Always Time To Die sk-1

by Elizabeth Lowell

  "What's stored over there?" she asked, pointing toward the crates and boxes lining the walls of the first story.

  "Supplies."

  Dan was already halfway down the stairs to the basement, moving with an ease that surprised Carly. His leg might bother him from time to time, but it didn't affect his balance.

  Okay, I guess he could catch me if I tripped.

  But she wasn't interested in putting it to the test. She turned sideways and edged carefully down the ten cement steps, taking special care with the fifth one. The thought of staggering down the steps and rolling into Dan like a human bowling ball made her smile. At the very least, it would shake up his cool reserve. Or maybe it wouldn't. Either way, she'd learn something about him.

  Forget it. He's not part of my research.

  Too bad. That's an interesting man. Really interesting.

  The thought surprised her so much she missed the last step. Before she could catch herself, Dan did. He was so quick that she found herself lifted, set on her feet, and released before she could do more than make a startled sound.

  "My bad," she said. "I was thinking when I should have been looking." And I was thinking stupid. The last thing I need right now is a big, moody male messing up my life.

  "No problem." He leaned past her and flipped a switch. Light flooded the basement. Stainless-steel cabinets and files gleamed.

  "Wow," Carly said. "I was expecting piles of crumbling newsprint."

  "We've got some of that, too."

  "I'll save it for last."

  Dan opened a cabinet and pointed to row after row of narrow trays. "Microfilm. Most recent at the top. Oldest at the bottom. I haven't scanned in anything for the last six years," he added, pointing to a computer terminal. "Quality isn't great on the photos but rats don't nest in the hard drive."

  "And they do in the newspapers and microfilm files?"

  "Every chance they get."

  She glanced around at the shadowy corners and aisles between storage cabinets. "You need a big cat. Several of them."

  "Too many coyotes."

  "Even in town?"

  "Especially in town. Nothing like a trapline of garbage cans to fill a lazy hunter's belly."

  Dan went down an aisle and along the far wall. Twice he bent down, fiddled with something she couldn't see, and then stood up again.

  "What are you doing?" Carly asked.

  "Resetting traps."

  When he came back, two big dead rats dangled by their naked tails from his left hand.

  "Yuck," Carly said. "At least mice are cute. Does this happen all the time?"

  "It's late to be catching rats. Usually they come in after the first hard freeze. They must have been chased out of their digs by the last storm." He glanced at the computer. "I'll get rid of these and show you how to use the archive program. Don't poke around while I'm gone. There are more traps. You could break a finger if you aren't careful."

  "Is that why they use live traps at the Quintrell ranch house?"

  "One of Sylvia's purse pets was maimed in a kill trap a long time ago. Ever since, they've used live traps only."

  "Makes sense. Can I use the computer?"

  "The program you'd be working with is a bitch to learn. Stick with microfilm until you know your way around."

  She watched him climb easily up the treacherous steps. The dead rats swung in rhythm with his stride.

  "Don't forget to wash your hands," she called after him.

  Carly thought she heard him chuckle, then decided it must have been just his boots scuffing over cement. The outer door opened with a groan and a scrape and closed the same way, leaving her alone with the past and a roomful of rattraps.

  Now I know why newspapers call their archives the morgue.

  Rubbing at goose bumps that wouldn't stay away, she set her jaw and headed for the first cabinet.

  Chapter 8

  QUINTRELL RANCH

  MONDAY MORNING

  THE WRITING WAS IN THE ERRATIC FAINT SCRAWL OF A MAN AT THE END OF HIS strength.

  Josh Quintrell wondered who of all the many people the Senator had screwed had finally found a way to get even. Winifred, probably. She heard all the gossip from the hispano community; they feared her as much as they respected her. She'd hated the Senator after she'd found out about his women, and she hadn't known the half of it.

  Senator, you were a real piece of work. Which of your secrets was it? You had almost as many of them as women.

