Texas Gothic

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  Mark stood on the side of the field, holding one end of a measuring tape. Emery held the other, checking distances for Dwayne and Lucas, who were resetting the stakes and surveyor’s twine that marked the field off in squares.

  “What happened?” I asked, because I knew perfectly well that the grid had been in place the night before.

  “Some cows came through, pulled up half the stakes.” He looked past me toward the Trooper. “Where’s Phin?”

  “She moves slow in the morning.” I got back to the important question. “I thought they’d cleared all the cattle from this area.” That was why Ben had been rounding up that stray on the day we’d met. “Are you sure that’s what happened?”

  He pointed to the ground, where there was fresh evidence of cattle trespass. “They think a fence must be down. Ben’s got some of his guys taking care of it.”

  In the bathroom of the Hitchin’ Post, Jessica had blamed falling fences on the Mad Monk. That kind of prank seemed mischievous compared to the specter I’d seen. Was that a clue that the monk was separate from my apparition? Though today it had succeeded in delaying the dig.

  And speaking of delays. “How is Dr. Douglas taking the media circus outside the gate?”

  Mark glanced toward the tent, where the professor was talking to Jennie. “She’s seen worse. As long as the paparazzi and protesters stay outside the gate, there isn’t much she can do.”

  Phin joined us just as the guys finished restoring the grid. While Mark reeled in the tape measure, Lucas got straight to business. “Did you tell them about the note?”

  “Not yet,” said Mark.

  “What note?” Phin and I spoke at the same time.

  Lucas explained, “Dr. D found a note on the windshield of the van this morning, telling her not to disturb the dead. It was written in red marker.”

  Phin chewed that over. “Red is a powerful color. And of course, the suggestion of blood implies a threat.”

  “Very melodramatic,” said Mark, not quite successful at laughing it off.

  “I don’t know, dude.” Lucas shook his head. “It should have been cheesy, but … it gave me the creeps.”

  Anonymous warnings were creepy. The red ink was unsettling because it was meant to be scary. A malicious thing to contemplate on a summer morning.

  Emery could be relied upon to break the mood. “You guys are getting worked up about a stupid prank.”

  “You know,” I ventured, following the thread of an earlier thought, “if the stakes were ripped up by a person, could the note writer have done it? Thinking he’d delay things or scare you off?”

  “Why would someone want to keep us from digging?” Emery asked. “Those remains are well over a hundred years old.”

  “Maybe it’s an old family scandal,” Lucas suggested.

  Dwayne, who’d been listening with enthusiasm, seized on that idea. “A hundred-year-old murder! Or a new body, buried with the old.”

  “Television!” said Emery. “This is exactly what I was talking about. Without dental records, without a cause of death, what could we prove? Nothing. Just that John Doe met his end next to the river.”

  I entered the argument, because this was how I planned to find the identity of the ghost, and I had to give myself hope. “What if the circumstances match up with a mysterious disappearance in the right time frame?”

  “It’s still just circumstantial evidence,” said Emery. “And the murderer would be long gone, too.”

  “This is a small community,” I said. “Even circumstance is enough to condemn someone in public opinion, and even if they’re dead, it’s a black mark on the family honor.”

  Mark nodded. “ ‘The sins of the father’ and all that.”

  I thought about Joe Kelly, carrying a grudge for three generations. “Exactly.”

  “Do you still have the note?” Phin asked.

  Mark seemed surprised at the question. “I suppose Dr. D might have kept it. Why?”

  “You could examine it for trace evidence.” She nodded toward the tent. “Jennie’s a criminology major. She could check for fingerprints or whatever. And I’d definitely like to see—”

  Emery cut in impatiently, “For crying out loud. Who do you think you are? Nancy Drew?”

  “Hey,” I snapped, because no one sniped at my sister but me, and Mark echoed with a stern “Chill, dude.”

  Phin was unperturbed. “Those books were highly unrealistic. Do you have any idea how much brain damage a person would have if she were hit on the head and drugged with chloroform that often?”

