Texas Gothic (33 page)

Mark spoke low, a warning. “Dude. It’s not a game.
Look
at her.”

She wasn’t completely still after all. She shivered, her lips blue with the cold, as her breath fogged in the air around her. It was strange seeing it from the outside, but what was happening to Daisy seemed different from what happened to me when the specter appeared.

The ghost wasn’t struggling against the barrier between
the plane of the living and the world of the spirit. It had found a door in Daisy.

Phin recovered first. “Ask it what it wants,” she told me.

I made a wordless sound of protest—was this the time for Twenty Questions?—but swallowed it. How would I know if I didn’t ask?

“¿Que quiere usted?”
I asked, forcing my cold lips to move and my brain to find the words. Daisy’s voice said,
“Búscame.”

“Look for you where?” My breath fogged the summer night air, and when I looked at my hands, they were like Daisy, mottled with cold.
“¿Dónde?”

“Puedes encontrarme. Búscame.”

My brain stumbled over that one. Mark, moving closer to me, supplied the translation. “You can find me. Look for me.”

“Where?” I repeated.

“La mina. Búscame. La mina.”

“The San Sabá mine?” Mark ventured, making the same leap I did, but voicing it before I could.

“Puedes encontrarme, niña. Búscame. Búscame.… ”

“Amy,” said Ben. I could feel his growing horror even through the ice that seemed to encase me. “
Do
something.”

“I don’t know what!” I said through chattering teeth.

“You do,” said Phin. “You’ve got this. Don’t let it be the boss.”

I was so cold, moving felt like cracking ice in my joints. But I pushed forward and threw up a hand, just like the ghost addressed me.
“¡Alto!”
I said.
Stop
. “Leave her alone.”

“Déjala,”
whispered Mark.

“¡Déjala!”
I shouted, putting everything into the command. All my air, all my strength, all my love for my family and for Daisy and her squabbles with Phin. I reached down through the layer of ice and found something Goodnight in me after all.

The glow snuffed out, and I felt the sting of warmth returning to my fingers. Daisy’s arm dropped and she staggered. Ben, of all of us, was the quickest to react, and he jumped forward to catch her. His flashlight dropped to the ground and rolled down the hill.

“Whoa,” said Daisy, in her normal voice, as she hung limp from Ben’s steadying grip. “That must have been a doozy.”

And then she turned away, just in time to avoid throwing up on his shoes.

Mark and Phin took Daisy back to the house after that. She still looked green, and moaned about her head exploding. I personally thought Phin needed to shut up for a while about parapsychology being useless.

Ben and I stayed to watch the dig site, though I suspected both of us considered it a token gesture at that point. We sat on the tailgate, the night so quiet, I could hear the tiny squeals of bats hunting for their dinner, and I shivered.

“Still cold?” Ben asked.

“A little.” I rubbed my hands together, even though it was my insides that didn’t want to warm up.

He went to the cab of the truck and came back with a
Thermos and a bunch of cookies in a zipper bag. “Mom packed us a lunch.”

I laughed, and a lot of the chill left me. Turning to sit cross-legged, I took the Thermos cup of coffee he offered and a chocolate chip cookie.

“So, this is your life,” he said.

Mouth full, I shook my head, then swallowed. “This is unusually exciting. Is your life full of skeletons and ghost-hunting trespassers?”

He frowned. “Only since you got here.”

“That’s not fair! Or true.”

“I’m teasing you, Underwear Girl.”

He was. His amusement heated my skin, and I sulked to hide my discomposure. “It’s hard to tell with you, McCrankypants.”

He chuckled, and I smiled, then we munched in silence for a few minutes, sharing the coffee cup, since apparently Mrs. McCulloch hadn’t thought of
everything
.

“So, tell me the deal with the Los Almagres mine,” he said.

I wiped at a crumb on my lip. “It’s a lost Spanish mine. No one knows exactly where it is, but there are records of it …” Then what he actually said caught up with me. “Which you must know, since you called it by the proper name.”

“What does it have to do with the …” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, and I didn’t make him.

