Texas Gothic (35 page)

This time she stopped, panting, waiting expectantly for me and Ben to catch up. When we reached her, I said, “Where’s Mac, Lila?” and she turned in a circle, then lay down.

“What does that mean?” asked Ben.

“She’s supposed to lie down when she finds something.” I tried to remember exactly. “Maybe she can’t follow his trail any farther.”

Ben turned in a slow circle. “But he’s not here.”

I turned, too, scanning the terrain. I could see Mark and Phin headed our way in the Jeep, driving carefully over the rocky hills. The night carried the purr of the engine and the sound of Lila’s panting breaths.

Then Ben grabbed my arm, his hand hot on my skin.

“Do you hear that?”

When I froze, Lila did, too, and her panting quieted for a second. Just long enough for me to hear what Ben did. A soft voice singing.

The breeze carried it through the hills like a phantom, but as we listened, Ben still holding my arm, the song
strengthened, until I could hear words as well as a tune, even over Lila’s panting.

“When I walked out on the streets of Laredo …”

“Which way?” I asked Ben, who knew the terrain.

“Here.” He started along the ridge, and I realized why Lila had stopped where she did. The drop-off was terrifyingly steep.

Ben doubled back on a cutback that took him lower, and as he made the turn, he stopped to get his bearings and sang out,
“As I walked out in Laredo one day.”

The answer came right away.
“I spied a young cowboy all dressed in white linen …”

They finished the stanza together, with Ben picking his way down the steep drop, holding on to the branches of trees as he went.

“All wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.”

Mac lay halfway down the slope, his fall stopped by a dwarf cedar. I could see his outline in the moonlight. He tried to get up as his grandson approached, but Ben ordered him to stay where he was.

“Amy!” he shouted up at me. “Get on the phone and call nine-one-one. Have them connect you with the sheriff. I think Mark and I can get Grandpa up and into the Jeep. Have the ambulance come to gate thirty-two.”

I barely had any bars of service, and my fingers shook as I dialed. We’d found Mac, but in what kind of shape? I was surprised how much relief could hurt when it cycled right back into worry.

o
nce I made it down the hill, I handed Ben my flashlight and knelt by Mac’s head. “Stay still, Mr. McCulloch. Let me check you over.”

He ignored me, of course. “I saw him, Ben,” Mac said, trying again to rise. Ben, after a moment of still surprise, gently but firmly pushed his grandfather back down.

“Hold still, Grandpa. We called for an ambulance.”

There was a soft hitch in his voice that made my heart hurt. Ben left his hands resting on Mac’s shoulders, reassuring both of them, I think.

A wet darkness soaked Mac’s gray hair, and I ran my
hands lightly over his skull, feeling for lumps. My fingers came away smeared with blood, but it seemed to be tacky and clotted, and there was a good-sized goose egg on the back of his head. He was certainly showing no lethargy as he batted my hands away.

“I don’t need a damn ambulance. I just fell down the gol-durned hill and couldn’t get up. So I sat here to wait for someone to come the hell and find me.”

“You did the right thing,” said Ben.

“Were you singing so Ben could find you?” I asked, meaning to distract him as I checked for other injuries. No problem moving his arms, for sure. But his legs …

“I was singing,” snapped Granddad Mac, “because my leg hurts like a sonovabitch and it was sing or cry like a gol-durned girl.”

He was not saying “gol-durned.” And when I ran my hands over his lower extremities and he hollered “mother effer,” that wasn’t what he really said, either. Ben looked mortified at his grandfather’s language. Not to mention the name he called me as I confirmed his hip was broken.

It didn’t help that Mark and Phin arrived just then, half sliding down the hill. “Did you find him?” Phin asked. “Is he okay?”

I ignored them all. I ignored the language, and my own tender sympathy for Ben and Mac both. I focused only on the problem I could do something about.

“It’s not your leg, Mr. McCulloch,” I said, all business, and using his full name since he didn’t seem to recognize me. “It’s your hip.”

“Baloney,” he said through his teeth, lying back—finally—with
a horrible grimace. “Only old women break their hips.”

“And old men who fall down cliffs.” It wasn’t much of a cliff, but it was enough. “Phin,” I said, “hand me the ice pack from the first-aid kit.”

She dropped the bag by Mac and found the instant cold pack, crushing and kneading it before handing it to me.

