Texas Gothic (5 page)

“To keep people away, of course. Until the forensic team gets in there and decides if it’s a crime scene or not.” She waved away such trivial concerns as homicide. “But that’s really not important.”

My mouth worked up and down, a soundless guppy face of … There were no words for my emotion. Finally I managed, “Not
important
? You didn’t think you should
lead
with the fact that someone has been killed mere miles from where we’re staying?”

“Well, not
recently
,” she said, as if I were the one incapable of conducting a linear conversation. “That’s why they had to wait on the physical anthropology team to come from the university.”

I thought after “dead body” I could be excused for being a little slow to catch up. “Physical anthropology” meant that what they’d found were mostly bones. But it was summer in
Texas. Hot, but dry. How long would it take for a body to become a skeleton?

“When did this happen?” I asked, trailing her as she went to her laptop.

“No one knows yet.” Phin ducked under the table to mess with some wires running down to the outlet in the floor. “They just started investigating today.”

I addressed her rear end. “No, I mean, when was the body, skeleton, whatever, discovered?”

“A few days ago.” She emerged, straightened, and pushed a few wisps of hair out of her face. “Somebody’s building a bridge, and they’d barely begun when the crew uncovered a skull and some bones, and tomorrow the UT physical anthropology department will excavate the rest. Which is why the sheriff’s cruiser is extremely irritating, because this would be the perfect chance to test my coronal aura visual media transfer device.… ”

She started talking gadgets and I stopped listening. I was trying to sort through what Ben McCulloch had said in his litany of Goodnight offenses. Something about a bridge, one that they were building because Aunt Hyacinth wouldn’t let them cross the river on her land. Which didn’t sound like her, but I put that part aside. Maybe she’d explain if she emailed me back—

And that was as far as I got, because Phin’s words had tripped my pay-attention-this-is-trouble switch.

So this is the
perfect
opportunity to expand my research on the measurable paraphysical effects of supernatural phenomenon
.

“Hang on,” I said when she paused to take a breath, and I pointed to the contraption on the table. “You mean this is
some kind of ghost detector you’re planning to use over on the McCulloch property?”

“Of course not!” she said in a huff. “It’s a spectral energy visualizer. Weren’t you listening?”

I placed my hands flat on the slate table, hoping to channel some of that cool into my demeanor. “Listen, Phin. You can’t go around spouting off about supernatural phenomena. I mean, Austin is pretty open-minded, but we’re not
in
Austin. This is a small town. And you definitely can’t go ghost hunting or energy visualizing or whatever on the McCullochs’ place. We need to keep well clear— What are you doing?”

She continued to open and close the workroom cabinets and drawers. “I’m trying to find an EMF meter in Aunt Hy’s things. I blew mine out in an experiment for my physics final.”

“You don’t need an EMF meter. You need to pay attention. This is important.” I followed her around the room, talking to the back of her head. Maybe if I threw enough words at her, some of them would penetrate her skull. “The McCullochs are already peeved at Aunt Hyacinth. If they’re trying to build this bridge, and then this body turns up, and if the ghost talk is making it even harder to get business done, their tolerance for quirky girl ghost detectives is going to be really low right now.”

“Aha!” Triumphant, she extracted something that looked like a ray gun from one of the drawers.

“What
is
that?” I asked in spite of myself.

“Infrared thermometer, of course. I knew she’d have one. Culinary equipment has made it so much easier to be
precise in cooking up spells.” She continued searching. “She’s got to have an EMF meter, too. It’s important to know where the electromagnetic fields are when you’re working.”

I tried a more logical approach. “The ranch is about a bazillion acres huge. How are you going to know where to look for spectral auras or whatever?”

She gave me a don’t-be-ridiculous look. “At the shallow grave, of course.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant. Because the only thing worse than trespassing would be trespassing on a
crime scene
.” I slapped a hand on the cabinet door she was about to open. “Are you listening, Phin?”

Finally she turned and faced me. “We wouldn’t be trespassing,” she said, as if stating something obvious. “We’ve been invited.”

“By whom?” The only thing obvious to me was how much we would
not
be welcome.

“By Mark.”

