Texas Gothic (19 page)

Good question. A quick search revealed I’d stuck it in my pocket at some point. I handed it over, and she immediately noticed the scratches on the case.

“You dropped it,” she accused.

“See if it still works,” said Jennie eagerly.

Dwayne grinned at me. “See if the ghost really said ‘boo.’ ”

Oh, he was a laugh riot. As if I hadn’t had enough disbelief and teasing when I’d confessed that.

Phin fast-forwarded the sound file all the way to the clatter of the recorder hitting the ground, when it went dead for a bit. When it came back on, for a few seconds you could hear my breathing, with labored rasps. Then finally, my voice, quaking with cold, “Wh-wh-what d-d-do you want?”

Then silence. No one spoke in the room, either. The terror in my voice was clear, even through the chattering, full of visceral fear that twisted my vitals in memory.

The dogs, who’d been sleeping around the room, started barking. I was relieved to have something to do, to calm my nerves as I calmed theirs.

Phin ran the recording back to listen again. But there was nothing after my question but more harsh breathing, until it stopped entirely.

Finally Jennie spoke. “I guess it didn’t get any voice.”

“EVPs aren’t always audible until you amplify and filter the recording.” Phin plugged the recorder into her computer and loaded the file.

“What’s an EVP, anyway?” asked Dwayne while we waited. “All these initials are hard to follow.”

“An electronic voice phenomenon,” said Phin, in a lecturing tone, “or EVP, is when a voice can be heard on an audio playback that wasn’t audible during the live event.”

Jennie giggled. “ ‘Live.’ Heh. That’s funny.”

It was so silly, even I laughed. Phin gave her an I-don’t-get-it frown, and when Jennie explained, “Because it’s ghosts,” she raised an eyebrow, Mr. Spock style which made Jennie—and me—laugh harder.

I felt punch-drunk. It was almost two in the morning, and the night had passed “surreal” a long time ago. I’d talked to Mark about my family. I was laughing at ghost jokes. I’d fallen so far off the fence, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get back up.

Jennie and I composed ourselves as Phin turned the computer so we could see the sound-mixing program. She turned up the volume as a vertical bar moved across the time line, leaving spikes where my ragged breath lurched through the white noise of the maxed-out speakers.

And then a new sound stabbed through the silence, leaving a buzz of white on the screen. The others jerked when they heard it, then got intently still.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Dwayne. “It
did
say ‘boo.’ ” On the computer playback it was clear.

Mark frowned in concentration. “Play it again, Phin.” His shoulders were stiff, his elbows braced on his knees as he leaned forward. His tone took the levity out of the air.

Phin obliged. I held my breath as the five-second clip played again, and again the ghostly word hissed through the silence. But this time I heard what Mark had before.

“There’s more,” I said, the fingers of unease crawling up my spine. “After the ‘boo.’ ”

Phin pointed to the sound wave on the screen. The “B” made a big spike followed by two trailing points. “Three syllables. They fall off, but they’re distinct.”

“Shhh,” said Mark. He slid off the sofa to sit next to Phin, shoulder to shoulder by the laptop speaker. “Play it again.”

Three syllables, emerging from nothing, an auditory specter taking shape in the air between us.

“Búscame.”
Mark spoke the word aloud, bringing it out of Neverland into the room with us. “It’s Spanish.”

“Búscame,”
I repeated. I’d taken Spanish in school, and even remembered some of it. “As in
buscar
?”

My brain supplied the word, but meaning lagged behind, and implication trailed even further.

“ ‘Look for me.’ ” Mark’s warm and human voice hung over the electronic whisper like a curtain over smoke. “It’s saying ‘Look for me.’ ”

a
t least I knew what it wanted. I hadn’t decided if that improved things, though.

Despite the hour, Jennie and Dwayne wanted to go over every millisecond of the recording, until Mark pointed out that Emery would put out an APB on them, just for spite, if they didn’t get to the hotel soon.

That got the excited pair headed for the door, but Mark hung back and helped Phin gather her laptop and equipment. “We’ll see you two tomorrow, right?”

“Definitely,” she said. Her enthusiasm made Mark smile,
even when she explained, “I have another experiment I want to try.”

