Rosemary Clement-Moore - Texas Gothic

ALSO BY ROSEMARY CLEMENT-MOORE

The Splendor Falls

T HE M AGGIE Q UINN:

G IRL VS. E VIL SERIES

Prom Dates from Hell

Hell Week

Highway to Hell

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 2011 by Rosemary Clement-Moore

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clement-Moore, Rosemary.
Texas gothic / Rosemary Clement-Moore. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Seventeen-year-old Amy Goodnight has long been the one who makes her family of witches seem somewhat normal to others, but while spending a summer with her sister caring for their aunts farm, Amy becomes the center of weirdness when she becomes tied to a powerful ghost.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89810-5
[1. GhostsFiction. 2. WitchcraftFiction.
3. Farm lifeTexasFiction. 4. SistersFiction. 5. TexasFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C59117Tex 2011

[Fic]dc22

2010047923

Random House Childrens Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

This book would not have been possible without
Starbucks and St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes.
(Me, not this book.)

t he goat was in the tree again.

I hadnt even known goats could climb trees. I had been livestock-sitting for three days before Id figured out how the darned things kept getting out of their pen. Then one day Id glanced out an upstairs window and seen Taco and Gordita, the ringleaders of the herd, trip-trip-tripping onto one of the low branches extending over the fence that separated their enclosure from the yard around Aunt Hyacinths century-old farmhouse.

Dont even think about it, I told Gordita now, facing her across that same fence. Id just bathed four dogs and then shoveled out the barn. I stank like dirty wet fur and donkey crap, and I was not in the mood to be trifled with.

She stared back at me with a placid, long-lashed eye and bleated, Mba-a-a-a-a. Which must translate as Youre not the boss of me, because she certainly didnt trouble herself to get out of the tree.

Suit yourself, I said. As long as she was still technically inor aboveher pen, I didnt have much of an argument. When dealing with nanny goats, you pick your battles.

I suppose Aunt Hyacinth could be forgiven for trusting me to figure out the finer points of goat management for myself. And for myself was no exaggeration. Except when my sister, Phin, and I had run into town to get groceries, we hadnt seen a soul all week. Well, besides Uncle Burt. But you didnt so much see Aunt Hyacinths late husband as sense his presence now and then.

This was Aunt Hyacinths first vacation in ten years. The herb farm and the line of organic bath products she produced here had finally reached a point where she could take time off. And she was going to be gone for a month, halfway around the world on a cruise through the Orient, so shed had a lot of instructions to cover. Even after shed given Phin and me an exhaustive briefing on the care and feeding of the flora and fauna, even while my mom had waited in the luggage-stuffed van to take her to the airport in San Antonio, Aunt Hy had stood on the porch, hands on her hips, lips pursed in concentration.

Im sure Im forgetting something, shed said, scanning the yard for some reminder. Then she laughed and patted my cheek. Oh, why am I worried? Youre a Goodnight. And if any of us can handle a crisis, Amy, its you.

That was too true. I was the designated grown-up in a family that operated in a different reality than the rest of the world. But if the worst I had to deal with was a herd of goat Houdinis, Id call myself lucky.

I gathered my dog-washing supplies and trudged toward the limestone ranch house that was the heart of Aunt Hyacinths Hill Country homestead. It was a respectable size for an herb farm, though small by ranching standards. Small enough, in fact, to be dwarfed by the surrounding land. To reach the place, you had to take a gravel road through someone elses pasture to the Goodnight Farm gate, where a second fence of barbed wire and cedar posts surrounded Aunt Hyacinths acreage. We often saw our neighbors cows grazing through it. I guess the grass really was always greener. A packed dirt road led finally to the sturdy board fence that enclosed the house and yard with its adjoining livestock pens. Sometimes it felt like living inside a giant nesting doll. Ranching life was pretty much all about fences and gates.

The dogs had kept a respectful distance from the goats enclosure, but they bounded to join me on my way to the house. Sadie nipped at the heels of my rubber boots while Lila wove figure eights between my legs. Bear, no fool, had already headed for the shade to escape the afternoon sun.

Get off! I pushed the girls away from my filthy jeans. I just washed you, you stupid mutts.

They dashed to join Bear on the side porch. I clomped up the steps, my arms full of dirty towels, and hooked the screen door with a finger. The dogs tumbled into the mudroom after me, then tried to worm into the house while I toed off my boots.

Not until youre dry. Stay! I managed to block them all except Pumpkin, a very appropriately named Pomeranian, who had asthma and got to come inside whenever he wanted. Which was pretty much all the time.

I closed the door and sigheda mistake, because the deep breath told me just how much I stank.

Hot shower in T minus five, four, three

The light over the sink in the kitchen went out. Not a crisis, since it was four in the afternoon. However, the soft hum of the air conditioner cut out at the same instant, which would be a problem very shortly. A big problem, because the only reason Id agreed to spend my summer on Goodnight Farmthe last carefree summer of my life, before I started college and things that Really Count in Lifewas that I knew it had civilized conveniences like climate control, wireless Internet, and satellite TV.

Phin! I shouted. Id lived with my sister for seventeen years, not counting the last one, which shed spent in the freshman dorm at the University of Texas. I knew exactly who was to blame for the power outage.

No answer, but that didnt mean anything. Once Phin was immersed in one of her experiments, Godzilla could stroll over from the Gulf of Mexico and she wouldnt notice unless his radioactive breath threw off her data.

Phins experiments were the reason I was currently covered in dog hair, straw dust, and donkey dung. She had eagerly agreed to house-sit because she wanted to do some kind of botanical research for her summer independent study, and, well where better to do that than an herb farm? But while the Goodnight family might be eccentric by other peoples standards, no one was crazy enough to leave Phin solely in charge of Aunt Hyacinths livelihood. She couldnt always be trusted to feed