  “Brain damage?” Dr. Douglas’s question made us jump. The guys looked at her with shamed-puppy-dog faces as she continued, “That’s the only reason I can think that you’d be standing here flapping your jaws when there’s a skeleton to be excavated. It’s not going to dig itself up.”

  Emery, Lucas, and Dwayne hurried off, and Dr. Douglas turned her disapproving gaze on Phin and me. “If I let you two work on this dig, are you going to be helpful? No more keeping my students from their work?”

  I shook my head emphatically. Phin, standing slightly behind me, must have made some kind of satisfactory response, because after a long, steely-eyed stare, Dr. Douglas gave a curt nod and said to Mark, “Show them what to do and get them set up.”

  I didn’t let my breath out until she turned and walked downhill, pulling her BlackBerry from her pocket as she went.

  “She doesn’t like me,” said Phin.

  “Trust me,” said Mark, “if she didn’t like you, you wouldn’t be here.” He shepherded us uphill, near the uncovered hole that Lila had dug yesterday, where a six-by-six-foot square had been staked off, just like the first excavation closer to the river. “Pick your spot. Any square in this marked-off grid. We want to try and find more of this skeleton to make a case for excavating the whole area.”

  Phin pointed to his clipboard. “Is that a diagram of this section?”

  “Yeah. I’ll keep track of who digs where, and in which square we find any artifacts.” At her gesture, he handed it over, looking confused as to why she wanted it. “It’s just an empty grid right now.”

  “It’s all I need,” she assured him, and pulled a pendant of pale stone from her jeans pocket. Mark watched her with indulgent curiosity. I wanted to crawl in the excavation hole and pull the tarp over my head.

  Hell, Phin. Could you possibly be more conspicuous?

  Okay, to be fair, she probably could. With no fuss, hand waving, or incantation, she let the pendant hang freely over the hand-drawn map. As it swung, she judged its changes in pattern, moving her hand until the stone made a tight circle over a small area.

  “What is she doing?” Mark asked in a fascinated whisper, as if he didn’t want to break her concentration.

  “Picking a spot.” I shrugged, as if this weren’t weird, as if I weren’t seething at Phin for flying her freak flag at every opportunity.

  The simple divination took seconds, and I hoped it would pass as a theatrical equivalent of eeny-meeny-miny-mo. Mark was the only one nearby, and he had already made up his mind about us, but I was very aware of the other students peering over curiously.

  “G-three,” said Phin, and handed the clipboard back to Mark. “Bingo.”

  Mark chuckled, and when I said, “Please don’t encourage her,” he laughed again, and motioned for us to follow him.

  “Come on. I’ll show you what to do. After yesterday, I’m not going to question how you two decide where to dig.”

  He set us up with a screen box, trowels, and brushes. The idea was to dig shallow layers of dirt out of our squares, and put it through the sieve to catch any small objects. If we came across anything that looked like it might be a bone, we could clear off the dirt with the brushes, being careful to avoid scraping the artifacts with the hard edge of the tools.

  As soon as he left us to our work, I sat back on my heels and glared at Phin. I’d taken the square next to her, and we weren’t terribly far from the others, so
I kept my voice down. “That was your experiment? The one you mentioned last night?”

  “Yes, but ‘experiment’ was a bit of a lie.” She made the first divot in her section with her trowel. “It was a basic locating spell. Though I am curious about what it turns up.”

  “What did you use?” She tossed the pendant to me, and I caught it automatically. It was white and weighed less than I expected. “Is this bone?”

  “Not human, of course.” She held out her hand and I tossed it back. “But it should still work. Alchemy 101. Like attracts like.”

  “Jeez Louise, Phin.” The others’ heads popped up like prairie dogs, and I lowered my voice again. “We’ve already got reporters at our door and half the town thinking I’m the ghost whisperer.”

  “Then what does it matter?” she asked. “Do you want to find something helpful or not?”

  I did. My hands seemed to tingle with the memory of yesterday’s dig, the thrill of dirt and discovery. I didn’t trust how much of that was my own reaction, and how much was this … whatever was happening to me.

