Texas Gothic (40 page)

And I was selfishly ecstatic for me. We’d be at the same school in just a few weeks.

He scratched the bump on his nose and said, “I know you don’t like football, but I wondered if you might go to the first game of the season with me.”

I took his other hand and looked up into his steely blue eyes, very earnest, very serious. “Ben McCulloch. I’d face ghosts, claim jumpers, cave-ins, bat guano, mad cows, and tree-climbing goats for you. But I absolutely
will not
go to a football game.”

With a slow, rare, devastating smile, he said, “We can fight about it later, if you want. I just have to hang around until the university people leave.”

I pretended to consider it. “Oh, all right. But only if we can park overlooking the bridge.”

He kept hold of my hand as we left the graveside and joined the others. We still had too much unresolved to say we were a couple, but I didn’t mind thinking we’d have the chance to try. And after all, the human variable makes nothing certain.

In life, or in death.

In magic.

Or in love.

This is the first book I ever started. My dad was a font of Texas legends and history, and I plotted out a very different version with him during a family trip to San Antonio. The lessons here are (a) don’t ignore your dad’s crazy stories and (b) never throw anything away. I still have the first draft of the opening chapters of this book, written on notebook paper (um, during biology class). Nothing is the same except the bones by the river and the title:
Texas Gothic
.

I owe thanks to Dr. Jerry Melbye, who answered my forensic anthropology questions, and to Jayme Lynn Blaschke, who shared his fantastic pictures of a cold-case crime scene investigated by the students at Texas State University in San Marcos. My fellow YA author Marley Gibson might not have realized I was picking her brain for ghost investigation hints, but I was. Likewise, author Vickie Taylor, who trains Search and Rescue dogs, was informative and awesome. And Hope E. Ring, MD, did not bat an eyelash when I asked her things like: “Say I were to throw a seventy-five-year-old man down a ravine and break his hip.… ”

All mistakes made and liberties taken with the valuable information these people provided are entirely my own.

Thanks to Shawn Scarber for naming Ray’s garage.

Here are the things that are real: the San Sabá Mission, and how it was rediscovered; the lost Almagres mine (also
called the lost San Sabá mine, or the lost Bowie mine); the beauty of the Hill Country (visit in the spring, when the wildflowers bloom); Semyon Kirlian’s research in coronal aura photography; Spanish colonization and the Apache’s objection to it (and who could blame them); conflict between ranching neighbors over river easements; rum-running; and the University of Texas Longhorns. Oh, and the number of women in criminology and forensic sciences has multiplied in the last decade, and people really do credit TV shows and books that show strong females in what used to be male-dominated fields. (Personally, I want to be Abby from
NCIS
.)

Here are the things I tried to make as real as possible: the techniques of anthropology, the theories of paranormal investigation (with obvious liberties), and the feel of a small Texas town and its surrounding ranch community.

Here are the things that I totally made up: the spells, the Goodnights, and the logistics of fitting the body of a slender coed in the cargo space of a MINI Cooper.

As always, thanks to my agent, Lucienne Diver; my editor, Krista Marino (who really did make this a much better book than I could have ever written on college-ruled paper during biology class); and all the folks at Delacorte Press. Love to my family; my husband, Tim; and my support system of awesome: Candace Havens, Shannon Cannard, Cheryl A. Smyth, Jenny Martin, Jamie Harrington, A. Lee Martinez, Sally Hamilton, the IHOP irregulars, and the DFW Writers’ Workshop. Rock on!