  Josh didn't want to read about any of it in the headlines. Not until after he was the surviving candidate in the primaries. Not until after the election itself.

  The Senator's secrets had been kept for almost a century. Surely Josh could keep them buried for eleven more months.

  He closed the Senator's private safe without looking at the gun and the cash, but he did remove the kind of evidence of civic corruption that some cops would have loved to have. The dial spun with a vague humming sound. After a glance at the locked door, Josh stood and went to the corner fireplace. There were only a few small pieces of pifion burning, just enough to give the room a scent of resin. He dropped the Senator's note in, watched it burn, and ground the ash into a smear across the small hearth. He did the same with the other papers.

  Obviously, someone knew too much, which meant he couldn't trust anyone local. At the same time, he couldn't afford to make local people suspicious. He'd act like it was business as usual and use an out-of-state accountant to track down the blackmailer.

  Until that happened, he had other problems. Carly May was at the head of the list.

  Josh unlocked the office door and strode quickly to the end of the house everyone called the Sisters' Suite. He knocked very softly before he opened the door to Sylvia's room. He didn't wait for permission to enter; it was his house now.

  As always, Sylvia's body made a slight mound on the hospital bed. As usual, Winifred's chair was drawn close and the pifion fire was blazing. Sylvia's empty black eyes stared into the room from beneath a carefully combed halo of white hair.

  Nothing much changed from visit to visit except the seasons beyond the windows and Sylvia herself, becoming more and more ghostlike, translucent. Every week when the doctor visited, he told Josh that he expected Sylvia to be dead.

  So far no one had been that lucky.

  "Good morning, Aunt Winifred," he said quietly. "How is Mother today?"

  "Alive."

  Josh bit back a sigh and a curse. Neither would make a difference. Winifred had never liked him. She would go to her grave that way. "Alma said you weren't feeling well."

  "I'll live."

  "I'm sure you will. Nothing would be the same without you."

  Winifred leaned forward, opened a rough pottery jar, and scooped out something that looked-and smelled-like it had been scraped off a barn floor and mixed with rotten fish. Gently she rubbed the greenish goo over Sylvia's withered torso, careful not to disturb the various tubes.

  "Your love and devotion have kept her alive," Josh said, trying not to gag on the smell of whatever Winifred had concocted. "We're all grateful for that."

  The old woman didn't answer.

  Slowly, like a leaf caught in an uncertain eddy, Sylvia's head turned toward the window. It was the only movement she ever made, gradually turning her head to one side or the other. Since her eyes never focused on anything, it was impossible to say why her body made the effort.

  "Get out and leave her be," Winifred said, pulling up the blankets again. "She's got pain enough without you."

  For a moment Josh's eyes narrowed and his hands flexed. Winifred's insistence that her sister had times of awareness was maddening. Every famous clinic in America-and more than a few overseas-had declared the opposite. The stroke that felled Sylvia had left her body alive and her mind forever beyond reach. The fact that she'd survived so long was a miracle.

  "If you don't want her disturbed," Josh said evenly, "we should leave the room while we discuss this pseudo-historian you've hire
d."

  "Nothing to discuss."

  "I don't think this 'family history' is anything more than a scam."

  "Doesn't matter what you think," Winifred said. "I hired her, it's my money, and that's that."

  "That might have worked with the Senator, but it won't with me. As long as you're living on my ranch, you will at least be civil to me."

  Winifred gave him a look from black eyes and touched Sylvia's hair gently. "It's not your ranch. It's hers. ''

  Josh told himself not to lose his temper. He dealt with more difficult and more powerful people five times a day. And that's what he should be doing now-working as the governor of New Mexico, not dancing attendance on one madwoman and the ghostly remains of another woman who hadn't spoken in almost forty years. It was nearly impossible to think of that slack mass of skin and bones as alive, much less as his mother, but a politician didn't get anywhere speaking ill of a woman who hung on to life long past reason.

  So long, so damned long. When will it end for her?

  For all of us.

