“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.
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 co
uldn’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?”
Texas Gothic Page 8
