scratch that barely hurt anymore. There was no reason that my vision should sort of go cloudy and dim around the edges.

Only for a moment. Just long enough for the last person I wanted to detect any weakness, to, well, detect weakness.

“Are you okay?” There was concern in his voice, and that, irrationally, annoyed me.

“Fine,” I said, and scuffed the drop between us with my shoe, erasing the spot and mixing my blood into the dirt. But the movement put me off balance, and the landscape seemed to tilt to the left.

Ben grabbed my elbow, too close to the scratch, and the hot sting steadied me as much as his support. “Maybe you should sit down.”

“No! Jeez, I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh.” His disbelief was obvious. “I see. You’re one of those girls.”

His tone put my back up and righted my world. I yanked my arm from his grasp. “I am not one of those girls.” I was not fluttery or queasy. I’d gotten plenty banged up on the soccer field, and I was the one the family came to for patching in that gap between a Band-Aid and an ER visit. I mean, I was pre-med, for heaven’s sake.

“Whatever you say.” He raised his hands, and I saw, mixed with the dust and dirt there, some of my blood, too.

“Hang on,” I said, before he could move. “Someone’s going to think we’ve been sparring with more than words.” Rummaging in my bag, through the mostly empty water bottle, a tube of sunscreen, and lip balm, I found what I wanted. The small plastic bottle had a Goodnight Farm label on it, and when I popped the lid open with my thumb, Ben backed up a step.

“What is that?” he asked, with a mix of snark and genuine suspicion. “Some kind of potion?”

I held it so he could read the label for himself. “Antibacterial gel. Mostly alcohol, lavender, and tea tree oil.”

“Mostly?”

“Stop being such a baby.” I gestured for him to put out his hand so I could squirt the stuff onto it.

“Trust me,” he said, “I work cows and ride horses. A little blood is not the most disgusting thing I get on my hands.”

“But it’s human.” I suspected he was being stubborn on principle. “Do you want to get some kind of disease?”

His brow lifted. “Do you have some kind of disease?”

“No! Of course not.” I grabbed his wrist and pulled him a step toward me, upending the bottle with a squeeze. A huge glob of gel squelched out and plopped onto his hand, complete with disgusting sound effects. Very classy.

His fingers were dirty, and the dirt mixed with the gel as I rubbed it on, since he just stood there, stiff and bemused. The extra—and there was plenty—covered my hands, and some of it dripped onto the ground, too. We were standing close, and the alcohol was cool in contrast to his skin, which seemed very hot under my fingers. Cool and bracing, the sharp smell mixed with the strong scent of lavender floating up and filling my head.

The smell slowed my brisk motion, and I stared at my fingers. At the dirt—McCulloch dirt—mixed with that drop of my blood and the herb that Aunt Hy included because it had antibacterial properties and smelled good, but had some other purpose, I was sure. More sure by the moment. Because the fizz of curiosity I’d felt all morning had turned to funny, queasy bubbles in my stomach.

That couldn’t be good. Even though it didn’t feel very bad at all.

Ben cleared his throat, and I realized I was still holding his hand. I let go quickly, but caught his studying gaze as he shook his fingers dry. I wondered if he’d felt something, too, but then he asked, exaggerating his central Texas drawl, “How is it you got left in charge of the farm, again? Because picking you isn’t exactly convincing me of your aunt’s stability.”

The languor of the moment snapped. “I’m actually the responsible one,” I said, in something surprisingly like a normal voice.

“Yeah,” he drew out the word, but I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic or not. “I can see that.”

I dropped the hand gel into my bag, jerked closed the drawstring, and slung it over my shoulder, pretending I hadn’t been affected at all by holding his hand. Or whatever the hell had just happened. “Let’s go.”


Near the excavation was the canopy I’d seen from the hill, where Phin and Mark were already chatting with an academic-type woman. I glanced at my watch and hoped I hadn’t missed too much. It felt like Ben and I had talked for an hour, but it had been a matter of minutes.

“Where have you been?” Phin asked when Ben and I stepped into the shade.

“I had to tie up the dogs,” I said, hoping no one had noticed the hand-holding in the middle of the field. I was grateful the men who’d been sitting around on their tailgates had piled into the cabs and followed Mr. Sparks off to the north quarter, or wherever they were going.

“And the ranch manager had to talk to me,” Ben added.

The older woman standing by Mark gave Ben an arch look, somehow annoyed and amused at the same time. “I told him yesterday. We’ll be done when we’re done.”

Ben kept his expression almost neutral, but I was getting a lot of experience with the varieties of his annoyance and the barometric pitch of his eyebrows. “Any idea when that would be, Doctor?”

She smiled slightly, relenting in her torture. Her face was austerely handsome, with sculpted bone structure and an olive complexion that had seen a lot of sun. Her hair, dark brown shot with gray, was braided back, and her clothes—cargo khakis, hiking boots, denim shirt—were worn and practical. “We should be out of your hair by the end of the day, and you can put your bulldozer back to work in the morning.”

Ben’s rueful smile acknowledged his impatience. “Thank you, Dr. Douglas. I realize you have to be systematic.”

