Texas Gothic (14 page)

Oh boy. Phin drew herself up and was clearly about to spell out just how many ways Caitlin was
completely
wrong on that point. I headed her off, because that was my job: keep the crazy contained.

“Ghost stories are folklore,” I explained, “and like every other kind of story, they have an internal logic.”

Phin took my interruption in stride and I continued my point. “Even if the tales get twisted by rumor and inflated by superstition, they’re usually based on something. I’m sure you know cases where folklore has led archaeologists to sites they would not have found, or even known to look for, without rumors and stories.”

Caitlin blinked at her, then picked up her beer with a grimace and took a bracing swig. “Oh my God. I’ve just been schooled by a freshman. How embarrassing.”

“Well,” said Phin, in a don’t-feel-bad tone that made Mark laugh even harder, “I
am
a sophomore.”

I picked up my Dr Pepper and smothered a groan. At least my sister was an
amusing
know-it-all.

Mark sobered to tease Caitlin. “It’s not her fault that she’s right.” Elbows on the table, he leaned in and took a teaching sort of tone. “That’s how the San Sabá Mission was found. The one I told you about today, Amy. An archaeologist came across an old pamphlet in an archive. Something printed up for tourists, by a family who was always finding artifacts when they plowed their fields. Academics had
dismissed these stories for decades, but it turned out to be the clue that led to discovering the site.”

“Speaking of finds,” I said, eager for any subject that wasn’t the Mad Monk, “what happened after I left the river? Did you get the skull out in one piece?”

Mark was happy to describe the excavation, giving Lucas time to get another round, and me time to regroup my strategy for keeping my balance on the tightrope between
Goodnight
and
normal
.

All afternoon, ever since Mac McCulloch had ridden off, I’d been lecturing myself:
Treat the story like a story, not like a ghost
. I’d expected that the ranch’s haunting would be a major topic of discussion in town, even in the crowded, noisy bar.
Especially
in the crowded bar. Where else were folks going to gather to gossip about it? I just hadn’t expected to get hit with “Mad Monk” quite so soon out of the gate.

“Oh, I’ll bet you’ll be interested in this, Amy,” said Mark, reeling back my attention to the discussion at the table. “Dr. Douglas made a preliminary estimate and thinks your skull may be as old as the first one. So tomorrow we’ll excavate around that spot, looking for more remains, and probably dig some test holes between the two finds.”

“So this could really be a big deal,” I said, a little tentatively. “Like you were talking about this afternoon.”

Everyone else was too excited to hear the conflict in my voice. They chattered about historical significance and writing papers and getting to name the site. But for a moment, the din of the bar retreated, and I was back in the field, back to hot sun and cool earth, and I was thinking about bones
and ghosts and wondering how I would be able to sleep tonight without seeing the hollow gaze of the skull in my dreams.

Caitlin had shaken off her pique and joined the speculation. “My money is on a lost settlement.”

“It could date back to the Spanish colonization,” said Lucas. “There were a number of failed colonies in the area.”

“Missions, you mean.” Phin’s train of thought wasn’t hard to follow. It might as well have been as neon as the beer signs over the bar.

“You’re thinking about the Mad Monk?” asked Jennie.

Emery gave a dismissive snort. “Even for a ghost, that sounds ridiculous, like something out of a gothic novel.
The Mysteries of Adolpho
or something.”

“
U
dolpho.” I took some pleasure in correcting him. His scorn made me reckless. Even without ghosts in my room and an eleven-year-old ghost hunter in the back of my head, it was hard to resist piecing the story together. Like I’d told Caitlin, there had to be some logic to it. “And it’s not so ridiculous. Texas had plenty of monks in its Spanish colonial days.”

Lucas nodded, in the spirit of the mystery. “Explorers looking for gold for the Mother Church. Missionaries here to civilize the natives.”

“Like Coronado,” said Phin. “Still searching for his lost city of gold.”

“Except that Coronado died in Mexico,” Lucas pointed out. “Though I suppose he could have come back in the afterlife. Do ghosts have to worry about transportation?”

“But Coronado wasn’t a monk,” said Jennie, mirroring
Phin’s posture and enthusiasm. Mark, Lucas, and Dwayne leaned in, too. Caitlin looked reluctantly interested, though Emery was trying to appear above it all.

