Always Time To Die sk-1

by Elizabeth Lowell

  The other man nodded. Like Josh, the priest knew that many of the citizens in the state were Catholic. Any good deeds done for the Catholic church by the governor would please a lot of voters.

  "May I come and talk with you as I did your father?" Roybal asked.

  "Unlike the Senator, I'm content in my religion," Josh said easily. "If that changes, I'll seek your counsel."

  Roybal was young and ambitious, but he wasn't stupid. He accepted the refusal with grace. "I will keep your family in my prayers."

  "Thank you, Father." Josh took Anne's elbow to help her over the frozen earth toward the hearse. "Prayers are always welcome."

  Carly watched the state's first couple head toward the relative warmth of the hearse, followed by the Protestant minister and the Catholic priest. Each man of God had his own modest car. Vehicle doors opened and closed in a series of sharp noises.

  She glanced at Winifred hopefully. The old woman was looking into the grave with an odd expression on her face. It could have been regret or even pleasure. It could have been indigestion. Carly didn't know Winifred well enough to judge. But if Carly had to bet, she'd go with a grim kind of pleasure.

  "Carly?" Andy said. "Why don't you ride back with us? There's plenty of room. We could talk about family and things."

  Winifred shot him a black look. "I'm paying her, not you. When I want her to interview you, I'll tell you."

  "Hey. Indentured servitude is passe," Andy said. "She's a fully grown woman. She can talk for herself."

  "She certainly can," Carly said distinctly. "Thank you for the offer of a ride, but Miss Simmons y Castillo and I have a lot to discuss before I'll be ready to interview family members."

  "I won't be here long," Andy warned.

  Thank God. Carly managed a smile. "Telephones work for me."

  "They aren't very personal."

  "Handicaps just make a job more interesting."

  Andy's blue eyes narrowed. He turned and stalked after his parents.

  Winifred laughed, a sound almost as rusty as a raven's warning cry. "Just like the Senator. Doesn't think there's a female alive that won't spread her legs for him."

  Carly hesitated, then decided that it had to be covered sometime, and now was as good as any. "My research hinted that the Senator was rumored to be very, um, sexually active when he was young."

  "He lifted every skirt he could get his hands on, and he got his hands on most. When he was too old to perform, he got those erection pills and kept at it until he died."

  Carly's eyebrows rose. "He managed to keep his romantic life out of the media."

  "Romance had nothing to do with it." Winifred's thin upper lip curled. "Lust, that's all. The reporters always knew how he spent his nights and lunch breaks. But back then, a politician could fornicate with anything willing or unwilling and no one said a word. Then Clinton came along." Winifred made a dismissive gesture. "By that time the Senator was on his way out of elected public life. Stories about his shopgirls and prostitutes weren't news anymore."

  Carly made her all-purpose sound that said she was listening. It was what she was best at: listening.

  And remembering.

  "Who are those people?" she asked, looking beyond the fence. "The ones who didn't come to the graveside."

  Winifred looked at the couple waiting patiently just outside the gate. "Pete and Melissa Moore. Employees. He's the Senator's accountant. She's the housekeeper."

  The one who forgot I was coming?

  But Carly didn't say it aloud. The Senator's death must have thrown the household into turmoil. She would find out when she met Melissa if there was anything deliberate in the oversight. Carly hoped there wasn't and at the same time was prepared for the opposite. It wouldn't be the first time she hadn't been welcomed by some members of the household whose history she'd been hired to record. An important part of her job was to disarm hostile people, getting them to relax and open up to her.

  "Well, no need to stand here freezing," Winifred said. "Leave the diggers to finish their work. Then I'm going to buy some shiny red shoes and dance on that philandering bastard's grave."

  The old woman marched toward the waiting car with the stride of a woman decades younger than her nearly eighty years.

  Carly glanced for the last time at the grave, memorizing small details of color and temperature, wind and scent. After a few moments she sensed a flicker of motion on the ridge that defined the other side of the valley. She looked up just in time to see two silhouettes drop down the far side and out of sight.

