Texas Gothic

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  Joe looked like he was going to explode, so I didn’t resist as Ben steered me away. The crowd murmured their disappointment that there wasn’t going to be a fight. So did Joe’s friends, who’d shouldered up beside him. But if Ben was half as accurate with his fists as with his words, someone might end up in the hospital. And not from the Mad Monk.

  “Friend of yours?” I asked when I’d recovered my powers of speech.

  Ben kept me close as we wove through the crowd. I didn’t really like to be steered, but didn’t think I had much of an argument where driving myself was concerned. Not while my bangs still dripped beer onto my nose, anyway.

  He gave a rueful sigh, as if to make light of the ugly incident, but his underlying tension remained. “Somebody’s great-grandfather hangs someone else’s for cattle rustling, and they never get over it.”

  “Cattle rustling!” I started to look back, but Ben’s grip tightened, keeping me from a very obvious goggle.

  “Don’t stare,” he said. Then, once we’d gained a little breathing room, he asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Well, I’m wearing enough beer to get arrested, but I’m not such a delicate flower that I’m going to crumple when a big meanie yells at me. I mean, you should know that.”

  His brows lowered, and he seemed to contemplate a number of answers, but before he could pick one a cute Hispanic girl in a Hitchin’ Post T-shirt intercepted us.

  “Oh my gosh,” she said, handing me a clean bar towel, which I took gratefully, blotting my dripping bangs. “I saw what happened. Are you okay? Joe Kelly has been a jerk since grade school.”

  “Joe Kelly?” I echoed. “As in Deputy Kelly?”

  “His son,” said Ben, eloquent in his brevity. But I heard his grandfather in his tone. Never trust a Kelly.

  I mopped at my T-shirt, but quickly realized the towel wasn’t going to cut it. “I can’t go back to the table like this,” I said. “I’m not decent.”

  Ben glanced down, then quickly back up, clearing his throat. “Does your family know about this exhibitionist tendency of yours?”

  My face flamed, but before I could work up a retort, the waitress hit his arm. “Be nice. I’ve known you since grade school, too.” Then she turned me toward the restrooms with a little shove. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up. I’m Jessica, by the way.”

  “Amy,” I said automatically, looking over my shoulder at Ben, who seemed amused to see me herded like a nanny goat. “I think I’m a lost cause. I should just go home.”

  Jessica kept propelling me to the hallway in the back of the bar, and a door that said Cowgirls. “Then let’s get you dry enough to not set off a Breathalyzer if you get pulled over.”

  Deputy Kelly would love that, I bet, so I stopped fighting. In the bathroom, where I tried to touch as few things as possible, Jessica had me strip off my T-shirt so she could rinse it in the sink—it couldn’t get any wetter—and dry it under the hand dryer. I stood in my bra and toweled off my hair and debated whether it was “nosy” to seize the opportunity that fate had given me.

  Jessica looked barely old enough to work in a bar, and she was obviously a local, since she knew Ben and Joe both. Maybe it wasn’t playing fair, but I figured, what the heck. The roar of the hand dryer would cover our voices.

  “So,” I began, in what I hoped was a subtle sort of way, “it sounds like you know all the families around here.”

  She grinned. “You mean like the McCullochs?” At my expression—clearly I hadn’t been subtle at all—she laughed. “It’s kind of a logical guess, you being neighbors and all.”

  I sighed and leaned against the counter, then thought better of it and stood up. “Okay. So, what’s his deal? Was he always such a crankypants?”

  “Not really.” She thought about it while she waved my shirt under the hot air of the dryer. “He and Joe were a year behind me in high school, but it’s a small campus. Ben made good grades, went to parties, had lots of girlfriends. Lots of girlfriends.”

  Her gaze slid sort of speculatively my way, and I sucked in my stomach a little bit. I mean, I wasn’t vain, but I was human, and also standing in my underwear under fluorescent lights.

  Jessica went on. “But he wasn’t popular popular, if you know what I mean. Even with his being a McCulloch, which you can imagine is a pretty big deal here. He was too laid-back to be really A-list.”