“Well, yes.” She looked from Phin to me with slightly vexed humor. “Of course, when we actually finish will depend on how many more visitors Mark has invited to drop by.”

I grimaced, aware that the students were barely working, distracted by Phin and me. Or possibly Ben, I amended as I caught the direction of one girl’s gaze. She caught me catching her, and grinned—sort of conspiratorial, sort of sheepish—before returning to her work. She was crouching in the pit that had everyone’s attention, and the back view of Ben McCulloch’s Wranglers was likely hard to resist from that vantage point.

Mark made good-natured excuses to the professor. “I just figured since Phin and Amy were UT students, and their place is spitting distance from here …”

“And Amy is a huge fan of the Discovery Channel,” said Ben, in a taunting monotone.

Dr. Douglas took that at face value, missing my glare at Ben. “All right,” she said. “Since they’re friends of the McCullochs.”

My glance turned wary, but Ben merely hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and hung back, letting the assumption stand. I supposed if he’d really wanted us gone, he would have sent us packing already.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, gesturing to the work-tables, where a girl was numbering a glass jar that looked like it held—but I very much hoped didn’t—some kind of huge black hairy spider.

Dr. Douglas gestured for Mark to explain. “Jennie is tagging and cataloging any artifacts we find among the bones.”

Phin leaned in closer. “Is that fabric?”

The girl—Jennie—answered, “It is. We won’t know exactly what kind until it gets back to the lab. But it’s very old.”

I could see it now, a tattered scrap, the thick threads hardened and fragile. Phin asked, “Old like your grandmother, or old like the Texas Revolution?”

“Well, there’s a lot that affects that.” Jennie seemed to take the interrogation in stride. She didn’t look much older than us, with a round, amiable face, and light brown hair worn in two braids that didn’t really flatter her. “Soil, climate, moisture. We’ll test it back in Austin.”

Phin gave one of her ambiguous “hmmm’s,” as if she was contemplating what tests she would do, given a chance. It occurred to me I’d better keep an eye on her hands and her pockets.

“Check this out,” said Mark, picking up a labeled box and holding it so I could peer in.

“An arrowhead?” It came out as a question, even though the shape of the stone was unmistakable.

“Yep. This type was used by Native Americans in the area around two hundred years ago.”

“Could it have killed our guy?” I asked.

“No way to be sure, but we might find something when we examine the bones—”

“In the lab.” Phin parroted their usual response, and Mark chuckled. Dr. Douglas did not.

“What about the age of the skeleton?” I spoke a little too quickly, to divert attention from my sister. “Can you guesstimate if it’s as old as the arrowhead?”

“I’m not one for guessing,” said the professor. “I’m only sure it’s been here for well over a hundred years. We can tell from the roots of the vegetation that has grown around the interment. Come and look.”

She led us to the edge of the excavated plot. The bulldozer loomed over us; the two students shifting the soil there slowed their work to watch us approach.

Mark pointed to the students and their wire-bottomed wood trays. “That’s Dwayne and Lucas. They’re going through the soil that the dozer turned up, to find any other bone fragments or artifacts it may have uncovered. But Caitlin and Emery have been excavating the grave itself.”

Caitlin was the girl I’d caught appreciating Ben’s Wranglers. Her hair was pulled up and through the back of her dark red baseball cap, and a trickle of sweat ran down her neck as she worked. She and the skinny guy working with her had dug down maybe two feet; the clay topsoil was only about that deep before you hit stony ground. That was why the area was good for growing grapes and herbs and grazing cattle, and not much else.

Dr. Douglas pointed to a lantana shrub, half ripped out of the hole in the ground—by the bulldozer, I was guessing. “The roots were growing through the skeleton’s ribs,” said the professor. “The students have been working around them to extract the bones carefully.”

Caitlin was uncovering a row of vertebrae from the soil with a stiff-bristled brush. They didn’t gleam white and clean like the skeletons I’d seen in museums, and it was unsettling, seeing the unmistakable shape of the spine emerging from the dirt.

“How much of the skeleton have you found?” I asked.

Mark took over the explanation. “Shallow burials, a lot of times you don’t get much. Animals and the elements can unearth and scatter the remains.”

Phin was uninterested in delicate phrasing. “You mean scavengers drag off pieces to eat.”

Dr. Douglas tutted. “We try and give the remains some dignity. It was once a person, after all.”

I gazed at the vertebrae, tumbled like a stack of blocks, and wondered if there was any remnant of human energy clinging to this spot, to these remains. Maybe it was some Jungian resonance, the aversion of the collective consciousness to reminders of death, that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Maybe it was something else.

I had been trying to avoid thinking about the apparition in my room, but the more I tried, the more the knot of dread, the one that hadn’t quite untied itself since last night, kinked and twisted in my chest. “Do you have any idea who it might be, or how he died?” I asked.

“Unless there’s damage to the bones,” answered Dr. Douglas, “it’s impossible to tell the cause of death. And after so long in the ground, it’s very difficult to tell at what point the damage occurred.”

“The poor guy had a bulldozer driven over him,” said Mark.

Dr. Douglas shook her head in sad disapproval. “Such a shame.”

