Texas Gothic

9



i couldn’t seem to get completely warm, which on a Texas afternoon in July was saying something.

Once I’d uncovered a good bit of the skull, Dr. Douglas had instructed us all to stand back while she called the sheriff. Apparently they liked you to do that when you found human remains, even old ones. As they waited for the authorities, Mark and the others swarmed over the ground like excited ants, measuring distances from the original find to the new one, diagramming, making notes.

The most useful thing I could do, according to Dr. Douglas, was keep out of the way. But I couldn’t leave, either, in case the authorities wanted to talk to me. I was sure Deputy Kelly would be just as thrilled to see me as I was to see him again so soon.

So I sat at the top of the rise in the shade of a live oak tree, feeling as unnecessary as a pair of swim fins on a catfish. The dogs sprawled sleeping, and Phin was writing a to-do list on her arm—a habit that even our ultra-accepting mother hated. As I watched the others work, my mind spun in restless, uneasy circles. I envied them all—the dogs’ peace and the students’ uncomplicated excitement, and even my sister’s ability to organize her thoughts and make a plan. Though I knew that last one would probably bite me in the ass later.

Her list was getting long. “I would love to take EMF measurements at that spot to see if there was some kind of subliminal stimulus that you and Lila sensed. It’s too random that you tied her up right on top of a skeleton.”

“Depends on the skeleton-to-square-foot ratio, I’d think.”

My own words jarred me. I’d only meant to mock her scientific tone, but the image took hold and another chill seemed to come up from the ground, leeching my warmth. “If there are remains all over this field,” I said more cautiously, “wouldn’t it be much less coincidental that I’d left Lila where there was something to find?”

I could see Phin put my first and second comments together and total them up with growing excitement. “I hadn’t considered a whole field of bones. We have got to come back here with the coronal aura visualizer.”

Funny how she and I had completely opposite reactions to the idea of the ground being full of human remains.

“I hate to rain on your phantom parade,” I said, “but I can’t imagine that the McCulloch Ranch is going to give you permission to do that.” Especially not if the rest of the family shared the ranch manager’s opinions of the Goodnights.

Phin was undeterred. “Maybe you can talk your boyfriend into letting us.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I snapped. And then regretted it, because I hadn’t even asked whom she meant. God, I was transparent.

“Uh-huh,” said Phin. “So, you weren’t holding hands earlier?”

It figured. She never noticed interpersonal details except when it was inconvenient to me. “Not like that.”

At least it was refreshing to squabble about someone who wasn’t dead. I glanced across to where Ben McCulloch paced while talking on his cell phone. The slope of the hill, from the end of the gravel road down to the bulldozer and future bridge, was about the size of a baseball diamond. The two excavations—the first one near the river, and the second hole that Lila had started—made home and second base. Ben and I were roughly first and third, as far as possible from each other.

As if he felt me watching him, he turned my way. Even from that distance, I could see the furrows of his frown deepen, all the more intimidating with his eyes hidden by his sunglasses.

“Boy,” said Phin. “If he was that guy in the X-Men, you’d be a scorch mark on the sand.”

“Thanks,” I drawled, but I didn’t disagree.

“He must like you a lot to hate you so much right now.”

I swiveled to stare at her. “For someone majoring in chemistry, you don’t have much of a grasp on the metaphorical kind.”

She clicked her pen and started another note on her arm. “There is no such thing as metaphorical chemistry, if you mean between two people. Pheromones are chemicals, too.”

So was kitchen witchery, or so Phin had always insisted. I found myself rubbing my fingers, smelling lavender and dirt and thinking about warm skin and, well, chemistry. “Just out of curiosity … what would you use lavender for, magically speaking?”

Her pen didn’t pause. “Attraction and love spells.”

I wheezed like she’d punched me. “Are you serious, or are you jacking with me?” With Phin’s deadpan delivery, I could never tell.

In this case she looked seriously affronted. “I never jack around about magic. What did you do?”