  "I'm her guardian now," Josh said. "The ranch is part of my legal responsibility to her."

  "Throwing me out won't win you any votes."

  Wearily Josh shook his head and pulled at the tie he'd worn for a taped TV interview an hour ago. A waste of time, but the reporter worked for a well-known national paper and was solidly in the governor's camp for the coming election.

  "Nobody said anything about throwing you out." Josh sighed as his collar button gave way. "The ranch has been your home for a long time. No matter what changes, I'll see that you're taken care of."

  Winifred gave him a long, black look. It was the kind of look that had the more superstitious-or cautious-of the local people crossing themselves when she walked by.

  "I'll hold you to that," she said finally.

  "I'm hardly likely to forget," he said impatiently. "But there's a difference between having a roof over your head and running the ranch and the house according to your whim. Important people in my party have decided that I'm first-class presidential material. The primaries will be tough. The presidential campaign will be brutal. The last thing I need is a bright-eyed little outsider mucking around in the Quintrell past. Some things are better left buried."

  "It's the Castillo past she'll be researching."

  "One way or another, the Quintrells and the Castillos have been tangled up since before the Civil War." Josh's voice, like his expression, was impatient. His blue eyes were icy. "At least have the decency to wait until after the election in November. Then you can air the Senator's filthy laundry from hell to breakfast. But not now."

  Handsome, angry, arrogant, he looked so much like the Senator that Winifred wanted to slap him. "I'm only interested in the Castillos. The Quintrells-all of them-can go straight to Satan where they belong."

  "But until then, you don't mind living on the devil's generosity, do you?"

  "It's the least you Quintrells owe me for taking care of Sylvia."

  "Sylvia is a Quintrell."

  "Not since that philandering son of a bitch broke her heart. Not since her first son died. Not since she went to make up with Liza and had a stroke. Not since you took over. She's Castillo now. Mine, not yours."

  Josh shook his head and gave up. Winifred lived in the past. She always had. She always would. Nothing he said could change that. He turned and headed for the door. "If you don't keep a tight rein on your little historian, I will."

  The door closed hard behind him.

  Chapter 9

  TAOS

  NOON MONDAY

  CARLY MURMURED INTO HER COLLAR AS SHE BENT OVER THE MICROFILM READER. Until Dan brought her up to speed on the computer program he'd used for archiving, she was stuck researching the old-fashioned way. Somehow she didn't think Dan was in any hurry to make her job easier.

  Despite the rather primitive room with its cracked, uneven concrete floor, the microfilm was in good shape and the filing cabinets were kept warm enough that she didn't have to worry about condensation on the film when she took it from its canister and put it into the reader. For the moment, her biggest problem wasn't the equipment, it was translating the oldest documents. Her colloquial Spanish was good enough, but her historical Spanish was barely passable.

  "Wonder if Winifred could translate these?" she muttered.

  "Probably," Dan said from the bottom of the stairs. "She spends a lot of time with old books."

  Carly jerked and barely managed to bite back a shriek. "Don't sneak up on me like that."

  His left eyebrow lifted. He hadn't made any special effort to be quiet when he secured the cellar door and walked down the steps. "You asked a question. I assumed you knew I was here."

  "I'm taking notes," she said, pointing to the tiny microphone along her jaw. "I thought I was alone."

  He glanced at the microphone, then came in for a closer look. "Nice. Voice recognition or straight recording?"

  "Both. Voice right now, record when I'm interviewing. They haven't come up with reliable multivoice recognition software yet."

  Dan knew they had, and it was classified, so he just nodded. "How much longer will you be?"

  She blinked. "Is there a time limit?"

  "Usual business hours." He glanced at his watch. "You have until five."

  She looked at her own watch. "Does someone have to be here with me all the time?"

  "Yes."

  Carly wasn't surprised, but she wasn't pleased that Dan had been assigned to babysit her. Something about him was distracting and she had a lot of work to do.