“And who is Mark?”

“One of the anthropology people. I met him in the hardware store. He’s the one who told me they’d be digging tomorrow, and he invited us to come and see.” She pulled at the cabinet door.

I leaned against it. “Right. The dig. Tomorrow. Not ghost hunting tonight.”

“It needs to be dark to image the Kirlian aura!”
Pull
. “Plus if we go tonight, I can get data before and after excavation.”

Push
. “I’m not going.”

She stopped and gaped at me like I’d told her I wanted fried kitten for breakfast. “But you
have
to go! Investigations have to be done in pairs to corroborate subjective experiences.”

I dropped my hand from the cabinet and drew myself up to my full height, which was respectable but only nose high to my sister, Galadriel. I made the best of it, though. “I have
one
purpose in this family, and that’s to convince people we’re normal. I haven’t done a bang-up job of it so far today, but I’m not going to make it worse by aiding and abetting your trespassing.”

“But how else am I going to test my coronal aura visualizer?”

“Test it on Uncle Burt.”

Snap
. The lights went out and the air conditioner stopped humming. Again.

“Dammit, Phin!” With the blackout curtains still up, the room was pitch dark.

“It wasn’t me!” she cried. “You see—Uncle Burt doesn’t want me to test it on him.”

“We’re in the country. The power goes out all the time, even without your, or Uncle Burt’s, help.” It went out so often that there were flashlights stashed in all the rooms. I stumbled to a drawer by the door and rooted around for one.

There was the scratch of a match and then a flickering glow as Phin lit one of the many candles around the room. Aunt Hy made those, too, but I rarely lit any, since I didn’t know what was for decoration and what held some arcane purpose.

“Maybe it’s the McCullochs’ ghost,” said Phin, the dancing flame casting eerie shadows on her face, the stone walls and black drapes turning the cozy room into something from a macabre fairy tale.

“That’s not funny.” And then, because I wasn’t sure she was joking, I asked, “A ghost couldn’t get through the security system, right?”

“Of course not,” Phin assured me. “Aunt Hyacinth knows what she’s doing. Plus twenty-five years of positive energy use here has strengthened it until the spectral equivalent of an F-five tornado couldn’t get through.”

While I was picturing that with some dismay—did that mean there
was
a spectral equivalent to a house-leveling tornado?—something cold and clammy pressed against the back of my leg. I jumped with a startled squeal. In the dim light, Sadie’s eyes shone back reproachfully, while the other dogs pressed close to me for comfort.

“For crying out loud.” Spurred back to sense, I found two flashlights and gave one to Phin. “I’m going out to the fuse box. Keep the dogs inside so they don’t give me another heart attack.”

“Here,” said Phin, running to her equipment and returning with the headlamp she’d worn earlier. “So you can keep both hands free.”

I took it, even though I knew I would feel too ridiculous to put it on. “Thanks.”

I went out through the mudroom, relieved to see that it wasn’t as dark outside as it seemed in the house. The sun had set behind the big granite bluff to the southwest, casting everything into an eerie twilight of silvery blue and indigo
shadows. Sunset had also brought a breeze to blow away some of the heat of the day, and dark shapes rode the currents overhead.

Bats. I shivered. They lived in the limestone caves that riddled the hills, and dusk brought them out to hunt bugs. I was generally pro-bat, except when I was trekking through the dark trying not to think about the inevitably dire fate of every horror movie character stupid enough to go into the dark with a flashlight and check the fuses.

The breaker box was outside the physical and metaphysical barrier of the board fence. A ridiculous arrangement. I slipped out of the gate, feeling the change like a pop in my ears, a tingle of warning. Maybe because I was still thinking of dead bodies. Aunt Hyacinth’s protections around the house would stop a spirit. They wouldn’t do anything against an axe murderer except make him queasy, which didn’t seem like it would be much of a deterrent. I mean, a strong stomach probably came with the job.

The thought made me hurry as I tried to outrace my nerves. Unease had knotted tight under my ribs when Phin had mentioned F5 arcane tornados, and it hadn’t loosened.