She listened as I quickly explained the incident with the dirt and my scratch and the hand gel. Right as I finished, Ben hung up his phone, scowled up at us for a long moment, then turned deliberately away. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “pheromones aside, I think we can safely rule out the possibility that you made him infatuated with you.”

“Ha, ha,” I said, hiding the fact that, against all reason, his angry dismissal still stung. “Obviously.”

“Well, I am joking this time. Love spells are false advertising. You could heighten sexual tension or the euphoria of infatuation, but you can’t make someone attracted to you against their will.” She considered for a beat, then amended, “Well, maybe I could, but certainly not by accident.”

I figured that piece of arrogance was better left unchallenged, in case she decided to prove it. “But the … whatever happened, if anything did … it wouldn’t have had anything to do with finding that skull, right?”

Phin’s long, speculative look worried me, like she might be concocting some kind of experiment. “Maybe it’s not about him, but the dirt. Some people use lavender to attract prophetic dreams. Maybe you’ve given yourself some kind of visionary connection to the land.”

Her casual tone conflicted with the uncurling anxiety inside of me. “But I tied up the dogs in that particular place before the hand-holding happened.”

“Yes, but I saw your face when you looked into that hole. We all did. You knew something was there.”

Despite the dappled shade of the tree, the river running in a soothing hush, the students chatting excitedly about their find—all that, and still a cool finger of apprehension slid down my spine.

“Or,” said Phin cheerfully, in a jarring change of mood, “you may just be attracted to him. I understand that people do get light-headed under such circumstances.”

The one thing I didn’t need? My sister the mad scientist explaining human attraction to me.

A plume of dust from behind the hill heralded the arrival of the law. It was sad that I viewed that as a fortunate thing.

Dr. Douglas was under the work canopy, alternately talking on the phone, texting, and giving orders to the students through Mark and Caitlin. But as the Blazer pulled up next to the university van, the professor keyed off her BlackBerry and put it in the pocket of her cargo pants.

From our hillside lookout, Phin and I watched as she, Ben, and Deputy Kelly—his stocky frame was easily recognizable—met and walked together to the new hole. The dogs pricked their ears at the activity. So did I, wishing I could hear what the cabal was saying. I gathered from the way the students hung back it was grown-ups only—Ben’s age notwithstanding.

I was so intent on the meeting that I jerked in surprise when a shadow fell across me. I looked up, squinting, and Phin did the same, shading her eyes with her hand.

Mark grinned down at us, the sun behind him. “What are you doing?” He nodded to the writing on Phin’s arm. “Experimenting in tattoo art?”

“Hardly,” she said, and stuck her pen into her ponytail. “Are you done measuring the field like a dressmaker?”

The analogy made him chuckle, and echo, “Hardly.” He joined us on the ground with a little exhale of relief. “Feels good to sit for a minute.”

“So, what happens now?” I asked. “Will you get to dig out the skull today?”

“Probably, so we can preserve it. Then the deputy has to file his report, and hopefully we’ll get to excavate for the rest of the remains tomorrow. It’s pretty obvious this isn’t a recent burial.”

I knew what he meant. Everything about the skull had seemed old and entrenched. “Is it the same age as the other one?”

“We’ll have to get it back to the lab to make sure,” he said. Phin snorted at the predictable answer, and Mark laughed in rueful acknowledgment. “But if they are related, it could be an exciting find. Seriously, we owe you a drink, Amy. You and Phin need to come out with us tonight to celebrate.”

I’d missed the significance of the students’ glee when Dr. Douglas had confirmed I’d uncovered a separate interment. But now, considering what I’d said to Phin about the skeleton-to-square-foot ratio, I thought I understood. “Do you mean there could be more bones and artifacts here?”

“There could be a treasure trove of artifacts here.” He said it with such anticipation, some of my surprise must have shown, because he laughed. “Not literally. That only happens in the movies.”

Phin had to show off a bit. “I heard that fossils and archaeological finds can go for millions of dollars.”

