Texas Gothic (11 page)

“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.

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.”