Phin’s talk of ghosts shouldn’t have bothered me so much. I’d grown up around Uncle Burt, and my cousin Daisy had been dealing with the dead as long as any of us could remember. But tonight I could not push away images of cold, silty water and slimy rocks, and thin, pale hands reaching—

The breeze lifted my damp hair and carried the rosemary scent of the shampoo, clearing my thoughts and bringing memory into sharp focus. I knew exactly what had my
stomach in knots, why carefully latched mental doors were rattling their hinges. It was partly the argument with Ben McCulloch, but mostly Phin bringing up La Llorona.

The weeping woman. Another spook, another river. A camping trip to Goliad, a flashlight, two preteens with a really bad idea. Phin was twelve and I was eleven and we had snuck out of our rented travel trailer and gone looking for the veiled woman who, legend said, wept by the river for her drowned babies. The stories of her luring living children to their deaths didn’t frighten us enough to make us waste the opportunity to investigate. Jeez, we were stupid.

I remembered nightmare snatches. The shadowed veil, the ashen skin of her clawed hands. Water closing over my head. But I didn’t remember exactly what had happened at the river, or how Phin and I had gotten away.

I recalled vividly what happened after, though. Dad had flipped his lid when he found his wet, bedraggled daughters after a frantic midnight search. He’d driven home growling things like “your crazy mother” and “encouraging this BS.” And scarier things like “court” and “judge” and “custody.” Much scarier to me than La Llorona.

It had shaken even Mom. Since they had never married, I wasn’t sure what his chances would be of getting custody. But even at eleven years old, I didn’t need psychic powers to see the way things would go if Phin started telling a judge about magic and spells in the Goodnight household. Not after La Llorona had almost made us victims of our own idiocy.

I didn’t ever want to see that look of fear and loss on Mom’s face again. Trying to get anyone else to change was
pointless, especially Phin. I could only change myself. So that night in Goliad was the last time I’d ever spoken of ghosts or magic to anyone outside the family. Until today.

I didn’t know what that meant, except that La Llorona was, in a weird sort of way, on my mind even before Phin brought her up. I had broken my rule when I’d talked ghosts with Ben McCulloch, right when I most needed to put up a good front.

A sound dropped me back into the present. I froze, one hand on the breaker box, and listened intently to the cricket-filled night. Had it come from the McCulloch place? The noise was otherworldly, the pitch so low I’d almost felt it rather than heard it. It was a visceral sort of
whump
, like the subwoofer on a stereo, overscored by a high, thin thread—

No, that was the bats. The dark shapes that had been swooping in a bug-hunting ballet now wheeled in unnatural and panicked chaos, as if someone had put a magnet on their internal compass. As I watched, two of them collided and plummeted to the ground. They hit with muted thumps and the leathery flop of wings, and then silence.

My throat clenched around my held breath. Just feet from me, their small black bodies lay unmoving in the circle of my flashlight. Had they knocked themselves out?

I edged closer, and when neither moved, I touched one with the toe of my boot.

Not stunned. Dead.

The practical part of me said I would need to get a shovel and bury them deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig them
up. Or maybe I needed to call Animal Control so they could be tested for rabies. Wasn’t erratic behavior a sign of that?

The other side, the Goodnight side, knew that rabies didn’t make two bats’ radar go so haywire they’d collide hard enough to kill each other. But what would?

Leave it alone, Amy
.

As omens went, it was pretty clear. Curiosity and ghosts didn’t mix. I knew that, even if the memories were slippery as river silt and cold bony hands.

The ringing of the phone worked its way into my dream and became a burglar alarm, which was enough to scare me awake, given that my dreams—once I’d finally managed to drift off—involved skeletons riding goats chasing me in my underwear as Ben McCulloch and his horse herded me away from the safety of the house, all while Phin sat on the porch drinking a Vanilla Coke.

Well, it scared me half awake, anyway. I was so clumsy with sleep that I answered my cell phone, my iPod, and my paperback book before I finally found the house phone. Three large dogs sacked out on my bed didn’t help. They made maneuvering difficult even when I was completely conscious.

“Unff,” I said, brilliantly.

“Amaryllis, darling,” said someone who sounded very like my aunt Hyacinth. “I have to tell you something.”