“Dr. Douglas is okay with that?” I asked. “I mean, our coming back to the dig, not Phin’s experiments.”

“I told her you two are good luck.” He grinned at me. “And she liked the way you took direction with that skull today. Er, yesterday,” he amended, glancing at his watch.

He turned to say goodbye to Phin, but she’d already disappeared into her workroom. With a rueful smile, he told me instead, “See you tomorrow,
chica
. Don’t forget to lock up.”

I followed him, said goodbye to Jennie and Dwayne, too, then closed the door and leaned against it. We never locked up Goodnight Farm. I wasn’t going to start for a ghost. Not that it would do any good if the shored-up security system failed.

As I headed for the workroom to look for Phin, I ran my hand over the back of Uncle Burt’s rocker. I didn’t pretend to understand how much of the real Uncle Burt remained, whether it was a shadow of his soul or just a wisp of residual personality, but I’d always tried to stay on good terms with whatever it was. I believed souls had someplace better to be, but who knows? If I loved someone like Burt loved Aunt Hyacinth, maybe I’d hang around, too.

But Uncle Burt fit here like a puzzle piece. The
other
did not. There was nothing peaceful or contented about whatever shred of a man had stood gasping and grasping in front of me. What remained of him was wretched desperation.

Look for me
.

The cold in my chest expanded. I took a deep breath—a whiff of denim and violets pushed it back.

The ghost could have been talking to anyone. His image might play like a recording when someone stumbled over that spot at any particular time. So why did it feel like he had been talking to, waiting for, me?

“You’re going to have to do it, you know.”

I jumped, shaking myself back to the present. “Jeez, Phin! That was freaky even for you.” She stood in the door of her workroom, and I glared at her for scaring me, and speaking directly to my thoughts. “You haven’t suddenly added mind reading to your talents, have you?”

“Pfft.
My
talents are actually useful and reliable. Are you going to get with the program?”

Casting a longing look toward the stairs and my bedroom at the top of them, I asked, “Does the program involve going to bed and thinking about it in the morning?”

She ignored the question. “This is the second time the ghost has singled you out.”

I sighed. “Thanks for that, Phin. It will really help me get to sleep.”

“Why are you being so obtuse?” She folded her arms when I didn’t answer. “I know the implication has occurred to you. You’re not normally an idiot.”

“No,” I said, “but I’m very tired, so why don’t you explain it to me?”

“We already talked about this,” she said with a huff. “Hauntings are usually very localized. Cold spots, apparitions, orbs, knocks and noises … they all tend to happen in
the same place, often around the same time under the same conditions.”

“I remember all that,” I said, because I wanted her to get to the point. A point I dreaded, because she was right. Since the ghost had appeared in my room, I hadn’t faced the full meaning. I’d sat on the knowledge, beaten it down, drowned it out by arguing with cranky cowboys and tinkering with Phin’s gadgets. I’d smiled right at Mark and told him not to worry. But I knew what she was about to say. “So just say it.”

“The ranch may be haunted, Amy. But it’s obvious that you are, too.”

a
t way-too-early o’clock, I stumbled down the stairs, trying to figure out why the dogs weren’t barking at the racket from the front of the house. I finally realized the thumping came from the door and threw it open to find my cousin Daisy on the porch, nearly hidden by the big cardboard box in her arms.

“You look awful,” she said, hardly glancing at me as she breezed in. With my rumpled pajamas and bleary eyes, I didn’t exactly make her a liar. “Clearly I’ve arrived just in time.”

I closed the door and followed her into the living room,
where she set the box on the coffee table. Daisy was a lot to take, even on a good day. She was a high school senior, but she’d skipped a grade, so she wasn’t quite seventeen yet. With her
very
red hair, black tee, short plaid skirt, and platform Mary Jane shoes with knee socks, not to mention all the spikes, she looked like the Goth love child of a Catholic schoolgirl and Lucille Ball.

“I didn’t sleep at all last night,” I said. “Also, Phin’s furious with me.”

“Are you sure you didn’t have a sleepless night
because
Phin is furious with you?”

I considered the question. Was Phin capable of doing some hoodoo to make me toss and turn like the princess and the pea all night, my brain spinning like a corrupted hard drive?

Absolutely.
Would
she?