“Were there missions this far north?” Mark asked.

Lucas made a “so-so” gesture. “The largest and most successful ones were farther south, along the Guadalupe, and east, up near the Neches. The soil here wasn’t really good for sustaining agriculture, so most of the missions in this area failed. Or met a more violent end. You mentioned San Sabá. That’s not far from here.”

“Wasn’t there a mine or something associated with San Sabá?” asked Phin. “Ghosts are often guarding a treasure.”

The word struck a chord of excitement around the table, everyone caught up in the possibility for the space of a held breath.

Then Emery broke the spell. “Oh my God,” he said, equal parts exasperated and disgusted. “You all watch too many movies.”

The gang laughed, breaking the runaway-train tension.

Phin’s suggestion had startled me, too, but for different reasons. Mac McCulloch had mentioned treasure but I hadn’t had a chance to tell Phin about that. Although, like she said, folklore was full of ghosts unwilling to leave their riches unprotected.

“This elective turned out to be way more interesting than I thought,” said Dwayne. “It’s like an episode of that
Bones
show or something.”

“Good grief,” said Emery, in the same disgusted voice. “Thanks to television, our classes are full of dilettantes who
think the field is all sexy anthropologists solving crimes and flirting with FBI agents.”

“I take exception to your point,” said my sister, in a debate-club sort of tone that, intentional or not, amused the hell out of me. “Mark is clearly sexy, and clearly an anthropologist.”

When he recovered from choking on his beer, Mark said, “Thanks,
chica
, but I don’t know any FBI agents.”

“I’m applying to the FBI,” Jennie assured him, “and I’d flirt with you.”

“And Caitlin’s no dog, either,” said Dwayne, and Lucas raised his bottle in agreement. Caitlin rolled her eyes, but I caught her laughing as she sipped her beer.

“Very funny,” said Emery, with
no
jealousy, I’m sure. “But you’ve completely missed my point.”

I wasn’t ready to let him off the hook, because for one thing, it was steering the conversation away from ghosts. For another, what kind of snob uses “dilettante” in a sentence without irony?

“I get your point,” I said, “but I read somewhere that the number of female students in the hard sciences has gone up across the board, and a lot of people credit the geek chic on TV.”

“Let me guess,” said Emery, looking down the table—and his nose—at me. “You’re a science major?”

“Pre-med,” I confirmed, with a bit of a challenge in my voice. “And Phin is majoring in chemistry and physics.”

I realized, as their heads turned to my sister, that I might have opened a can of worms, talking about Phin’s studies.
But I
was
proud of her, even if she chose to express her genius in an unconventional way, and Emery’s attitude pissed me off.

“Chemistry
and
physics?” echoed Mark, clearly impressed.

“Well,” Phin said modestly, “they’re not entirely unrelated.”

“Were you inspired by
CSI
?” Emery’s sneer earned him a glare from Jennie and Caitlin.

Phin answered him literally, of course. “It was
Ghost Hunters
, actually.”

They laughed, as if she were joking, which she wasn’t. I groaned—silently.
This is why I can’t take her anywhere
.

“Then why not parapsychology or something?” asked Emery, who probably would have mocked her no matter what she said.

Phin looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he would ask such a stupid question. “Because I’m not interested in the psychospiritual nature of the paranormal. I’m interested in the physical and measurable aspects.”

Jennie seemed delighted to have Emery put in his place. “I get it. Like how on those shows, they use gadgets to measure things like cold spots, electromagnetic energy, that kind of thing.”

“Exactly.” Phin nodded. “Though my concern is not only hauntings but all paranormal phenomena: ESP, mediums, spellcraft of various traditions. Only, no accredited university offers a degree in preternatural science. So—” She shrugged. “Chemistry and physics.”

“All the double majors
I
know,” said Emery, again with that
tone
, “are taking summer school.”

She answered a lot more calmly than I would have. “I’m doing two online classes and an independent study project. It’s based on the work of Semyon Kirlian in the 1930s, capturing the image of the corona electrical discharges of an object when laid on a photostatic plate subjected to a certain voltage.”

