Texas Gothic - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,66

she likes me.”

I gave my head an experimental turn. “If your skin hasn’t turned green and bumpy, then she likes you.”

“If she didn’t, she’d turn me into a frog?”

“Why mess around with transformation when an embarrassing rash will do?”

He exhaled on a chuckle, a half laugh that stirred the hair at my nape. I fought a shiver, despite the hot sun. The cramp was gone, but he continued to work on the kinks, thumbs on either side of my neck. “Have you looked up at all in the last hour?”

No. I hadn’t. I’d been working with a mindless intensity, my thoughts on the ghost, trying to make this dig count. Some clue to the mystery had to be here.

“I guess I lost track of time.”

“Thinking about your ghost?”

I spoke before I could chicken out. “About yours, actually. The Mad Monk.”

His hands fell away. “Seriously? That ridiculous story?”

“Yes, the story.” I emphasized the word and turned to face him. “Just hear me out—”

Then I stopped, because he looked like five miles of bad road. His eyes were shadowed, and he hadn’t shaved, and though it kind of worked on him, in a work-hard-play-hard sort of way, I didn’t think it was a styling choice. “How late were you out last night?”

He gave me a pointed once-over. “No offense, Amaryllis, but you look a little haggard yourself.”

“I had horrible nightmares and couldn’t sleep. You?”

A rueful grimace, and he admitted, “Got a call about cows on the road in the wee hours. We’ve got fences down all over the ranch. I was up all night repairing the ones by the highway. Steve’s got a crew out working on the rest.”

“You were? By yourself?”

He scowled and slipped into the exaggerated accent he used when he was mocking me about the ghost. “Well, I couldn’t rightly ask any of the men to do it, what with the Mad Monk bashing people on the head.” Then honesty made him relent. “I had some volunteers, though.”

I wondered if Jessica’s boyfriend was one of them. “Isn’t that sort of weird? So many fences going down at once?”

His eyes narrowed. “Odd, but not out of the question. This place is full of limestone caves, and sinkholes open up.… ”

“Did sinkholes open up?” I asked.

“Well,” he admitted, “not that we’ve found yet. But they could have.”

“All over the place?”

“Of course not all over the place,” he snapped.

“That’s what you said!”

“Maybe it wasn’t sinkholes,” he said, “but it sure as hell wasn’t the Mad Monk!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because why the blue blazes would a ghost tear down a bunch of fences?”

“I don’t know! But I need to find out.”

That stopped us both. Him because I’d come right out and said it, and me because … well, because I guess I’d found my next step. Just like local folklore helped archaeologists find actual buried sites, following the legend of the Mad Monk could be the thing that led me to the real ghost. But I needed to ask questions, piece together the internal logic of the story.

“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