  Someone hadn't even cared enough to stand outside the fence.

  When I get to know Miss Winifred better, I'll have to ask her who else wants to dance on the Senators grave.

  The only tears cried at this funeral had been clawed out by the icy wind.

  Chapter 3

  TAOS

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  THE DURAN FAMILY LIVED ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF TAOS, BEYOND THE TOURIST AREA with its timeless adobe buildings and modern parking meters measuring out minutes in silver coins. The Durans inhabited a Taos few visitors saw, a place of modest houses crouched among winter-bare pastures, surrounded by willow-stick and barbwire fences.

  John drove into a narrow adobe garage that had once been a tack room and turned off his truck. Though the building was more than two hundred years old, it had been wired in the twentieth century. Motion-sensing lights flashed to life, revealing every timeworn adobe brick. The space itself was clean. Neither of Dan's parents tolerated garbage, clutter, or worn-out machinery tossed around the property. Some of the neighbors felt that every man had a right to his own junkyard, but no one got upset about it either way. New Mexico had a long history of live and let live.

  "You think Mom's back from the pueblo yet?" Dan asked.

  John glanced at his watch. Two o'clock. "She should be. She teaches after the noon mass."

  "Still doing English?"

  "It's what the kids need most. She does some simple math, too."

  Dan shook his head. "She never gives up, does she?"

  "That's why I love her. Heart as big as the sky. You should get a good woman to make you happy."

  "I'm already happy."

  "Really? You better wear a sign. Otherwise your expression will scare small children."

  "Yeah yeah yeah," Dan said without much heat. He knew his father was right, but that didn't change his memories of the past twelve years, the years when he'd experienced firsthand just how much of an animal man could be.

  He shoved the memories away. They didn't have anything new to teach him. He didn't have anything new to bring to them. That was why he'd come home, hoping to find something new, something worth the pain of living for it.

  John waited, hoped, but Dan didn't say another word. "You're like your mother. You keep it inside."

  Dan didn't answer.

  John didn't expect him to.

  The back door opened before Dan put his foot on the first step up to the narrow porch. Diana's hair was short and dark black except for a wide streak of white at her left temple, legacy of a nameless ancestor. Her eyes were as dark and clear as ever, and her smile just as unexpected in her serious face. Gently rounded and as determined as any man, Dan's mother was the light of many lives, including her son's.

  "That was certainly a long walk," she said, watching him climb the stairs. Though she didn't say anything, concern for his injury was in her eyes and in the troubled line of her mouth. "You must be freezing."

  Dan scooped her up in a hug and set her down gently. "I'm too big to freeze." He sniffed the air that was rushing out of the kitchen. "What's that?"

  Diana gave John a worried look. He shook his head slightly.

  "Posole soup and fresh tortillas," she said, frowning. "I've got the woodstove going. Come in and warm your-Get warm," she corrected quickly. Dan didn't like discussing, or even acknowledging, his injured leg. Despite that, she couldn't help wanting to ease the pain she saw occasionally in his face. "And carnit
as. You didn't eat much breakfast before you left."

  Dan's gentle smile was at odds with the grim lines that usually bracketed his mouth. "I'm not a teenager anymore, Mamacita. I'm all grown up."

  "But-" She bit back her worry. Her son wasn't a child to be fussed over, yet she had a lifetime of nurturing reflexes that made her want to coddle and cuddle him. "Coffee, too. Just the way you like it."

  "Hot as hell and twice as bitter," John said unhappily. "Whoopee."

  Diana stood on tiptoe and kissed her husband's mustache. "I made a second pot for you."

  Dan heard his mother giggle like a teenager behind him and knew that his father was nibbling on her neck. Dan smiled slightly, almost sadly. The older he got, the more he wondered if he'd ever find a woman or if-as he suspected-he was better suited for living alone.

  With a stifled groan, he eased himself into the chair that was pulled up close to the old woodburning stove. Pinon crackled and burned hotly, scenting the air almost as much as the food bubbling on the stove itself. He dragged off his coat and hung it over the back of the chair. The black turtleneck he wore under his denim shirt was made of a high-tech cloth that breathed when it was hot and held heat when it was cold. At least, that was the theory. There was always an uncomfortable time before the cloth decided what it should do.

