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  Always Time To Die

  ( St. Kilda - 1 )

  Elizabeth Lowell

  Elizabeth Lowell

  Always Time To Die

  For

  Eric and Miranda

  The future is yours.

  PROLOGUE

  NEAR TAOS, NEW MEXICO JANUARY

  TUESDAY, 3:00 a.m.

  THE CUTTING EDGE OF A WINTER STORM MADE THE OLD HOUSE SIGH AND MOAN AS if someone was dying.

  Someone is. Soon.

  The ghostly smile, the laughter, and the words were silent.

  No one saw the intruder glide across the ancient Persian carpet on soundless feet. No one heard the door to the library open.

  The hospital bed and oxygen bottle looked bizarre among the ranks of leather-bound books and gilt-framed portraits of Andrew Jackson Quintrell I and his wife, Isobel Mercedes Archuleta y Castillo. The ambition that had created one of New Mexico's biggest ranches and launched the national political careers of future Quintrells blazed out of A. J. Quintrell's Yankee blue eyes. The matching ambition of one of New Mexico's oldest families smoldered in Isobel's hazel green eyes.

  The old man lying motionless on the hospital bed was their grandson. The fires of ambition had almost burned out in him. He would end his life as he had begun it, on the Quintrell ranch. No hospitals, no nurses, no doctors. No muttering and fussing and false smiles of hope.

  There wasn't any hope.

  For nearly a century the Senator had enjoyed the wealth and prestige and power of the Quintrell family. For eighty years he had run the family with the closed fist of absolute power. Now he was slowly succumbing to congestive heart failure. At the moment, oxygen made him rest easier. In time it wouldn't help. Then he would drown.

  Die, old man. Why can't you just die and save us all a lot of trouble?

  No answer came but the slow, shallow, damnably steady breathing of Andrew Jackson Quintrell III.

  You lived like a pagan king. Why couldn't you just die that way? But no, you had to have it all-pagan life and Christian afterlife.

  Father Roybal would be visiting again this morning, urging former Senator Quintrell to purge his soul of all evil and reach out for God's forgiveness. Forgiveness would be there, waiting for him.

  It always was for prodigal sons.

  Confession might be good for the soul, but it's hell on the living. I don't want to live in hell, old man.

  It's your turn to do that.

  Finally.

  Gloved hands removed the oxygen tube from the Senator's nose. Gloved hands took a pillow from the bed and pressed it gently, firmly, relentlessly over the old man's face. Breathing slowed, then stopped. He stirred just a little at first and then urgently, almost violently, but he was no match for the deadly gentleness that shut off his air. A minute, two minutes, and it was over, breath and heart stopped, death where life had been.

  It took less time than that for the murderer to tidy up the bed, reinsert the oxygen tube, replace the pillow, and walk out into the bitter caress of night.

  Chapter 1

  NEAR TAOS

  SUNDAY MORNING

  TWO MEN SQUINTED AGAINST THE WIND AND STARED DOWN AT THE QUINTRELL family graveyard. It lay a few hundred yards below and six hundred feet away from the base of the long, ragged ridge where they stood. A white wrought-iron fence enclosed the graveyard, as though death could be kept away from the living by such a simple thing.

  At the edge of the valley, pinons grew black against a thin veneer of snow. Cottonwood branches along the valley creek had been stripped by winter to their thin, pale skin. In the black-and-white landscape, a ragged rectangle and a nearby tarp-covered mound of loose red dirt looked out of place. Three ravens squatted on the tarp like guests waiting to be served. A polished casket hovered astride the newly dug grave, ready to be lowered at a signal from the minister.

  The first of the funeral procession drove up and stopped outside the ornate white fence. There wouldn't be many cars, because the graveside service was limited to clergy and immediate members of the Senator's family. The public service had been yesterday, in Santa Fe, complete with a media circus where the famous and the merely notorious exchanged Cheshire cat grins and firm handshakes and careful lies while the smell of dying flowers overwhelmed the stately cathedral.

  Automatically Daniel Duran looked over his shoulder, checking that his silhouette was still invisible from below, lost against a tall pine. It was. So was his father's.

  He and John weren't famous or notorious. They hadn't been invited to either the memorial or funeral service for the dead man everyone called the Senator. The lack of invitations didn't matter to Dan. He wouldn't have gone anyway.

  So why am I here?