“It’s a theory that came up when we found the ore. What if this expedition”—I gestured to the field—“was returning
from the mine, taking samples of the gold they’d found back to Mexico? If they were attacked, and never made it, and the location of the mine died with them?”

He refilled the coffee cup slowly, as if organizing his thoughts. “
Los Almagres
means ‘the ochre hills.’ The color is supposed to show mineral deposits, like gold and silver. So folks have been speculating about the location being everywhere from Enchanted Rock to Sugar Mountain.”

“So basically, all over the Hill Country from San Antonio to … right around here?”

“Yep. Your Mad Monk”—I started at the name, because he’d never spoken it voluntarily before—“was supposedly on one of the expeditions sent to bring back sample ore to Mexico. That’s all I know. Except some people say he was scalped and that’s why he’s always striking people in the head.”

His reaction to the mention of the tale had always been so vehement that I was expecting some kind of scandalous tale, maybe even about his own family. I was more incredulous than angry—almost—when I snapped, “Why couldn’t you just
tell
me that?”

“Because I
hate
that story. Joe Kelly and his asshole cousins scared the crap out of me with it when I was a kid. They put on monks’ robes and … Okay, it’s stupid now, but when you’re six, and someone in a scary hooded cloak locks you in a feed silo for a couple of hours, it makes a big impression.”

My anger faded. That would make a big impression on me
now
. “Why do the Kellys hate your family so much?
Seems like it’s more about the land thing than the cattle rustling.”

“I don’t know.” He emptied the coffee cup, then screwed it onto the Thermos. “I don’t want to talk about Joe Kelly anymore.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“I don’t want to talk at all.”

“Oh.” What did that mean? We’d actually been having a conversation without yelling or much name-calling. We’d broken cookie together. Or maybe he just needed to think about what a nutty world I’d dragged him into. Or just wanted me to shut up. I wrestled with hurt and disappointment, and told myself not to be silly.

“I can go into the cab of the truck. Give you some space.”

He gave a laughing sort of sigh. “Seriously, Amy? Do I need to draw you a map?” He grabbed the waistband of my jeans and slid me across the tailgate, closing the space between us. I fell against his chest and he wrapped his arms around me. My squeak of surprise was colored with approval, but it still made him pause, holding me against him, his gaze roaming my face, lingering on my mouth before coming back to meet my eye.

“This would be the time to tell me if you still hate me,” he said.

“I don’t hate you, you moron.” He didn’t even waste time laughing. All my kisses so far had started tentative, inquiring, diffident. Ben had gotten the inquiry out of the way, and
captured my mouth with his in a kiss that took permission as given. Which it was. Totally. Even if I’d called him a moron.

His hand slid up to the back of my head, and he kissed me more deeply. I cupped his face with my hands and answered some questions of my own. He had a rough chin this late at night. He tasted like chocolate and coffee.

When he pulled back, he was gloriously out of breath, and so was I. “You still want to go inside the truck?” he asked.

“Here is good,” I said, and kissed him again.

“I haul manure in this truck,” he said when I gave him the chance to speak.

That had to be the weirdest way to phrase a proposition ever, but it worked. “Inside is better.”

i
t’s hard to walk while you’re kissing someone. Harder still to work a door handle. And that’s not a euphemism for anything dirty. So don’t ask me how Ben and I managed to get where we were, tangled up together on the bench seat of the truck, somehow working around the console and the steering wheel and the gearshift, and only once blowing the horn.

That’s not a euphemism, either.

I only know that when Ben was kissing me, the whole world retreated. I felt things I’d never felt before, in places I never knew were connected.

But I was pretty sure that whatever was buzzing against my thigh was not normal. For one thing, it was ringing.

Ben dragged his mouth away from mine and mumbled a curse that was a little shocking and kind of hot.

“Ignore it,” he said.

That was easy for him to say when his cell phone was rounding third base. If anyone got a home run tonight, I didn’t want it to be Verizon Wireless.

“I can’t,” I said when it buzzed again. “It’s in a really distracting place.”

He shifted his weight enough to reach into his pocket—I sucked in my breath at how high his hand grazed my thigh-took out the phone, and tossed it toward the dash. It fell to the floorboard and kept ringing.