  Right now, he was hot enough to think about going back out to the garage.

  "So, did you see Mrs. Rincon on your walk?" Diana asked John.

  "Didn't go that way."

  "Ah, then you saw Senor Montez. How is his gout?"

  "Didn't go that way either," John said.

  Diana paused in dishing up soup. "No? At least you saw the Millers. Is their newborn-"

  "We didn't go there," John interrupted.

  Dan waited tensely for his mother to ask where they had gone.

  She didn't. Sometimes she could be just as tight-lipped with her family as she was with everyone else except children. She set the food out in front of her men and went to stir the fire.

  Dan looked at the rigid line of his mother's back and sighed. She didn't have to ask where he'd been. She knew. He didn't understand how she knew, but he was used to that. He'd inherited her fey ability to take a few words here and an expression there and come up with a conclusion that left other people wondering how he'd seen what they hadn't. It was a gift associated with curandero blood, with natural healers, but Dan had never felt any call to herbs or potions.

  "Mom," he began unhappily.

  "No." Her voice was flat. She reached in her pocket for a tissue and held it to her nose. A spot of red appeared. Then another. The dry winter air always made her nose bleed. Not much, just enough to be annoying. She tipped her head back and pressed hard. "I will not hear the name of evil spoken in this house."

  "He was just a-"

  "He was evil," Diana cut in, crossing herself. "Do not say his name in my presence."

  "He was your grandfather," Dan said.

  She tilted her head forward, felt no more blood, and stuffed the tissue in her pocket. After she washed her hands, she picked up a plate of steaming tortillas and set them down in front of Dan with enough force to make them flutter.

  Silence.

  "Men do evil things," Dan said, "but they're still human."

  Silence.

  "He was my great-grandfather. I wanted to…" Dan's voice died. "I don't know what I wanted. I just knew I had to go."

  "You did and it's done," Diana said. "Now eat."

  Dan glanced at John. His father had a worn, unhappy look on his face, the same look that came every time the subject of the Senator arose.

  How can Dad stand living with her pain, with the ingrained fear of the past that lives beneath her silence?

  For some people, time healed. For his mother, time made everything worse.

  Abruptly Dan stood up, tired of dodging around family taboos and ignoring the dark, bitter currents that flowed deep beneath his mother's quiet surface. His leg protested the sudden change of position, but held with little more than a sharp reminder of injury. The high, clean air of Taos was doing more to heal him than all the hospitals, surgeries, and medications had.

  "Silence won't make it go away," Dan said in a level voice. "If it did, you'd be free. Why let a cruel old man ruin the rest of your life the same way he must have ruined your mother's?"

  "What happened to sleeping dogs and land mines?" John asked his son roughly. "Eat or take a walk."

  "Shit," Dan said under his breath.

  "You'll not swear in your mother's presence."

  "Sorry, Mother," Dan said neutrally. "I keep forgetting that reality isn't welcome here."

  "Daniel." John's voice was a warning.

  Dan lifted his coat off the back of the chair and said to his father, "Call me when you want to get that tractor running."

  He closed the back door carefully and told himself he couldn't hear his mother weeping.

  But he could.

  Chapter 4

  QUINTRELL RANCH

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  ANDY QUINTRELL V REACHED FOR ANOTHER BEER, ONLY TO HAVE HIS FATHER TAKE the can away.

  "You need to sober up," Josh said.

  "Why?" Andy waved his hand casually. "Not a camera in sight."

  "Winifred's pet historian has cameras and her digital recorder is always on."

  "Who cares?"

  Anne Quintrell walked into the kitchen. "I do. Your father does. You should."

  "Because you want me to be a senator when I'm thirty?" Andy belched richly, legacy of the two beers he'd drunk without a pause. "What about what I want, huh? What about that?"

  Anne smoothed back hair that was already perfectly in place. "What do you want?"

