Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore

eat.”
    Dr. Douglas tutted. “We try and give the remains some dignity. It was once a person, after all.”
    I gazed at the vertebrae, tumbled like a stack of blocks,and wondered if there was any remnant of human energy clinging to this spot, to these remains. Maybe it was some Jungian resonance, the aversion of the collective consciousness to reminders of death, that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Maybe it was something else.
    I had been trying to avoid thinking about the apparition in my room, but the more I tried, the more the knot of dread, the one that hadn’t quite untied itself since last night, kinked and twisted in my chest. “Do you have any idea who it might be, or how he died?” I asked.
    “Unless there’s damage to the bones,” answered Dr. Douglas, “it’s impossible to tell the cause of death. And after so long in the ground, it’s very difficult to tell at what point the damage occurred.”
    “The poor guy had a bulldozer driven over him,” said Mark.
    Dr. Douglas shook her head in sad disapproval. “Such a shame.”
    Ben gave a suffering sigh, as if he’d heard this before. “It isn’t as if we knew he was there.”
    “That’s true,” said the professor, though she still sounded like a disappointed parent. “It couldn’t be helped, I suppose.”
    Mark, better at staying on the subject, told me, “Back at school we’ll analyze those shreds of cloth we found, find out what kind of fabric it was. That might give us some clues.”
    “Can you tell from the skull if he was Anglo or Hispanic or Native American?” asked Phin, and I wondered what
she
was thinking.
    “Yes,” said Dr. Douglas. “Though we do those measurements back in the lab or the morgue.”
    Phin sighed pointedly at the now familiar response. Dr. Douglas’s eyes narrowed, like Phin was topping her list of Students to Flunk If I Get the Chance. I had to admit, some things did look a little more exciting, or at least more timely, on TV.
    The professor went on to say, as if offering a huge favor, “I did measure the femur that Mark found, and it indicated this man was rather small of stature. Five foot two or so. Which points to an older origin. Modern nutrition has raised the average height substantially in the last centuries.”
    The bones looked so lonely there in the hole. I wondered if, after they arranged all the pieces in the cold, sterile lab, that would be any better a resting place than the warm Texas earth. Who had this been? An immigrant, or a settler? A Native American? Centuries, plural, was a big time frame.
    A familiar noise infiltrated my deep thoughts, bringing me back to the twenty-first century. I realized Bear was barking. And so was Sadie, raising a raucous canine alert.
    “What on earth … ?” began Dr. Douglas.
    “Sorry,” I said, already moving around the excavated pit, intent on settling them down. But I bumped into Ben, then careened off of Mark. We pinballed like the Three Stooges,
all
intent on getting to the dogs. I froze in horror as we sorted ourselves out and I saw why.
    Lila wasn’t barking with the others. She was too busy making her own canine excavation, dirt flying around her as she dug, while Bear and Sadie encouraged her.
    Oh hell
.
    I untangled myself from Ben and Mark and started running, too fast to sort out the sensations in my gut—anger at the dogs, worry they’d get us kicked off the property, and something else. Some tug at my vitals that I couldn’t explain, except it spurred me on so that I had no trouble keeping up with the guys.
    “Lila, stop!” I shouted, to no visible effect. “Leave it!” I tried again, in a less panicked, more alpha-dog voice. This time she obeyed, stepping back and sitting primly at the end of the leash, still tied to the mesquite tree. She grinned at us as we reached her, muzzle and paws covered with dirt, proud of her accomplishment.
    The four of us—Ben, Mark, me, and the dog—stared at the hole while the others hurried up