Texas Gothic - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,18

take territory pretty seriously.”

I knew what she meant. You wouldn’t think barbed wire would slow down something without a body, but fences that merely marked a border for a human could be literal boundaries for a spirit. Like Aunt Hyacinth’s security system was supposed to be.

Phin voiced the conclusion before I could. “If it is the ghost from the neighbor’s place, it wouldn’t just wander over here.”

Not without a reason. That was what she was getting at, the possibility I didn’t want to face. Not without a fight.

“Maybe the McCulloch ghost is just a local legend,” I said. “You told me the reports were mostly secondhand. Maybe that ghost story is based on one already on the Goodnight side of the fence.”

“The geography still doesn’t hold up.” Phin might have been rattled earlier, but she sounded calm and logical now. “And even if that’s true, it still means that the ghost came through all the wards around Aunt Hyacinth’s house.”

“Exactly!” I’d thought I wanted unflappable Phin back, but I didn’t. I wanted someone as freaked out as I was, so she would know that I didn’t want logic right now. I wanted reassurance. “It came in the house.”

“I realize that’s a little unnerving—” she said.

“Unnerving?” I swept an angry arm at the carnage around us. “Look at my room, Phin! There was a supernatural event in my bedroom. A spectral apparition nearly froze me to death, and a ghostly wind touched all my stuff.”

She lifted her brows in disapproval, whether at my tone or my priorities. “I don’t see how arguing over whether it crossed one fence or two is going to help. Something came into Goodnight Farm, past our wards, and the only way we’re going to figure this out is by applying reason and logic, not taking refuge in denial.”

“Phin, the only thing more unnerving than realizing there’s something that can get past Aunt Hyacinth’s defenses is wondering why it would.”

“Why do ghosts haunt at all?” she said. “Because they want something.”

The words hung in the air like an unfinished musical chord. There was the question I didn’t want to ask: What did it want?

A knock downstairs shattered the moment. Someone was at the front door.

The dogs exploded into barking and took off in a thunder of paws and scrabble of claws, sounding like a pack of hellhounds on the stairs.

“Oh my God,” I blurted, grabbing onto Phin as we faced the open bedroom door. “It’s the axe murderer.”

“I doubt he would knock,” she said, but she was whispering, too, and didn’t move away from me.

Another rap, imperative and authoritative enough to be heard over the dogs. That didn’t seem like a nefarious thing.

“Maybe we should look out the window,” Phin suggested.

Feeling stupid that she’d thought of it first, I hurried across the hall to Aunt Hyacinth’s room. Even through the sheer curtains, I could see the front of the house and yard were lit like a shopping mall parking lot on the twenty-third of December. A normal person would have assumed the floodlights were motion activated, but Aunt Hy hadn’t bothered with sensors when she had Uncle Burt to turn on the lights.

Which made it easy to see the police car parked next to Stella and Aunt Hyacinth’s Trooper. The shield on the door said “Sheriff,” and every instinct inside me screamed “Trouble.”

6

there was never a good reason for the police to be at the door at one in the morning. My imagination was supplying all sorts of horrible scenarios, making me wonder if something had happened to Mom. But surely one of the aunts would have called if that were the case. So it had to be some other sort of bad, and there was no lack of possibilities there, either.

“Maybe it’s another body,” said Phin as we hurried downstairs to the accompaniment of the dogs’ continued barking.

I knew she was not as macabre as her enthusiasm would imply. I was sure she meant “another long-dead skull for the anthropologists to dig up” and not “somebody’s husband or kid.”

What I couldn’t explain was why the memory of the two dead bats weighted my feet as I quieted the dogs and answered the front door.

The officer on the porch reminded me of a wolverine. Not as in X-Men, but as in Animal Planet—very compact, kind of squat and solid, with a mean look about the face.

I opened the door a crack, with Phin right behind me, and he held out his badge just long enough for me