  "To get laid."

  Disgust flickered over Anne's face.

  Josh laughed roughly. "A real chip off the old block, aren't you?"

  "Hey, Granddad humped everything he saw and he spent his whole life being reelected."

  "That was then," Josh said. "Today that kind of womanizing won't fly at the polls."

  "Fuck the polls."

  "It's about the only thing you haven't jumped," Anne said tiredly. "Why can't you just keep it zipped?"

  Andy rolled his eyes. "Spoken like a nun."

  "Then get married," Anne said. "The Meriwether girl would be an excellent wife."

  Andy made retching sounds. "I've seen better-looking dog butts. Just because her father's a senator doesn't make her hot."

  "Hot?" Casually Josh reached out and jerked his son to his feet. "Listen to me, Andy, and listen good. I've had it with your hyperactive dick."

  "Josh-" Anne began.

  "Not now," Josh said without looking away from his son. "You have two choices. Grow up or sign up for the Marines. They've made men out of sorrier boys than you."

  Andy closed his eyes. "Not another lecture on the value of serving your country."

  "No lecture. Just fact. I'm through supporting you and I won't let your mother give you so much as a dime."

  Andy's eyes snapped open. What he saw in his father's eyes made him cold.

  Josh nodded. "That's right. This is the end of the line. The Senator kept seeing himself in you, kept smiling at the thought of you drinking and screwing your way through life."

  "He understood me," Andy said.

  "He's dead. Times change." Josh let go of his son. "Change with them or get your spoiled ass out of my life."

  Andy looked at his mother.

  "No," Josh said. "She can't help you. The Senator who understood you so well left everything to me."

  "How will it look if you simply throw out your only child?" Anne asked quietly.

  "I'll pay for rehab in Santa Fe. After that, he's on his own."

  "Rehab?" Andy said. "You're crazy. I'm not an alcoholic or-"

  "If you refuse rehab," Josh interrupted, "I'll give a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger interview to Jeanette Dykstra for her sniggering TV

  show. There are more parents ou
t there with screwups for kids than solid citizens. If anything, my standing in the polls will go up."

  "That's all you care about!" Andy shouted. "That's all you've ever cared about!"

  Josh shrugged. "And all you care about is getting laid. So what?"

  A volatile mix of tears and rage shimmered in Andy's eyes. He pushed past Josh and slammed out the back door of the kitchen.

  "He has an appointment in Santa Fe with the New Day Clinic on Monday at ten o'clock," Josh said to his wife. "If he doesn't keep it, he's on his own."

  "But this is so… sudden," she said, shaking her head.

  "Only for you. I've been ready to throw him out for ten years. But if I so much as lectured Andy, he'd go crying to you or the Senator."

  "But Andy's so young," she whispered.

  "Men his age have fought and killed and died."

  "You say that like you approve."

  Josh swore wearily. "We've had this conversation too many times. Andy either cleans up his act or I'll cut him loose. Conversation over."

  "The king is dead, long live the king, is that it?"

  "That's it."

  Tears magnified her eyes. "I'll divorce you."

  He smiled slightly. "No you won't. You want to be first lady as much as I want to be president. You've worked and sacrificed for that goal all our married life. You won't throw it away because a spoiled child pitches a fit."

  Two tears slid down her cheeks. She didn't want to agree with him, and she knew that he was right. "You know me too well."

  "That's what it's all about. Knowing people. When you know what they want, you have them by the short and curlies." He finished his coffee and set the cup aside. "I'll be in the Senator's study going through papers."

  She sighed. "Need any help?"

  "I'll let you know if I do."

  But before he let anyone read over his shoulder, he'd be certain that the Senator had died without confessing his sins in a private journal.

  Chapter 5

  QUINTRELL RANCH

  SUNDAY EVENING

  CARLY WALKED DOWN A HALLWAY IN THE OLD CASTILLO HOME. WITH EACH STEP SHE murmured into her lapel, where she wore a nearly invisible microphone that was attached to a digital recorder at her waist.