When I did doze, the luminous specter waited, then turned into La Llorona, dragging me underwater, where I froze and couldn’t breathe, until I jolted awake, huddled in the middle of my bed, bones aching, teeth chattering.

If not for the physical misery, I might not put it past her. But Phin was never petty.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, following Daisy again, this time into the kitchen.

“Delivery service,” she said, rooting around in the refrigerator. “Your mom said you needed those books. Also, you should call her, because she’s getting some intermittent heebs and jeebs, and it’s rocking the vibe in the store. That’s
my
message, because I’m working there this summer and I need the commission.”

She emerged with a Dr Pepper and a handful of baby carrots. “Why’s Phin mad at you?”

“Because I wouldn’t let her do experiments on me last night.”

“Hmm.” Daisy contemplated my face as she cracked the top on the bottle of DP. “That’s either rather wise or extremely foolish.”

“Why?” I asked, because I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t driven an hour and a half out here, leaving before the sun was up, just to bring me books and tell me to call my mother.

Phin picked that moment to appear from the workroom. She already looked thunderous, but at the sight of Daisy, she clouded even darker. “Great. That’s all we need. A psychic.”

“Hey, Phin. How are things in the la
bor
atory?” She said it like Boris Karloff, with an emphasis on the
bore
.

“Have you been up all night?” I asked my sister.

“Of course not.” She went to the cabinet and got down a pottery mug with a black cat on it, then put the kettle on to boil. “I got my usual four hours.”

Daisy munched on a carrot. “Don’t people who don’t get enough sleep eventually snap? I’d lock up the axes and knives if I were you, Amy.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll snap first,” I said dryly. In fact, I was pretty sure what would make it happen, too.

“So, why does Phinster want to do experiments on you?” Daisy asked.

Phin folded her arms and raised her brows. “You mean you don’t know already? What kind of clairvoyant are you?”

“One who works best with dead people,” said Daisy, popping another carrot into her mouth.

Another sardonic look from Phin. “Which is, I assume, why you’re here. Because of Amy’s ghost.”

I didn’t need a road map to see where this was going, so I took a shortcut. “How can I be haunted?” This was the argument we’d had the night before. “The ghost was around before I got here. Hell, the ghost was here before I was even
born.
”

“If you don’t believe me,” Phin said, “ask Daisy. You don’t really think she drove all the way out here on whatever flimsy excuse she gave, do you?”

I looked up at Daisy. She wrinkled her nose in apology. “Sorry, Am. It wasn’t just your mom with the heebie-jeebies. And now that I’m here, I’m definitely getting a vibe. The dead are sort of my thing, so as much as I hate to say it, Phin is right.”

Phin snorted but didn’t gloat. I looked from one implacable face to the other and felt the sand shift under my arguments. Which, to be honest, weren’t built on certainty so much as hope.

“I think it’s extremely unfair of the two of you to gang up on me this way.”

Daisy took my shoulders and bent to look me in the eye. “We’re doing it because we love you, Amaryllis. The first step to solving your problem is admitting you have a problem.”

“Very funny.”

She grinned and dropped her hands. But I noticed she shook them at her side, like shaking the feeling back into
cold fingers. A small movement, tactfully hidden, but in its way, the most convincing argument of all.

“What about the people who say they’ve seen the Mad Monk?” I said. “That would mean it’s not just me who’s haunted.”

“Unless they haven’t really,” said Phin. “You said it yourself, the McCulloch Ranch ghost might be legend based on another ghost, shored up by accidents and imagination.” She paused. “Actually, you didn’t say that last bit, but you know it’s true.”

“Or,” said Daisy, “it’s appeared to other people before. Or it’s a separate entity to worry about. The important thing is, you have to deal with the one attached to you, whether it’s the Mad Monk of legend or something else.”

I went to the kitchen table and sat down before my knees could give out. “You’re saying that this thing is tied to me and … what? It’s not going to go away?
Ever
?”

They exchanged looks of rare agreement. It figured they would finally see eye to eye when it meant that I was screwed.

“So, what do I do?”

“Well,” said Phin, “you told me last night that all these people—Mac McCulloch and the girl at the bar—want you to find out about the Mad Monk.
So …
maybe you should listen.”