Ben made another call while we worked. “We found him,” he said. One of the knots of anxiety in my chest came a little loose at that “we.” I heard the tiny sound of distant cheers over the phone. But Ben’s expression didn’t change as he held my gaze with his unreadable one. And a new knot drew tight around my heart.

“We already called for an ambulance. Come in at the gate at mile marker thirty-two. Mark will meet you out there in his Jeep.” He looked at Mark, who nodded his cooperation. The brusqueness of Ben’s tone made me think he was talking to the sheriff or deputy, but he softened a fraction when he said, “Tell my mom …” He paused uncertainly, then drew up his resolve and finished, “Tell her it’s going to be fine.”

He said it like he was going to
make
it fine, by his own force of will if necessary, and I shivered, for no reason I could name.

Granddad Mac was as restless as he could be with a broken hip. He kept moving, cursing at the pain. Whenever I came near his head with the ice pack, he shoved it away.

“Come on, Mr. McCulloch. This is going to make you feel better.”

“Nothing but a horse tranquilizer is going to make me feel better, missy!”

Phin took the cold pack from me and shifted to where he could see her in the spill of the flashlight. He stopped his restless thrashing. “I remember you. You’re the Goodnight witch.”

“That’s right,” she said, and held the cold pack up where he could see it. “And this is a magic ice pack. I put a potion inside that will ease your pain and make you feel calm and relaxed.”

“Now wait just a minute,” said Ben. I opened my mouth to shush him, but he ran over me. “If you’re seriously planning to use some kind of sedative on my head-injured grandfather …”

“It’s not—” I started, because I knew that was a standard cold pack, nothing at work but natural chemistry. But Phin shot me a look that froze my tongue, then leveled a stare at Ben.

“You’re right,” she said. “This is
powerful
stuff. But I think we should let Grandpa Mac decide if he wants it.”

“Hell yes! Bring it on.” Mac practically snatched it from her.

“Grandpa …,” said Ben. “You’re not exactly—”

“What?” Mac demanded, holding the ice pack to his head. “I’m not what? Sane?”

“That’s not what I was going to say.” But from the clench of his jaw, that had been what he meant.

“Deep breaths, Grandpa Mac.” Phin held his hand, stroking his arm. “The potion won’t work if you get yourself in a lather.”

Whatever Phin did, the fight seemed to slip from Mac’s body on the sigh of his exhale. He retained enough to glare at Ben. “Why do these Goodnight girls treat me more sane than my family does? They actually ask me about things. No one else ever consults me anymore.”

“But what were you
doing
out here, Granddad?” asked Ben. “What were you thinking?”

I
was only thinking about calming the waters until the ambulance got there. “What happened, Mr. McCulloch? Did you hit your head when you fell down the ravine?”

“I hit my head when that damned ghost rose up from the ground and scared the bejeezus out of me!”

“You saw him?” I asked, startled. “What did he look like?”

“Great hulking shadow, came out of the dark. Hit me on the head with his cross. You know, the long-handled ones.” He pantomimed something like a cross that leads the processional line in a church. I’m sure it had a technical name, but I didn’t know it. Mac voiced my own thoughts when he said, “Not very monklike of him, was it?”

“No.” It didn’t sound much like my ghost, either, which had always had a sort of light associated with him. I would describe the shape as tall and lean, not hulking. And he’d never had any kind of staff, crook, or cross when I’d seen him.

I picked up the flashlight and shooed Phin out of the way. “I’m going to look at your head for a second,” I told him. Phin did a lot of eye rolling toward the ice pack. I took a guess at her meaning and said, in the same hypnotic voice
she’d used, “Don’t worry. The magic ice pack is already working. You won’t feel anything.”

“Oh for crying out loud,” Ben burst out. But Mark, who’d been silently standing by, surprised me by shushing him. “It’s Dumbo and the lucky flying feather, dude. Let them do their thing.”

Ben glared at him, too. But he didn’t say anything else, and neither did Mac as I lifted the corner of the ice pack to get a look at the knot on his head.

The lump was good sized, but it went out, which was good, not in, which would be very bad. The blood that caked his white hair came from a cut, and as I examined it more closely, I saw that a bit of what I had thought was dried blood was actually a sliver of something else. “Phin, hand me the tweezers from the kit, will you?”