“Problem solved.” And then he kissed me again, and I forgot about the ringing, until there was a chirp of a voice message and oh my
God
how was I even paying attention to that?

I turned my head, asking breathlessly, “Aren’t you going to see who it was?”

“No,” said Ben, his voice tickling the spot behind my ear. I shivered all the way to my toes, and I wanted to lose myself in that sensation, but a
really
unwelcome worry kept tugging me back to earth.

“What if it’s your mother?”

“It probably is. I don’t care.”

My insides melted at the rough edge in his voice. Mr. Responsible wanted to be with me so badly, he didn’t care who was calling. It was, quite possibly, the most flattering
thing a guy had ever said to me. Verbally
or
nonverbally, and trust me, he was really eloquent with the nonverbal just then.

“What if something is wrong? It’s really late.”

He tensed, and it had nothing to do with me, or with the way his weight pressed me into the cushion of the truck seat or the way our shirts had worked up so that the skin of my stomach was so hot against the hard muscle of his.

“I don’t care.” He touched his forehead to mine, his voice frayed at the edges with a conflict that went beyond us and the cab of his truck. “I’ve given up my fraternity and my apartment and my band, and I’ve been wanting for three whole days to see your underwear again, and for just one hour I’m not going to let the ranch interrupt.”

That was really presumptuous, that he was going to get to see my underwear again. But considering he was kind of seeing my bra by Braille at the moment, maybe not so much of a stretch.

And God, if anyone understood about wanting to just be there, breathing the warm air that he exhaled, seeing how long we could prolong the moment before my head cleared or his did or we started arguing again … that person was me.

Which was why I couldn’t let it go. I wouldn’t have been there with him like that if he hadn’t been the uptight control freak that he was.

“What if it’s something with your granddad?”

And that was that. He drew back a fraction and looked at me. I could see him pretty well, thanks to a clear night and a country sky. It’s amazing how bright the stars can be,
and all of them shone down on us just then, as we were caught between what we wanted to do and what we—both of us—knew had to happen.

“Dammit,” he said.

“I know.” Boy, did I know.

He pulled his hand out from under my shirt, letting his fingers trail over my stomach. I shivered and wished I could be an enabler.

“Where’s the phone?” he asked, tactfully looking for it while I straightened my clothes.

I found it on the floor and handed it over. He thumbed through the menu until he got to voice mail, and listened. In the cool glow of the phone, I could see the animation leech out of his face. The nagging worry that had tugged at the shirttail of my conscience bloomed into an ominous dread that pushed everything else out of my head.

“What is it?” I asked when the message was done and he clicked open the keypad to send a quick text.

“We have to go.” He dropped the phone into the console between our knees. “Granddad’s missing. Mom doesn’t know where he went.”

“Where could he have gone?”

He’d turned on the engine and put the truck in gear. “If I knew that, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”

I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm, and that was
not
the tone you took with someone you’d been making out with just three minutes ago. The pitch of his brows, the tightness in his jaw—those I got. It was his grandfather. But I didn’t understand the walls going up, pushing me back.

Those worries, however, could wait. “He can’t drive,
right? And none of the cars are missing? So he’d have to go on foot or on horse. How far could he go?”

“That’s just it. Mom doesn’t know how long he’s been gone. She’s got Steve looking in the stable to see if Grandpa took one of the horses. They’re also checking to make sure none of the guns are gone.”

My stomach dropped. It was an abrupt, elevator sensation, and I really thought, for a moment, that it might come back up again. I hadn’t thought about that. Aunt Hyacinth had a .22 rifle just because she lived in what was pretty much wilderness, but otherwise the Goodnights were not a gun-toting family.

“The gun cabinet stays locked, and it’s in the ranch offices, which are also locked. Granddad doesn’t have a key to either. Hasn’t for a while.”

The reasons for that would be pretty obvious. And I knew that Alzheimer’s patients could turn in a moment to depression—and Grandpa Mac definitely had some mood swings. But he wasn’t so far along he couldn’t almost pass for a forgetful curmudgeon.