When Emery’s only response was a baffled blink, Jennie laughed. Dwayne, searching for the joke, asked, “Care to translate that for the business major?”

Mark gave him a wry look. “I didn’t get half of that, either, dude.”

Phin waved off their confusion. “It’s not important. I’m merely basing my work on that principle. The coronal aura visualizer measures the energy aura of objects in response to metaphysical energy rather than electricity.”

“This is the thing you mentioned this afternoon?” asked Mark.

“Yes. I’m curious whether anomalies underground might appear as coronas in the surface vegetation.”

That actually didn’t sound too crazy, especially for something from Phin. Smoking chemistry labs and blown fuses aside, her gadgets did usually work, once she got the bugs out. And considering she was doing things that no one—that I knew of, anyway—had ever done before, some bugs were to be expected.

I began to hope we’d get through the Gadget Girl Show without mentioning anything
too
out-of-bounds. But
then Caitlin asked, “What do you mean, metaphysical energy?”

Don’t do it, Phin
. I tried to send her psychic messages—as if I had suddenly developed a previously nonexistent skill in that area.
Don’t say it
.

But of course she did. “Oh,” she said, in a no-big-deal voice, “everything from ordinary high emotion to psychic events—ghosts, spells, things like that. I’m particularly interested in the herbomancy potential.” At their blank looks, and before I could do anything to stop her, she clarified, “Plant magic.”

Oh hell
. My insides in knots, I gripped the table and contemplated whether I could fake a medical emergency to save us from laughter and ridicule. They’d probably ignore what she’d just said if I could manage a convincing heart attack.

But this was Phin. In the months she’d been away at school, I’d forgotten how she could make the most out-there statements seem no worse than eccentric.

Mark scratched his chin. “You think this might be able to image disturbances underground?”

She nodded. “It’s possible, if there’s some kind of stimulus.”

“Oh for crying out loud,” said Emery, and flopped into the booth corner to sulk.

Dwayne gave me a bit of a wink, unaware of my incipient mostly fake heart attack. “Is that how you found the skull, Amy?”

“Lila found it,” I said automatically.

“
I
think she did a spell by accident,” said Phin, because she always had to go there.

His grin turned teasing. “Do you do a lot of magic spells?”

“No,” I answered emphatically.

“That’s true,” said Phin. “Amy prefers to operate in a more mundane world than the rest of our family.”

Jennie asked, “So is your family … what do you call it? Wiccan?”

“Good grief, no,” said Phin. “We’re all Lutherans.”

They laughed, and I slumped back on the hard wooden bench, letting the raucous country music wash over me along with my relief. I should have been furious with Phin for saying these things. Whatever immunity she had, whether it was personality or some kind of inherent magic, the safety net around her words didn’t extend forever. Outside her sphere of influence, who knew what this would set off? I only knew I’d be the one dealing with it.

But today I couldn’t throw stones. I was seriously losing my objectivity. My job was to keep the Goodnight eccentricities inside and the scary real-world judgments outside. How could I do that when I kept losing my footing on the fence?

“You know what we should do?” said Dwayne. “Go look for the ghost.”

I sat up so quickly, I kicked someone under the table. “Hang on,” I said.

“That’s a great idea!” said Jennie. Was she naturally that enthusiastic, or was it happy hour talking? Either way, the bad ideas kept on coming. “We can use the corona vision thing. It will be awesome.”

“Coronal aura visualizer,” Phin corrected her.

“You guys aren’t serious,” said Caitlin, then to Mark and Lucas, “Tell me you’re not buying into this idea.”

Lucas took a swig of his beer. “Not until after some food, at any rate.”

Why wasn’t Phin saying anything? I expected her to grab her oar and start paddling us up this creek of crazy.

And even more important, why wasn’t
I
saying anything? I needed to put the brakes on this, but I couldn’t seem to form the words.

Mark said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing if Phin’s invention does show any disturbances underground. I mean, anything that would make digging easier.”

“Come on,” said Dwayne, flashing a game-for-anything grin. “We can video it and maybe get on a TV show.”

“I don’t think so,” said Phin repressively. “I don’t intend to prostitute my scientific integrity on YouTube.”