  “Laid-back?” I couldn’t picture it.

  Jessica nodded. “I don’t think he got so serious until he came home from college.”

  She could have meant when he graduated, but something in her tone, in the knit of her brow, said not. “When was that?” I asked.

  “Sometime last year.” She glanced at me in the mirror. “You know about his dad, right?”

  “Uh, no.” Just that I’d made an idiotic statement about him having parents, and that he’d stuttered over his answer in a way that now gave me a sinking dread in the pit of my stomach.

  “His dad died not long ago.” She said it solemnly, but without the hush of a very recent death. “And Ben’s granddad isn’t doing so well. The ranch is kind of a lot for his mom to handle on her own, even with the help of Mr. Sparks, so Ben came home to help out for a while.”

  “How long is a while?” I asked.

  She thought about it. “Well, it’s been since last year sometime. So …”

  Someone came into the restroom and went into a stall without looking at me twice. Jessica hit the blower again, and I retreated to my thoughts.

  The idea of Ben putting school on hold for his family gave my heart an odd and painful twist. As much as I complained about my own family, I’d do anything for them. I mean, I was here, dealing with Phin and her inventions for a month. But my whole world was wrapped up in going to college—I’d picked all my high school classes and extracurricular activities based on what would look good on an application. If I had to stay home and run the shop for Mom for an indefinite amount of time … ? I’d be twice as cranky as he was.

  The girl from the stall came out, washed her hands (thank God), and left, drying them on her jeans. When the door had swung closed behind her, Jessica turned to me in a decisive sort of way. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Uh, sure.” I hoped it wasn’t “Why do you give a fig about Ben McCulloch?” because I didn’t have an answer to that.

  “Are you going to catch the Mad Monk?”

  The knot in my chest, the one that had sent me fleeing the booth in the first place, the one that had slackened in my distraction, wrenched tight. So tight and so hard that I let out an involuntary wheeze. I grabbed the counter by the sink to steady myself, and deliberately rolled my eyes, hoping the sound came off as exasperation and not Holy-smokes-what-is-wrong-with-me?

  I stalled, because I couldn’t come up with an answer to my question or hers. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  She stated the obvious. “Because you’re a Goodnight. Everyone knows about Ms. Hyacinth.” She spoke so matter-of-factly, as if I were the weird one for not realizing this about my family. “How her potions have a little something … extra.”

  I stared at her. “You know about that?”

  “Oh, honey, everyone knows about that.” Her nose made a rueful little wrinkle, and she amended, “Not everyone believes, but I do. And …”

  The dryer had run down again. She cast a look at the door, then hit the button once more with her elbow. “My boyfriend works for the McCullochs. They’re good people, and don’t make the guys stay late if they don’t want. Vincent’s not scared … but I am.”

  I could see that. I could also see, from the level way she met my eye, that she trusted me, my family, to make it right. I wanted to tell her she was putting her faith in the wrong person. She should be talking to Phin—not that Phin exactly inspired confidence—or any of my aunts or cousins. Anyone but me.

  “What all has happened?” I asked, without quite meaning to. “Besides the guy who was hurt last night.”

  “There
have been these strange lights and noises in the pasture after dark. Rumbles and moans that echo around the hills. Sounds like chains rattling.” My face must have shown what I thought about that, because she rushed to tell me, “I know it sounds silly. But Vincent and I were, um, well, we were out parking one night, up on the lookout near the bluff? And I heard it myself. It’s eerie. Comes from everywhere and nowhere, and you kind of hear it in your bones as much as your ears.”

  What she described was exactly what I’d heard outside the night before, right before the bats had gone on their erratic and fatal flight. I pictured the ominous fall of the twin winged bodies, and could understand why she looked so frightened.

  “Could it have been some kind of digging or construction?” I asked, looking for a mundane explanation.

  “At midnight?” She hit the dryer again, to cover our voices. “The thing is, stuff only started happening since they began clearing the ground for the new bridge. The sounds and lights. Steve Sparks got thrown when his horse got spooked, and something keeps knocking down the fence in the west pasture. Then Joe Kelly reminded everyone of the time his dad and uncle saw the Mad Monk—it was when they were sinking a new well.”

