Texas Gothic (22 page)

“Why?” Ben finally said. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

Because it wouldn’t leave
me
alone, and I didn’t want to be saddled with a spectral shadow my whole life. But I couldn’t tell him that. I had to find another way to convince him I was doing a crazy-sounding thing for noncrazy reasons.

“Look, Ben,” I said. “Whether the Mad Monk is real or not, people are scared. If I get to the bottom of this legend, find out how it started and what’s stirring it up, maybe it will help.”

It was a good argument, though I felt a little guilty because I’d implied I was going to disprove the Mad Monk story. But maybe I would, if my specter and the monk were two different things.

He narrowed his eyes, still doubting. “So, you want to do a ghost stakeout, like on television?”

I didn’t see a reason to tell him I already had. “More like detective work. Ask questions, talk to people who’ve heard the stories before they’ve been warped by time and rumor.”

“Like who?” he asked, as if he was chewing it over.

“Well, I could start with you.” He snorted, but I was undeterred, even though he wasn’t going to like my next suggestion. “Your mother …”

“No.”

“Your granddad.”

“
Hell
no!”

He turned at that and stalked up the hill toward the copse of trees where Phin and I had sat the day before. Today there was a huge SUV there, its tailgate open to serve as a makeshift buffet table. The students sat on the ground and on a few camp seats from the work areas. Dr. Douglas lounged in one of the chairs, chatting with a woman I couldn’t see behind her enormous sunglasses.

None of them, fortunately, was paying attention as I trotted after Ben. I’d totally mishandled him—again—and trying to repair my case was like trying to bail a leaky rowboat.

“I would only talk to him if he was having a good day,” I bargained. “Alzheimer’s patients sometimes remember the past more clearly than the present—”

He stopped. Turned. Leaned down so he was right in my face. “No. Do
not
talk to Grandpa Mac about ghosts. He sees enough of them already.”

My mind snagged on that for a moment, wondering if he saw them in the present or the past. Was his Emily like Uncle Burt, or was she only in his mind?

The question wouldn’t matter if I didn’t fix things with Ben.

“Look,” I said, “the only stories I have are via the Kellys. What the Kellys said they saw or heard, or what their cattle-rustling grandfather said.” In fact, it seemed like the Kellys had done a lot more talking about the ghost than Aunt Hyacinth could have, given that she’d been on a slow boat to China for a while now. But I didn’t point that out, since Ben was mad enough already.

“Fine,” he said, proving how angry he was. “Why don’t you take Joe Kelly out to dinner and ask
him
about the Mad Monk.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, because apparently I was five.

“Wear a raincoat for the beer and your rubber boots for the bull—”

A woman’s voice, syrup thick and laced with maternal disapproval, rolled heavily down the hill. “Benjamin Francis McCulloch! I told you to bring that young lady up here for some lunch, not to yell at her like a hooligan.”

Francis
? I was never going to let him tease me about Amaryllis again.

The triple-name whammy had an astounding effect on Ben. He colored to the tips of his ears and, after one last acid glance, wiped his face of anything but pleasant solicitude and gestured me onward to the picnic. With the same exaggerated courtesy, I swept by him … and knew I was just as red-faced as he.

Most of the gang were too busy eating and talking to pay much attention, but Mark looked vastly amused. Caitlin’s expression implied she was updating her taxonomy to include
Freshmanicus buttheadius
. And as I passed Phin, she murmured, “What was that you said about not antagonizing the law?”

I ignored her and focused on the blond woman who literally greeted me with open arms. “Amy! I’ve just been chatting with Phin. It’s so delightful to meet you both.”

Mrs. McCulloch had a big Texas drawl to go with the big Texas hair, and she seemed utterly genuine. Her warmth threw me off balance. If there was any bad blood between
her and Aunt Hyacinth, it didn’t affect her greeting at all, and she clearly didn’t hold my public argument with Ben against me.

Either that, or she was the best actress in the world. I glanced at Phin, who shrugged—her mouth full of sandwich—which I interpreted to mean she’d taken the woman at face value and so should I.

Holding me at arm’s length, she gave me a rather matriarchal inspection. “Aren’t you adorable! Look at those dimples. I expected you to be taller.”