  But Phin was right. I had to find out what was haunting me, or nothing else would matter.

  19

  “it looks a lot more exciting on television, doesn’t it?”

  Emery was officially starting to piss me off. I hated I-told-you-so’s. Especially when they were true.

  My back ached from hunching over the shallow trough with the trowel and a soft-bristle brush. I had so much dirt under my nails I could start another Goodnight Farm. Digging for human remains in limestone earth, hard-packed by time, elements, and a whole lot of cow hooves, was grueling work.

  We’d been at it all morning, with Mark and Dr. Douglas periodically checking our progress and technique. I was beginning to wonder if the skull might have been separated from its body, since I hadn’t found anything but a rock that I’d thought was a patella but was just a rock.

  Then Dwayne uncovered a real kneecap, as well as a tibia and a jumble of bones that had once been a foot.

  “Come here and look at this, gang,” said Dr. Douglas. When we’d gathered around, she pointed out the tarsals, metatarsals, and a few tiny phalanges. “Since the bones are in accurate positions, merely collapsed and distorted by the weight of the soil, this body was likely buried before it decomposed, preserving the remains in place.”

  “Is this the foot that belongs to the skull Amy found yesterday?” Dwayne asked.

  “The position and proximity do seem consistent with that.” Lecturing as she worked, she scooped some dirt into a vial, then labeled it with a Sharpie. “When we find remains that haven’t been moved, we want to get as much information from the soil around the body as possible. Lab analysis will help us to determine the answer to Dwayne’s question, as well as to piece together how the bones came to be here.”

  “Look at this,” said Mark. We were all crouched shoulder to shoulder around Dwayne’s trench, and Mark lightly touched a piece of tattered and blackened leather sticking out of the dirt beside the bones. “That could be the bottom of a shoe or boot.”

  “Don’t remove anything until Jennie takes pictures,” said Dr. Douglas. “I’ll send Caitlin, too. She’ll be thrilled to have something to catalog that isn’t a bone.” The professor was way too stoic to rub her hands together with excitement, but she definitely had a vibe going on, as Daisy would say. “And call me if you find anything else.”

  As she left, I stared at the ragged leather, my mind filling in the gaps, until I saw the sole of a boot, tattered by wear and innumerable miles. A soldier’s boot? A conquistador’s?

  Or maybe it was the sole of a monk’s leather sandal.

  “Imagine the ground that shoe traveled on the way here, the places it may have been.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until I saw the others looking at me. I cleared my throat, a little embarrassed at my whimsy. “It’s just … here’s this utilitarian thing, like what we’re all wearing now. Whoever wore it walked on this same dirt, had the same mud on his heels, but centuries ago.”

  Emery had his own commentary. “Very poetic. Except we try not to do much imagining in science.”

  I gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “I can see why you picked a field where you mostly work with dead people.”

  “And I imagine things all the time,” said Phin, backing me up. “It’s called ‘invention.’ Or sometimes, ‘making a hypothesis.’ ”

  “Don’t provoke him,” chided Mark, not quite hiding his laugh. “We have to work with him all year. So let’s get back to it.”

  Emery set his jaw, which emphasized his prominent chin. “Those of us who are actually working, and not just amusing themselves.”

  A hand smacked him in the back of the head, and it wasn’t mine. Caitlin had arrived, digging tools in her (non-smiting) hand. “Don’t knock the volunteer labor,” she said. “Of which I’m one. Now show me this thing that might be a shoe so I can earn my unpaid-predoctoral-candidate-archaeologist’s keep.”

  Phin tugged at my shirt. “Come on, Amy. If that troglodyte finds something significant before I do, you are going to owe me big-time.”

  I suspected the debt might involve being her test subject in a school project, so I got back to work as ordered. My whole life felt like an experiment since the ghost had appeared.