“Yes,” said Mark, “but we’re not talking Australopithecus. This is a modern skull.”

“But—” I started. That couldn’t be right. The bone had felt old. Literally and in some way I couldn’t quite define. “You said it wasn’t recent. And Dr. Douglas said the site by the river had been here maybe a century or two.”

He grinned. “ ‘Modern’ on an evolutionary scale. As in ‘less than half a million years old.’ ”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed because I should have known that. They did teach evolution in Texas public schools.

“It might still be prehistoric, though,” said Mark. “If this turns out to be a mass burial of some kind, the value will be in information.”

My gaze roamed over the sloped baseball diamond that Mark and his crew had staked out. It looked so normal. Dry, dusty soil. Crispy summer grass. “What do you mean by ‘mass burial’? A graveyard?”

“Maybe,” said Mark. “A Native American site or pioneer cemetery that was washed out at some point. But with the shallow interment, maybe a battle or massacre site.”

Massacre. The word gave me a jolt, and horrible, history-textbook images flooded my mind. “Like some kind of killing field?”

He hurried to reassure me, as if the atrocity I imagined showed on my face. “Very unlikely. More likely an undocumented skirmish during the Texas Revolution, or something earlier, from the colonial days. The Apache and Comanche weren’t entirely keen on being Christianized.”

“You mean by the Spanish missionaries.”

“Well, you know about San Sabá, right?” He nodded vaguely westward, as if we could see that far into the next county. “The mission was attacked by the Native Americans. Possibly egged on by the French, who wanted to expand from Louisiana. Anyway—they destroyed the mission. It was lost for hundreds of years, but a team from Texas Tech excavated the site in the nineties.”

He sounded like a kid talking about Santa Claus, like he was envisioning something like the San Sabá find here. He was all but rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

“Where would you start with an excavation like that?” Phin asked.

Mark’s eyes lit up with expository glee. Phin looked like that whenever she started talking gadgets. Though I was more interested in these details than I was in coronal aural whatsits, the talk of surveying the field, marking out a grid, digging test holes and trenches before a systematic, layer-by-layer dig … it sort of faded out as I warily watched my sister’s face.

She wore an expression that too often preceded burnt fuses and chemistry lab evacuations. “That doesn’t seem very efficient,” she told Mark when he was done. “I wonder if my coronal aura visualizer might help.”

“Phin!” I barked, because we had an agreement. All right, maybe less of an agreement and more of me haranguing her not to talk about these things in public and her placating me, at least when I was around to know about it.

“What?” she asked, seeming genuinely guileless. “It might pick up disturbances under the ground where there’s vegetation. And he already has permission to be here.”

Mark looked from one of us to the other. “What’s a coronal aura visualizer?”

The crunch of boot heels on limestone interrupted Phin’s answer. But my relief was short-lived. Ben McCulloch stopped on the hill so that he was level with us as we sat. He surveyed the three of us—six, counting the dogs—and ended with me. “Deputy Kelly wants to talk to you.”

I sighed and pushed to my feet. “This should be fun.”

Ben offered me a hand, but I pretended I didn’t see it. After the last time we’d held hands, I wasn’t risking any more weirdness. We walked down the hill to where the officer waited with Dr. Douglas.

In the daylight, without the distraction of a recent near-ghost experience, I could see that, allowing for years of sun through the patrol car window and squinting behind his mirrored sunglasses, Deputy Kelly was probably about my dad’s age. And I’d called it right; he did not look happy to see me.

“Miss Goodnight. Fancy meeting you here.”

“Good afternoon, Deputy,” I said very politely, aware of Ben standing to one side and Dr. Douglas with her arms folded, drumming her fingers on her sleeve.

The deputy poised his pen over his notepad. “I just want to get your statement for my report. Your first name is Amy?”

I sighed. “My legal name is Amaryllis.”