  “Were they out on an ATV?” I asked, remembering my chat with Mac McCulloch. As I weighed truth against legend, it occurred to me that if you were joyriding where you shouldn’t have been and got in an accident, a Mad Monk might deflect the blame and make people forget you were misbehaving.

  “Yeah. Joe’s uncle Mike had a broken arm and fifteen stitches in his forehead. And folks have been saying that the last time it was this bad, back when they were working on the highway? A guy was killed.”

  “Killed?” She had my full attention. It was still a lurid sort of story, but her face was pale and earnest.

  She nodded. “They found him at the bottom of one of the ravines with his head smashed in. No one could figure out how, though the coroner supposed he must have hit a rock when he fell.”

  “Was it the same ravine as the guy who fell last night?”

  Another serious nod. “That’s what they say.”

  “Who says?” I asked, maybe too strongly. Because Aunt Hyacinth had been gone for almost a week, and I knew that gossip couldn’t be laid at her door.

  “Everyone,” Jessica answered, then paused, chewing her bottom lip. “So … are you going to look for the Mad Monk?”

  My quick denial caught in my throat. I wanted to help her, but I knew I couldn’t, and I needed to tell her that, to say something. But my throat had seized on the words like a miser’s fist on a nickel and wouldn’t let go.

  The harder I tried, the worse it got. Much worse than at the table—the knot in my chest seemed to wrap around my lungs, making it painful to breathe, and a clammy sweat broke over my bare skin.

  The horrible pregnant pause went on and on, until Jessica dropped her gaze, trying to hide her disappointment, to gloss over how she’d silently pleaded for my help and I had ripped her heart out and stomped on it. “This shirt is a loss,” she said. “Let me go see if we have any Hitchin’ Post ones in the office.”

  She dashed out, and I sagged against the counter, the tightness easing. I filled my lungs, pushing away the panic, only to have new fears rush in.

  What was wrong with me? This wasn’t my normal struggle to balance my worlds. I didn’t hunt ghosts. So why couldn’t I just say that?

  And why did I have such a hard time looking myself in the mirror? When I did, all I could see was Jessica asking for my help, and Mac McCulloch demanding it. Because I was the one who took care of things.

  Apparently, I wore it like a sign.

  13

  you could fit two of me inside the Hitchin’ Post T-shirt that Jessica brought me. I hoped to make a stealthy exit and call Phin from the car, but Ben was waiting in the dimly lit hall outside the bathrooms, leaning against the wall next to a pay phone with an age-yellowed Out of Order sign.

  When I came out, he straightened and peered at me critically. “You okay?”

  “I’m not going to melt, if that’s your worry.” And then I bit my tongue, because I remembered about his dad, and why he was so tightly wound, and that not five minutes ago I’d been thinking I should be nicer to him. “Sorry,” I said, the weight of the day dragging down my shoulders. “I just want to go home. Can you tell the others bye for me?”

  Ben studied me a moment longer, and I wondered if there was an actual reason he’d asked if I was okay. Like maybe whatever was going on in my head showed on my face. “I’ll walk you out,” he said, in a don’t-bother-arguing sort of way.

  Fortunately I didn’t really feel like arguing. As we made our way through the main room, he didn’t take my arm again, but when the crowd jostled us, his hand touched my back, not quite encircling me, but keeping me close so we didn’t get separated.

  There was something so … stalwart about Ben. I’d only known him two days and he’d managed to infuriate me most of that time. But there I was, protected by the curve of his arm, and grateful for it. And not just because it felt nice, though it did.

  We finally broke through the rabble and out into the warm summer night lit by a few paltry streetlamps and occasional headlights going by on the highway. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten, and now I was doubly glad for Ben’s company, even when he dropped his hand from my side.

  “My car is over here.” I nodded to Stella in the gravel lot.

  “It’s not hard to spot,” he said, and he had a point. The Mini Cooper did stand out from the cluster of Harleys and the rank and file of pickup trucks.