  It was a good question. He didn't have an answer. He wasn't even sure he wanted one.

  The wind rushing down from the harsh peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains tasted of snow and distance and the kind of time that made most people uncomfortable. Deep time. Unimaginable time. Time so great it reduced humanity to an amusing footnote in Earth's four-billion-year history.

  Dan liked that kind of time. Humans were amusing. Laughable. It was the only way to stay sane.

  And that was something he'd promised himself he wouldn't think about for a few months. Staying sane.

  If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, chances are you don Y understand the situation. Why else would ignorance be called bliss?

  With a grim smile he turned so that his injured leg didn't take the force of the brutal wind.

  "You should have stayed home," John Duran said.

  Dan gave his father a sidelong look. "The exercise is good for my leg."

  "That old man never acknowledged you or your mother as kin. Hell, he barely acknowledged his own legitimate daughter."

  Dan shrugged and let the wind comb dark hair he hadn't bothered to have cut in months. "I don't take it personally. He never acknowledged any of his bastards."

  "So why bother hiking here for the Senator's funeral? And don't waste your breath on the exercise excuse. You could do laps around the Taos town square with a lot less trouble."

  For a time there was only the sound of the ice-tipped wind scouring the ridge. Finally Dan said, "I don't know."

  John grunted. He doubted that his fiercely bright son didn't know why they were freezing their nuts off on Castillo Ridge watching one of New Mexico's most famous womanizers get buried. Then again, maybe Dan truly didn't know.

  "You sure?" John asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Well, that's the most hopeful thing that's happened since you turned up three months ago."

  Once, Dan would have smiled, but that was before pain had etched his face and cynicism had eroded his soul. "How so?"

  "You cared about something enough to walk three miles in the snow."

  Dan's dark brown eyebrows lifted. "Have I been that bad?"

  "No," his father said slowly. "But you're different. Much less smile. Too much steel. Less laughter. More silence. Too old to be thirty-four."

  Dan didn't argue. It was the truth.

  "It's more than the injury," John said, waving at his son's right leg, where metal and pain had exploded through flesh. "Muscle and bone heals. Emotions…" He sighed. "Well, they take longer. And sometimes they just don't heal at all."

  "You're thinking of Mom and whatever happened with her mother."

  John nodded. "She still doesn't talk about it."

  "Good for her." I hope.

  "You didn't feel that way a few years ago."

  "A few years ago I didn't understand about sleeping dogs and land mines. Now I do."

  And that's what was bothering Dan. The Senator's sister-in-law Winifred was
running around kicking sleeping dogs right and left. Sooner or later she would step on a land mine and wake up something so brutal that his own mother had never once spoken of it, even to the man she loved.

  Silently the two men watched the shiny white hearse wait next to the graveyard's wide gate. The couple in the rear seat, Josh Quintrell and his wife Anne, waited for the driver to open their doors. Their son, A.J. V, called Andy, got out and turned his back to the windblown snow. When his parents stepped into the gray daylight, their clothes were as black as the ravens perched on the graveside tarp.

  A second car pulled up close to the hearse. As soon as it stopped, a tall, lanky woman emerged into the bitter wind with just enough hesitation to show her age. The iron gray of her hair beneath a black lace mantilla marked her as Winifred Simmons y Castillo, sister-in-law to the dead Senator, and a woman who in more than seven decades hadn't found a man-or anything else-she couldn't live without.

  "Hell on wheels," John said almost admiringly.

  "Is that what you call someone who looks for land mines by stomping and kicking everything in sight?"

  John shook his head and shut up. He didn't know why Dan was upset by Winifred's quest for her family's past. When he'd asked what the problem was, Dan had shut down, all hard edges and silence. John hadn't asked again. When his son had worked for the federal government, he hadn't talked about his job. After he'd quit a few years ago to work for St. Kilda Consulting, he still didn't talk about his job.

  Another figure got out of the car with the lithe energy of youth. Whatever the woman wore was concealed beneath an overcoat that went to her ankles. The loosely tied wool scarf around her head lifted in the wind. She snatched it with gloved hands and knotted it more securely. But for just a moment, rich auburn hair burned in the winter light with the vivid colors of life.

  "That her? "John asked.

  "The fool who's going to go stomping around in the Quintrell minefield? Yeah, that's her, one Carolina May, Carly to her friends."

  "You check her out?"

  "What do you think?"

  "You did. And?"