“What are you doing now?” asked Ben. Then to his granddad, “Are you okay?”

“Oh fine,” said Granddad Mac, sounding a little drunk. “This stuff is great. Too bad everyone doesn’t know about magic, or we could put this stuff in a bottle.”

“Good thing,” said Ben, through not-quite-clenched teeth.

I ignored that as I concentrated on pulling a sliver of old wood from the cut in Mac’s scalp. I was willing to bet real money that it hadn’t been a ghost that knocked Granddad Mac down the hill.

The sky was beginning to lighten by the time the EMTs whisked Grandpa Mac off to the hospital. It seemed
everyone had been there: Steve Sparks, Mrs. McCulloch, and Deputy Kelly, and the search party, which included his nephew Joe, along with Dumb and Dumber. The last two were on ATVs, which seemed to be asking for trouble, even if the head-bashing Mad Monk was a complete myth.

Then most of them left again: Mark offered Mrs. McCulloch a ride to the hospital with him and Phin, and Steve Sparks went back to the ranch to keep an eye on things, which left Ben stuck with me and Lila, who couldn’t go to the hospital.

We stood a little ways from where the remaining searchers were debriefing. “I’ll get someone to take us back to Goodnight Farm,” I offered, but hoped he would say no, that he wanted me to come with him.

Which goes to show that you shouldn’t ask questions, even unspoken ones, that you don’t want the answer to.

“That would probably be best,” said Ben, without meeting my eye.

In the grand scheme of things, getting dumped just hours after hooking up didn’t rate a blip on the world radar. But all the same, it hurt like hell.

Later, I’d give in to it. Now, I reassured him, “Granddad Mac will be okay.”

He raised his brows with a sardonic edge, more cutting than I’d seen in a while. “Did you see that in your crystal ball?”

I flinched at the hit. He hadn’t even given me an
en garde
. “Seriously?” I asked. “You want to do this now?”

“I don’t know,” he parried. “Is there
ever
a good time to
ask what the hell were you thinking doing magic on my grandfather?”

“I—” I wanted to explain that it hadn’t been magic so much as psychology and the Phin Effect turned up to the maximum. But the door I’d thrown open to Ben had been slammed in my face, and the instinct to now bar it was too strong for me to ignore.

He leaned close, keeping his voice low, but tight with anger. “I specifically told you not to talk to my family about the ghost. About any of that mess. Even for a trespassing, busybody ghostbuster, that takes a lot of balls.”

I could
hear
the fuse sizzle in my head, but I was helpless to stop the inevitable explosion of verbal shrapnel. “Well, maybe if you weren’t such a secretive, neurotic control freak, you could have told me what I needed to know.”

“
Want
to know.”

“
Need
. Ben, you
saw
what happened tonight at the dig.” It seemed so long ago, so much had happened since Daisy had channeled the ghost’s warning.

He scrubbed his hands over his face, like he was trying to rub off the fatigue and emotion of those intervening hours. “I don’t know what I saw anymore.”

I should have guessed that without Phin there, his acceptance would unravel. I could see the thread, but I couldn’t catch it, and I didn’t have the power to knit it back together, except with my words.

“You saw what you saw, Ben McCulloch. If you can’t believe me, why can’t you at least trust me?”

“Because all I can
see
is my grandfather lying in a ravine
telling me that a flipping ghost knocked him down there.” He swept a hand toward the drop-off, but encompassed the entire breadth of our relationship. “You talked to Granddad Mac about the ghost, and then he went wandering off to find it!”

I didn’t need help feeling guilty for that. “Do you really think he hadn’t heard the rumors from anyone else? His memory is shot, not his ears.”

“So now you’re telling me how to handle my own family?”

“No!” The protest burst out of me, and I wanted to burst, too, the pressure was so strong in my chest. Beside me, Lila whined, and I lowered my voice because I knew people would be straining to hear. “How did you even get that? Could we please stick to my
actual
offenses? Which, as far as I can tell, are simply, A, existing and, B, treading on your hallowed domain.”

“It’s about you existing in complete
chaos
and bringing that here. When I’m around you,” he said, sounding as miserable and frustrated as he did angry, “I get caught up in you and your crazy world. I can’t handle that. I just want to go back to a time when I didn’t know that people could see ghosts or find people with magic or make me forget my responsibilities in the cab of my pickup truck.”