Ben gave a suffering sigh, as if he’d heard this before. “It isn’t as if we knew he was there.”

“That’s true,” said the professor, though she still sounded like a disappointed parent. “It couldn’t be helped, I suppose.”

Mark, better at staying on the subject, told me, “Back at school we’ll analyze those shreds of cloth we found, find out what kind of fabric it was. That might give us some clues.”

“Can you tell from the skull if he was Anglo or Hispanic or Native American?” asked Phin, and I wondered what she was thinking.

“Yes,” said Dr. Douglas. “Though we do those measurements back in the lab or the morgue.”

Phin sighed pointedly at the now familiar response. Dr. Douglas’s eyes narrowed, like Phin was topping her list of Students to Flunk If I Get the Chance. I had to admit, some things did look a little more exciting, or at least more timely, on TV.

The professor went on to say, as if offering a huge favor, “I did measure the femur that Mark found, and it indicated this man was rather small of stature. Five foot two or so. Which points to an older origin. Modern nutrition has raised the average height substantially in the last centuries.”

The bones looked so lonely there in the hole. I wondered if, after they arranged all the pieces in the cold, sterile lab, that would be any better a resting place than the warm Texas earth. Who had this been? An immigrant, or a settler? A Native American? Centuries, plural, was a big time frame.

A familiar noise infiltrated my deep thoughts, bringing me back to the twenty-first century. I realized Bear was barking. And so was Sadie, raising a raucous canine alert.

“What on earth … ?” began Dr. Douglas.

“Sorry,” I said, already moving around the excavated pit, intent on settling them down. But I bumped into Ben, then careened off of Mark. We pinballed like the Three Stooges, all intent on getting to the dogs. I froze in horror as we sorted ourselves out and I saw why.

Lila wasn’t barking with the others. She was too busy making her own canine excavation, dirt flying around her as she dug, while Bear and Sadie encouraged her.

Oh hell.

I untangled myself from Ben and Mark and started running, too fast to sort out the sensations in my gut—anger at the dogs, worry they’d get us kicked off the property, and something else. Some tug at my vitals that I couldn’t explain, except it spurred me on so that I had no trouble keeping up with the guys.

“Lila, stop!” I shouted, to no visible effect. “Leave it!” I tried again, in a less panicked, more alpha-dog voice. This time she obeyed, stepping back and sitting primly at the end of the leash, still tied to the mesquite tree. She grinned at us as we reached her, muzzle and paws covered with dirt, proud of her accomplishment.

The four of us—Ben, Mark, me, and the dog—stared at the hole while the others hurried up the hill.

“It’s probably a rabbit,” said Mark, but his tone implied he hoped for something more grisly.

It’s not a rabbit.

It wasn’t just the sprint making my heart pound. Adrenaline flagged, leaving something different, a kind of ringing excitement vibrating through me. I’d never been sensitive, let alone psychic, but just then I had a hunch like you would not believe.

Dropping to my knees, I examined the hole that Lila had made, maybe a foot deep in the crumbly gray-black earth. There was something smooth at the bottom. I could see a tantalizing silver-dollar-sized bit of it.

I thrust my fingers into the dirt and pulled out two handfuls of soil, dropping them to the side. Quickly I widened the conical hole, uncovering a curve of bone that became a dome, then became something unmistakable.

“Here.” Mark handed me a brush like I’d seen Caitlin using on the bones in the excavation by the bulldozer. “Use this.”

“Thanks.” I took it and shifted to lie on my stomach. Mark took a mirror position, pulling the dirt away when it kept falling back into the hole, as if the earth didn’t want to give up what we’d found.

Through a kind of buzzing drone, I was aware of the others around us. I could hear the dogs whining and see Phin’s shoes next to several pairs I didn’t recognize. They stayed back—the hole was only big enough for four hands.

A sweep of the brush revealed the forehead—the frontal bone, I amended with a tiny shiver, realizing what I was seeing. AP biology had come in handy sooner than I’d thought.

“Careful, now.” Dr. Douglas’s voice was patient and professorial, but there was an undercurrent of anticipation that told me—if I hadn’t already guessed from the dome shape and slightly porous texture—that there was something important under my fingers. “Don’t try and uncover the whole thing. Without the support of the surrounding earth, it may come apart.”

I nodded, somehow unwilling to speak and break the spell of discovery. As she had instructed, I left the dirt supporting the back of the skull—the occipital bone—and concentrated on the front. The nasal bone, the brow ridges, the cheekbones and maxilla. The things that had made it a face. Even if I hadn’t remembered the names of the bones, their shapes were iconic, the stuff of nightmare and mortality, and in the heat of the day, I felt a graveyard chill.

Gently I smoothed the dirt from the eye sockets with my thumbs and wondered what was the last thing this person had seen. The relentless drowning wave of a flood? The snake that had bit him? Did he stare his own mortality in the face before he died?

Another shiver gripped me, and I pressed my hands against the cold dirt to hide their trembling. There was no ignoring the similarity between the empty eyes of the skull and the hollow, dark gaze of my midnight visitor, the apparition I could still see when I blinked, like the afterimage of a flame.