Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement-Moore Page A

the hill.
    “It’s probably a rabbit,” said Mark, but his tone implied he hoped for something more grisly.
    It’s not a rabbit
.
    It wasn’t just the sprint making my heart pound. Adrenaline flagged, leaving something different, a kind of ringing excitement vibrating through me. I’d never been sensitive, let alone psychic, but just then I had a
hunch
like you would not believe.
    Dropping to my knees, I examined the hole that Lila had made, maybe a foot deep in the crumbly gray-black earth. There was something smooth at the bottom. I could see a tantalizing silver-dollar-sized bit of it.
    I thrust my fingers into the dirt and pulled out two handfuls of soil, dropping them to the side. Quickly I widened theconical hole, uncovering a curve of bone that became a dome, then became something unmistakable.
    “Here.” Mark handed me a brush like I’d seen Caitlin using on the bones in the excavation by the bulldozer. “Use this.”
    “Thanks.” I took it and shifted to lie on my stomach. Mark took a mirror position, pulling the dirt away when it kept falling back into the hole, as if the earth didn’t want to give up what we’d found.
    Through a kind of buzzing drone, I was aware of the others around us. I could hear the dogs whining and see Phin’s shoes next to several pairs I didn’t recognize. They stayed back—the hole was only big enough for four hands.
    A sweep of the brush revealed the forehead—the frontal bone, I amended with a tiny shiver, realizing what I was seeing. AP biology had come in handy sooner than I’d thought.
    “Careful, now.” Dr. Douglas’s voice was patient and professorial, but there was an undercurrent of anticipation that told me—if I hadn’t already guessed from the dome shape and slightly porous texture—that there was something
important
under my fingers. “Don’t try and uncover the whole thing. Without the support of the surrounding earth, it may come apart.”
    I nodded, somehow unwilling to speak and break the spell of discovery. As she had instructed, I left the dirt supporting the back of the skull—the occipital bone—and concentrated on the front. The nasal bone, the brow ridges, the cheekbones and maxilla. The things that had made it a face. Even if I hadn’t remembered the names of the bones, theirshapes were iconic, the stuff of nightmare and mortality, and in the heat of the day, I felt a graveyard chill.
    Gently I smoothed the dirt from the eye sockets with my thumbs and wondered what was the last thing this person had seen. The relentless drowning wave of a flood? The snake that had bit him? Did he stare his
own
mortality in the face before he died?
    Another shiver gripped me, and I pressed my hands against the cold dirt to hide their trembling. There was no ignoring the similarity between the empty eyes of the skull and the hollow, dark gaze of my midnight visitor, the apparition I could still see when I blinked, like the afterimage of a flame.

9
    i couldn’t seem to get completely warm, which on a Texas afternoon in July was saying something.
    Once I’d uncovered a good bit of the skull, Dr. Douglas had instructed us all to stand back while she called the sheriff. Apparently they liked you to do that when you found human remains, even old ones. As they waited for the authorities, Mark and the others swarmed over the ground like excited ants, measuring distances from the original find to the new one, diagramming, making notes.
    The most useful thing I could do, according to Dr. Douglas, was keep out of the way. But I couldn’t leave,either, in case the authorities wanted to talk to me. I was sure Deputy Kelly would be just as thrilled to see me as I was to see him again so soon.
    So I sat at the top of the rise in the shade of a live oak tree, feeling as unnecessary as a pair of swim fins on a catfish. The dogs sprawled sleeping, and Phin was writing a to-do list on her arm—a habit that even our ultra-accepting mother hated. As I watched the others