The deputy glanced up from the paper. “That’s a new one on me. Could you spell that, please?” I did, used to the question. “And your sister’s name?” he asked.

“Delphinium,” I said tightly, ignoring the twitch of Ben McCulloch’s smirk. “D-e-l-p-h-i-n-i-u-m.”

Kelly wrote it down, along with my last name, my age, and my permanent address, while Dr. Douglas radiated impatience. I would have suspected the deputy of illiteracy, except I got the feeling he was taking his time in order to irritate the professor. Finally he finished writing and looked up at me; I was mirrored in his sunglasses, my hair dusty, my nose rather pink. “So … what were y’all doing here at the dig? Just out for a stroll?”

“As it happens,” I said with some satisfaction, “the professor’s assistant was nice enough to invite us, and Dr. Douglas was showing us around.”

The deputy glanced at Mark and Phin, their heads bent together as Mark laughingly studied the to-do list on my sister’s arm. “I see,” said Kelly, setting my teeth on edge. He sounded professional on the surface, but contempt seeped out from beneath. “And how did you come to find the remains? Ouija board? Spirit guide, maybe?”

I couldn’t seem to make myself answer. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d say if I let myself speak. Aunt Iris had often counseled me to imagine myself as a duck, to visualize scornful comments rolling off my back like rain. I felt more like a bristling hedgehog, all tight in my middle, wanting to roll up in a ball—not just to protect my soft parts, but to stick him with some pointy spines, too.

Deputy Wolverine reminded me of too many jackasses I’d had to deal with after Phin and her magic charm had left our high school. The “Do you want to play with my magic wand?” jokers. Worse, with his badge and his uniform, it wasn’t just anger that tied my tongue in knots, but fear. Nameless, formless fear of what people in authority could do if you marched too conspicuously to a different drum.

“It was the dog,” said Ben. I glanced at him, startled by his help, and found him staring at Deputy Kelly with ill-disguised dislike. Then Ben looked at me, met my eyes without much softening in his. “Didn’t you tell me she was a search dog, Amy?”

Speak, Amy.

“Uh, yes.” I shook off my surprise and turned back to the deputy. “Lila found them. I just cleared away the dirt.”

Kelly narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t stupid, and he probably hadn’t missed any of that exchange. “I’ve worked with Ms. Hyacinth and Lila once or twice. I thought that dog was only trained for SAR, not HRD.”

Dr. Douglas interrupted, outraged. “You brought a Human Remains Detection dog to my dig site?”

I raised my hands, frantically warding off her anger. “I didn’t know!”

With an exasperated huff, she turned to the deputy. “Well,” she snapped. “I think that settles it. Unless you’d like to interview the dog.”

Deputy Kelly seemed satisfied that fate had decided to punish me for hopping the McCulloch fence after he’d tacitly warned me not to. He pocketed his pen and notepad and made a show of checking his watch. “I’ll just head into the office to file this report. I imagine it’ll take me the rest of the afternoon. We’re kind of backed up.”

Dr. Douglas visibly bit down on her impatience. If they couldn’t dig on the new site until the paperwork was done, then Kelly’s taking his own sweet time about it was seriously passive-aggressive. I wondered what the professor had done to piss him off. Or maybe he just hated academics on principle.

With a tight smile, Dr. Douglas said, “Of course. We’ll be ready to excavate when you give the all clear. I know the sheriff won’t want to waste time when it comes to human remains.”

Point to the professor. Deputy Kelly pursed his lips and nodded to her, then to Ben. “I’ll be in touch.”

He headed toward the Blazer, his khaki uniform blending in with the terrain. As soon as he was gone, I turned to Dr. Douglas and groveled, “I’m so sorry about Lila. I only knew about the search and rescue, not the … um, other part.”

The professor waved my apology away. Her demeanor had unbent as soon as the deputy left. “It got Deputy Kelly on his way.”

“Then you’re not angry?”

Okay, maybe she hadn’t softened entirely. “I would have been if the artifact had been destroyed.”