  From beneath lowered lashes she watched while he shrugged out of his jacket and denim shirt. Stripped down to a black turtleneck and faded jeans, he went to a storage cupboard at the back of the room. He pulled out some yellowed, fragile papers, and went to work with a piece of equipment she assumed was some kind of scanner. Despite the size of his fingers and a physical strength made clear by the fit of the turtle-neck, he handled the papers with a delicate patience that intrigued her.

  "You've done that a lot, haven't you?" she asked.

  Dan nodded without looking up.

  "But you're not an archivist?"

  He nodded again.

  She didn't take the hint. "Then why did you take on the job of translating microfilm into computer files?"

  He looked up at her. In the stark light and shadows of the room, his green eyes had a catlike glow. "I wanted to."

  "Why?"

  "Why do you care?"

  "I'm curious. And don't bother telling me about curiosity and the cat. Been there, heard that, wasn't impressed."

  The line of his mouth shifted slightly. Almost a smile. But then, his face was in shadow so she couldn't be sure.

  "Somehow I'm not surprised," Dan said.

  "Somehow I don't think much could surprise you."

  He looked at the smoky gold of her eyes and knew she was wrong. She surprised him. Everyone else walked on tiptoe around him, trying not to disturb whatever was brooding inside him. But did she tiptoe? Hell, no. She nudged and nipped and kicked.

  "When I was thirteen, I chose to microfilm the computer files as a school project," he said, surprising himself again. "Back then, the newspaper wouldn't let me near the really old stuff, so there's a lot still to be done." He lifted and turned the sheet and hit the button again. "I modified a computer scanning program and kept working on it until I left for college when I was eighteen. No one else could figure out how to make my program work, so they just kept on with the microfilming and I'd do the 'translation' when I visited."

  She looked at the power implicit in Dan's shoulders and shook her head.

  "What?" he said.

  "I'm trying to picture you as a pencil-necked geek teenager. Ain't happening."

  "Muscles don't reduce your IQ."

  "Maybe in your case." Carly shrugged.

  "You have something against men who aren't nerds?"

  "As long as they don't mistake brawn for the Second Comi
ng of Christ, no."

  "Somebody burned you good."

  "No. Somebody bored me. Big difference. Then he couldn't believe I didn't want him. Finally had to serve the jerk with a court order not to be where I was, ever, under any circumstances."

  "How long ago was that?" Dan asked.

  A quality in his voice made her look at him again. Though he hadn't moved, there was a difference in him, more intense, more alert, all relaxation gone.

  "Eight, nine years," she said. "A long time."

  Whatever had tightened his body left as silently as it had come. He leaned back into his chair and said, "Not long enough, apparently."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You're still afraid of men."

  Carly didn't like that description. Being careful wasn't the same as being afraid. "I don't like men who won't take no for an answer," she said. "The big boneheads are more intimidating than the smaller sizes of stupid. Must be something genetic in me that makes me avoid the big ones."

  "Common sense?" he suggested dryly.

  "Bingo. So what interested you about the past enough that you spent a lot of time down here scanning old newspapers and making high-tech computer files out of microfilmed data?"

  For a while she thought he wasn't going to answer. So did he. Then he surprised both of them.

  "I believed that the past explained the present," Dan said.

  "It does."

  He lifted one shoulder. "The recorded past? Not really. It's written by winners. That leaves at least one whole side unrecorded. Playing cards with half a deck is a sure way to lose the game."

  While Carly thought about his words, she wound a curl around her index finger, a childhood habit she'd never been able to break. "That's an unusual insight," she said finally.

  "If you're thirteen, maybe. After that you outgrow it." He went back to scanning in old papers.

  She tried to decide if she'd just been personally insulted or if he was rude to everyone.

  Not my problem. I’m here on Winifred's nickel and his last name isn't Quintrell or Castillo.

  Having decided that, she heard herself asking, "Do you understand the old Spanish?"

  "Yes." He brought down the scanner lid and hit a button.