“Understandable,” I said, still a little bewildered by the reception. Phin and I bookended average height, but Aunt Hyacinth was something approaching Amazonian. “My aunt Iris always said Hyacinth married Uncle Burt because he was the first man she met who didn’t insist she wear flats on their dates.”

She laughed. “I can’t imagine anyone insisting your aunt do anything. As we well know.”

“Mom,” Ben chided her in a long-suffering sort of tone.

Mrs. McCulloch breezed along. “Come have a sandwich. Ben, get Amy a drink.”

He shot me a warning glance behind his mother’s back, as if I was going to ask her about the Mad Monk right then. Which I might have, but not while he was within earshot. Or while I was so hungry.

Mrs. McCulloch chatted while I cleaned my hands and made a cheese sandwich. “Can you believe all the excitement down by the gate? Who knew one bridge would lead to all this?”

Mark ambled over for some more potato chips. “You
never know what’s going to turn up in construction, Mrs. McCulloch. When the highway department expanded the road through the town where I grew up, they uncovered a graveyard. That’s how I got interested in anthropology. A team came from the university, identified the graves, and relocated them so the highway could go through.”

I wondered about Ben’s sharp look. I got that the bridge would make their lives easier, but they’d done without it this long. What difference did a few months make?

“Good heavens,” said Mrs. McCulloch. “That must have taken forever.”

“Years,” answered Mark. I coughed in surprise, and he realized the tactless hole he’d dug for himself. “That was an extreme case, of course. Property rights and legal issues, as well as identifying the remains from very old church records …” Ben usually played things close to the vest, but all the color drained from his face as the scenario kept getting worse. Mrs. McCulloch looked rather stricken herself.

From his seat on the ground, Lucas offered tentative reassurance. “Those shoe remnants we found should rule out a Native American burial ground, at least. The construction technique is more sophisticated than the foot coverings of the local tribes.”

Dr. Douglas sighed in displeasure. “Let’s please, if at all possible, keep anything
else
from leaking to the press. It would be nice not to make this any harder on the McCullochs—and me—than it has to be.”

“I appreciate that, Serena,” said Mrs. McCulloch, and it took me a second to realize who she meant, because Dr. Douglas did
not
look like a Serena. “Now, I hope this
question doesn’t seem rude, but how much longer do you think you’ll be here at this stage of things?”

The professor surveyed the field, as if picturing what might be below the surface. “We’ll finish excavating the B site today, then tomorrow we’ll dig some test trenches between the two.”

“What about all this?” I pointed to the big grid the guys had relaid this morning. The baseball diamond.

“That’s much too big a project to tackle without a grant and a dedicated team. I only have these guys for one more day. Well, I have Caitlin for the summer, and I’m stuck with Mark and Emery full-time. But Dwayne, Jennie, and Lucas are almost finished with the mini-term.”

She rose from her seat and stretched. “What we’ll do is dig some holes at regular intervals and see if we turn up anything worth investigating. Then we can come back with funding and a few willing bodies.”

An awkward pause weighted the hot, dusty air. I think we were all thinking about Mark’s story. I wondered if the McCullochs had a Plan B for their bridge.

“Well,” said Mrs. McCulloch with determined cheer, “whatever you find tomorrow, at the end of your day you should come to our Fourth of July party. That includes you girls, too,” she added to me and Phin. “Your aunt never misses it. Your uncle, either, when he was alive.”

Uncle Burt had been gone for fifteen years. My surprise must have shown, and Mrs. McCulloch laughed. “Yes, it’s a hundred-year-old tradition. No one misses it.”

“Not even the Kellys,” said Ben, who’d been quietly sitting on the tailgate of the SUV.

I smiled at him very sweetly. “Then I won’t, either.”

Ben’s mom either missed or ignored the exchange. “And in the meantime, girls, if you need
anything
, you just give us a call. There’s no cause for you to ever feel spooked or anything in that house all alone. You have Ben’s phone number?”

“Um … I, uh … No,” I stammered. Ben, with a careful absence of expression, dutifully took out his cell for the ritual exchange of digits. Not at
all
awkward with an audience. I gave him my number and he called me to send me his. Fortunately, my ringtone was the UT fight song, and it would have been unpatriotic to smirk during “Texas Fight.”