  Over the rest of the morning, Lucas and Dwayne worked together and uncovered a femur, then the iliac crest of a pelvis. That caused another flurry of excitement as they dug down to expose the rest of it so Dr. D could identify its gender as male. I realized I’d been already thinking of the remains as male. Was that a hunch or just bad science? Emery found the other tibia and another piece of rotted leather, and at Phin’s dark look, I bent my head to my work and didn’t look up again.

  The only problem was, digging and sifting didn’t take much brain power, so my mind was free to wander and worry.

  What would happen if finding the whole skeleton didn’t satisfy the specter?

  Maybe these remains had nothing to do with the ghost. It seemed like if I was wedded to this thing somehow, I would sense something when I touched the bones. I’d felt the age and mortality of the skull yesterday, but nothing that really tied it to the apparition.

  I was pinning my hopes that digging here would lead me to some clue, but if this didn’t work, what did I do then?

  My work was much more orderly than my thoughts. Back and forth across my three-by-two rectangle of ground, on each pass I dug down another layer. Six inches deep didn’t sound very impressive, but I had to put every shovelful of dirt through a sieve, to make sure I didn’t miss any tiny bones or artifacts.

  A pair of very worn boots stepped into my line of sight. They crumbled the edge of my nice, neat trench. You could have measured the sides with a ruler, until then.

  “Hey.” When I didn’t respond right away—digging was sort of hypnotic—he gave a whistle. “Earth to Underwear Girl.”

  I didn’t need the boots or the horrible nickname to tell me who it was. Because it figured.

  “You’re collapsing the side of my trench. I worked very hard on that.”

  Ben stepped back, sending clods of dirt skittering down the sides of my excavation. I tried to look up at his face instead of his feet, but my neck was knotted tighter than a toddler’s first shoelaces.

  I could only turn my head enough to see that Phin and the others were gone. “Where is everybody?”

  “Ordinary mortals have to stop and eat.” His feet shifted, and I could picture him hooking his thumb in his belt the way he did. “My mother brought lunch.”

  “Your mother?” Surprise made me move too fast, and I bit off a gasp as the muscles between my neck and shoulder seized into one big, searing spasm.

  “Don’t sound so shocked,” he said. “I told you I had one.”

  “Cramp,” I choked, dropping my trowel and grabbing my shoulder.

  “Oh for Pete’s sake.” He slid a hand under my arm and pulled me smoothly to my feet—a move I wouldn’t hav
e been able to do on my own, since my leg muscles were kinked and knotted, too.

  “Careful—” I flinched as he touched my neck, but despite the manhandling, his fingers were gently firm. Not enticing or soothing, but effective. He kneaded the tightly wound muscle that ran from behind my ear down to my shoulder, and the blinding pain of the cramp began to ease.

  “Relax,” he said.

  Was he kidding? All the voluntary tension was running out of me, leaving only the knots. My insides were melting, too, at the steady, capable strength of his hands.

  “You do this a lot?” I asked, not nearly as snarky as I wanted to be.

  “Sure,” he said, oblivious—I hoped—to the breathless catch in my voice. “I do this to my horse all the time.”

  “Lucky horse.” No lie. I was willing to bet he treated his horse better than some guys treated their girlfriends. His thumbs worked the cords in my neck, and I bit my lip to hold back an embarrassing sigh. “You have a funny way of showing how much you don’t like me.”

  “I don’t like gophers, either, but I wouldn’t leave one to suffer. I’d shoot it to put it out of its misery.”

  “Nice.” I started to slide out from his hold, but his fingers tightened just enough to stop me.

  “Almost got it,” he said, working out the very last of the cramp. He also answered my unasked question. “Phin sent me. She said no one else annoyed you enough to break your concentration. Not even Emery. I think she likes me.”

  I gave my head an experimental turn. “If your skin hasn’t turned green and bumpy, then she likes you.”

  “If she didn’t, she’d turn me into a frog?”

  “Why mess around with transformation when an embarrassing rash will do?”

  He exhaled on a chuckle, a half laugh that stirred the hair at my nape. I fought a shiver, despite the hot sun. The cramp was gone, but he continued to work on the kinks, thumbs on either side of my neck. “Have you looked up at all in the last hour?”