  “So, about Joe Kelly,” I began as we walked toward my car. Ben glanced over warily, but waited for me to go on, which I did. The episode with the deputy’s son was fairly near the top of my overflowing mental in-box, so the topic wasn’t as arbitrary as it sounded. “He’s actually still pissed about what your granddad did to his?”

  “Great-granddad,” Ben corrected. He gestured for me to precede him between two trucks, then said, “Grudges last a long time here. Doesn’t help that my dad bought up the Kelly land during the oil bust in the nineties.”

  I noted that the McCulloch manifest destiny didn’t sit too well with everyone. “Wasn’t that rubbing salt in the wound a little?”

  “Just business.” We’d reached Stella’s back bumper. Ben slouched with his hands in his pockets, watching me fish my keys out of my pocket. “And he paid better than market value. I think he felt bad about the granddad thing.”

  “I guess that explains why Deputy Kelly is a ray of sunshine whenever he pops over to your land. But not why the Goodnights put such a burr under his saddle.”

  “Oh, I can imagine.”

  The comment lacked bite. In fact, he seemed almost at ease. Ironic, when my brain was so overloaded that I couldn’t even seem to get my keys into the car door. I fumbled them and they hit the gravel with a thunk.

  Ben reached for them at the same time I did, and we narrowly avoided knocking our heads together. I gave up and leaned against Stella’s fender with a slightly hysterical laugh. “I’ll be glad when Run-into-Things Day is over.”

  He retrieved the keys from the ground—after making sure I wasn’t going for them again—and dropped them into my hand. “Any day that includes multiple dead bodies, you should get a pass on running into things.”

  He was part of the problem, too. When he was being nice, I couldn’t help wondering whether I owed him an apology over the “Don’t you have parents?” thing or a thank-you for extracting me from the Situation in the bar. Not to mention my inappropriate curiosity about his opinion of my addiction to Victoria’s Secret.

  Rather than voice any of those things, or do something sensible like get into my car, I said, “We were talking about the irony of Deputy Kelly being the scion of cattle thieves. And why Joe hates you.”

  He gazed at me a moment and I took the opportunity to study him in the dim yellow haze of the flyspecked street-lamp, without a hat or sunglasses. Hi
s nose was a little crooked, with a scar across the bridge, and his jaw a little too square. Maybe. “Is that what we were talking about?” he asked. “And not why the Goodnights are a saddle burr?”

  “You don’t think we’ve exhausted that subject?” I asked. “Besides, I have a reason for asking.” It seemed odd that the Kelly name kept popping up whenever the Mad Monk did. And even if I didn’t want to go hopping the fence in the middle of the night with Phin’s PKE meter, I was still curious about the ninety-nine other mysteries of McCulloch Ranch.

  After a moment Ben shrugged and said, “Joe Kelly and I graduated together. Started at the University of Texas together. Pledged rival fraternities. Destined to be antagonists, I guess.”

  “Maybe it’s genetic,” I said. “Your family, his family.” His mouth relaxed into something like a very small smile. “A good old-fashioned feud?”

  “Never trust a Kelly,” I echoed.

  Wham. The shutters slammed back down. “Where did you hear that?”

  Oh hell. Now what? Until I knew where I’d gone wrong, I could only answer with the truth. “From your grandfather. He rode over to the farmhouse this afternoon.”

  “Grandpa Mac?” Ben echoed. “Rode over to your house?”

  I scratched the side of my nose and chose my words carefully, because I knew better than to tell him why. “I guess he forgot about Aunt Hyacinth being gone.” He continued to stare at me, until I couldn’t stand it. “All right. What did I do now?”

  “He road his horse over to your house, and you just let him ride back?”

  I should have clued in right then that there was more going on in his head than what was coming out of his mouth. I had known him long enough that the flat tone and expressionless gaze should have been dead giveaways.

  “What was I supposed to do? He’s a grown-up! He knew the way to Goodnight Farm; I figured he, or the horse, would know the way back. And,” I went for the big, I’m-so-logical finish, “he said your grandmother was expecting him back, so I knew someone would be watching out for him on your end—”