Dr. Douglas marshaled her troops. “Break’s over. Let’s see if we can get the rest of our John Doe out of the ground before dinnertime.”

m
rs. McCulloch—to my surprise—held me back with a question, waiting until the others had cleaned up their lunch trash and moved downhill. Even Ben left, carrying the camp chairs back to ops for Caitlin, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t noticed he’d left me alone with his mother.

She busied herself putting away deli meat and cheese into a big cooler. “I hope that Ben hasn’t made things too difficult for you, Amy.”

How was I supposed to answer that? Of course he had. But I couldn’t tell his
mother
that.

“He’s obviously under a lot of pressure,” I said carefully,
then added, to be fair, “And he’s been a gentleman when it counts.”

That pleased her, which was my aim. Because I had questions. I just had to figure out how to phrase them tactfully. “I’m relieved to know that there isn’t as much antagonism between Aunt Hyacinth and your family as I thought.”

There. That sounded much better than
What the hell is your son’s problem?

Mrs. McCulloch closed the ice chest and pushed it into the SUV. “We’ve always gotten along with your aunt, but Ben and Steve—Steve Sparks, our manager—they’ve had a lot of frustrations lately. Hyacinth never had a problem with us fording the river on her property, but Steve wants us to lease the bluff to a cell phone company to put a tower on, and Hyacinth … well, she’s adamantly against it. She says—” Ben’s mom broke off with an embarrassed laugh. “Well, she has her reasons, even if we don’t understand them.”

I looked at the bluff she meant, a big, beautiful hunk of granite that dominated the vista like the prow of a red-rock ocean liner in a rolling sea of hills. “It would be a shame to ruin that view.”

That was grounds enough for me, but Aunt Hyacinth was undoubtedly worried about electromagnetic fields, which was probably the part Mrs. McCulloch didn’t understand.

“It would,” Mrs. McCulloch admitted, following my gaze. “But Steve says it would also be a lot of money. And it would be nice in case Mac … Well, just in case.”

In case Grandpa Mac someday needed long-term residential care. That was how folks tactfully phrased it.
Mrs. McCulloch didn’t have to finish the sentence for me to hear the looming nightmare in her voice. Ben’s mom, I’d noticed, tended to say a little more than she meant to.

Like how she seemed to say Steve Sparks’s name a lot, which, on one hand, was natural if they worked closely together on ranch business. But she was also a widow with a lot on her shoulders.

Maybe I felt protective of her because I’d grown up with a single mother whose “I march to the beat of my own new age synthesizer” was sometimes mistaken for “I need a big strong man to tell me what to do.” Or maybe it was just that Steve Sparks was a condescending jerk, without Ben’s mitigating qualities.

Such as the charm with which he compared me to vermin. Or to his horse, which I supposed might be construed as a compliment.

I was working my conscience around to asking his mother about the Mad Monk, but I was too slow. Ben returned, sliding his phone into his pocket and looking, if possible, even more tired than before.

“Fencing accident, Mom. I’ve got to go.”

“Oh dear,” said his mother.

“Fencing accident?” I assumed another one had fallen down, but I didn’t tease him about sinkholes or any other cause. He looked too grim.

He answered me tersely. “Barbed wire. High tension. It snapped with a man in the way.”

My imagination filled in the gaps, and I felt an odd stab of responsibility. My palms were sweating, and I shoved
them in my pockets, shaken by the strength of my reaction. “Can I help? I’m certified in first aid.”

Ben looked surprised by my offer, and said genuinely, “Thanks. But Steve took Clint to the ER, where he’ll be okay with some stitches.” He ran a hand over his face. “If this gets blamed on that ghost …”

He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t really have to.

“Don’t be silly, Benjamin,” said Mrs. McCulloch. “Why would anyone think it’s the ghost? It’s the middle of the day, and no one got hit on the head.”

If someone weren’t injured, maybe seriously, I would have laughed at Ben’s exasperated reaction to his mother’s logic. I pressed my luck with a question. “Why would a ghost—a hypothetical ghost,” I corrected at Ben’s dark look, “want to injure someone repairing a fence?”

“Why does the f—” He caught himself and looked at his mom. “—ictional thing do anything?” said Ben scornfully. “Just ask anyone: to protect his ‘treasure.’ ”

His air quotes were
aggressively
ironic, and Mrs. McCulloch reassured me with a hand on my shoulder, “He’s not angry with you, honey. Just at the situation.”