Mark and Phin had joined us, leaving the dogs in the shade. Caitlin had jogged up from the riverside site, too. “No work on the new grave today?” she asked.

“Only the preservation of the remains already uncovered,” Dr. Douglas told her, then addressed the rest of the crew gathering around. “Mark, you remove that skull. Take Emery, too. Do your best to keep it intact.” She pulled her phone from her cargo pocket and started a text. I tried to imagine Indiana Jones with a BlackBerry and failed. “Caitlin, you’re in charge at Site A. Get that excavation wrapped up, and you and Jennie pack up those artifacts for transport to Austin.”

“On it, Dr. D,” Caitlin said, with a jaunty swish of her ponytail. She chucked me on the shoulder before she left. “Nicely spotted on that skull. We may recruit you.”

“Lila found it,” I said, for the fifteenth time, but Caitlin was already gone. A fast mover, that one.

“You two,” Dr. Douglas said to Phin and me, then paused, as if considering her words. I suspected they were between “Get lost,” and “Take a hike.” But she surprised me. “Mark seems to think you’ve earned some adjunct status, so you can hang around, as long as you don’t touch anything unless he tells you it’s okay. But the dogs have to go.”

With that, she headed to the river. Ben watched her go, then exhaled—half sigh, half exasperation—and tugged his hat down to shade his eyes. “I’d better update my folks. Let them know what the Goodnights have dug up this time.”

“I didn’t know about the dog!” I protested. Again.

He looked at me, more inscrutable than usual. “You have your own nose for trouble, Amaryllis. You don’t need a dog.”

Later, when it would do me no good, I would think of a response to that. But just then I was blank.

Still stewing over a killer comeback, I watched him walk toward his truck. He was parked near the UT van, and Caitlin, who hadn’t quite gotten to work yet, stopped him to chat. They were too far for me to hear their conversation, and I wouldn’t say she was flirting—she didn’t seem like a flirter—but as they spoke Ben’s scowl unknotted a little. Not as far as to become relaxed, but, well, he didn’t look like he wanted her to go jump in the river.

I had a sudden thought. The bones I found meant an even longer delay in building the bridge. The McCullochs might have to find a new location entirely. Even if they had legal grounds to stop the excavation, that seemed extremely mean-spirited (so to speak). Ben couldn’t get mad at dead people, and that left me and my family.

And the dog. Lila was trained to scent for people lost in the hills and in the caves. Even in rubble. I didn’t think she was trained to pick out remains, though. Just the living. Did it mean anything that Lila had alerted to the skull? Ghosts, bones, rumors of ghosts … each kept rising to the surface of my mind, then slipping back under, like beans in a boiling pot of soup.

The revving of a truck engine shook me out of my thoughts, and I realized I was frowning at an empty spot of land, as Ben and Caitlin had gone their separate ways.

I needed to go, too, for completely practical reasons, and I interrupted Phin’s conversation with Mark to tell her so. “We should get the dogs home. And I have to feed the goats.”

She fished the truck key from her pocket and handed it over. “Take the Trooper. We’re going to the roadhouse out on Highway 287 later. I’ll text you when we head over there.”

“Will you really?” I asked, because her anti-phone tendencies went both ways: incoming and outgoing.

“I’ll remind her,” Mark said. While he seemed an agreeable guy in general, I got the feeling his quick offer might have had more to do with Phin herself. She, of course, seemed oblivious, and I couldn’t decide how I felt about that. Her cluelessness made me feel older and protective, but I liked Mark, and … well, what grounds did I have to say anything?


The sleepless night, the emotional excesses and tossing and turning, heaped on top of finding a body, or at least part of one, all settled on my shoulders as soon as I loaded the dogs into the Trooper. They were happy to be headed home, and I drove back to Goodnight Farm in a fog of thought and with a vague hope that I would get back to a goat- and ghost-free yard.

I arrived to find an old man sitting on the porch, boots up on the railing like he owned the place.