  "Sweet Carly hasn't a clue."

  John grunted. "Too bad."

  "Shit happens."

  The gate clanged open and the ravens flew into the pale cottonwood branches to wait.

  Chapter 2

  QUINTRELL FAMILY GRAVEYARD

  TUESDAY MORNING

  CARLY MAY HAD BEEN RAISED IN THE COLORADO ROCKIES, WHICH MEANT THAT SHE was no stranger to the knife-dry cold of a mountain winter. Even so, her hands felt numb beneath the black gloves she'd hastily bought for the funeral. Part of Carly, the part that loved to discover and write family histories, was honored to be at the renowned Senator Quintrell's family funeral. The rest of her felt like the outsider she was. No news there. She'd been an outsider all her life.

  Hoping she looked suitably attentive to the funeral of a man she'd never met, Carly mentally checked off a list of the electronics and clothes she'd crammed into her little SUV. After Winifred Simmons's demand that Carly come to the ranch four weeks early to work on the Castillo family history, she'd shipped some of her basic genealogical supplies by overnight air to the Quintrell ranch. They hadn't been waiting for her when she'd arrived last night, exhausted by the drive from her northern Colorado home.

  She bit back a yawn and focused on the grave. This was what she had rushed here for, to witness and relate for future generations the funeral of a legendary man.

  "… not to mourn the passing of a great man," the minister said, "but to celebrate his transition from the bitter coils of…"

  Carly kept a straight face while the minister sliced and diced Shakespeare to fit a former senator's graveside eulogy. She glanced sideways at another man of the cloth, a priest who had hoped to be celebrating the conversion of a dying celebrity to Catholicism. Father Roybal was here at the special invitation of Josh Quintrell, the Senator's only surviving child and the governor of the great state of New Mexico. Despite the honor, the good father looked like he would rather be saying mass than standing mute. Or perhaps he was simply unhappy over losing one of the best-known souls in the nation.

  The wind flexed and raked icy nails over the land. Anne Quintrell pulled her mid-calf sable coat more closely around her and raised the wide hood over her head. Yesterday in Santa Fe, where cameras flashed and TV lights burned like wild stars, she'd worn a simple black wool coat. The fact that she'd been born to sable rather than wool was something that she and her husband were careful not to parade in front of voters. No matter how blue the blood, when cameras were present near a man who had presidential hopes, the man dressed like Abe Lincoln and made sure his wife did the same.

  Carly noted Anne's rich sable coat with the same detachment that she'd noted Miss Winifred's occasional chesty cough and the lines of fatigue on Governor Josh Quintrell's face. Even when you were over sixty, losing your father was hard.

  "… with the blessed as they wend their solitary way…"

  Now the minister was mining Milton. Carly ducked her head to hide a smile and wished she'd been brave enough to bring her recorder to the graveside. She didn't want to lose any of the small facts that would transform the Quintrell family history from a dry genealogy to a living story of hope and loss, hate and love, success and tears and laughter. But she'd only been here a few hours, and hadn't quite dared ask to be allowed to digitize the private service.

  The minister kept talking despite the fact that his audience showed every sign of being cold and miserable. Even the relentless wind couldn't hurry the man along. He'd come with a feast of platitudes and intended to serve up every oily crumb.

  Carly shut him out. Despite her work of researching and writing family histories, she hadn't attended any funerals professionally until this one. Usually she was called in before the fact of death, when someone felt the chill whisper of mortality and truly believed for the first time I will die. That was when people wanted to fix their place not only among the dead, but among the survivors.

  See me and know you will die, too.

  She wiggled her numb toes inside dress boots that hadn't been designed for standing around on frozen ground while a minister of very ordinary intellect tried to encompass life's greatest mystery by pillaging the work of dead poets.

  "… burning in the forest of the night…"

  It was Blake's turn on the chopping block. Carly glanced beneath her long dark lashes, trying to see how the audience was responding to the lame eulogy. Andrew Jackson Quintrell V looked green around the edges, but that probably had more to do with a pulsing hangover than the minister's words. Anne Quintrell had no expression except occasional wariness when she glanced at her twenty-three-year-old son to see if he was still standing. Josh looked worn and sad or maybe just cold and bored. With a professional politician it was hard to tell. He certainly was a good-looking man, standing tall and straight in his sixties, with a mane of wind-tossed silver hair and brilliant blue eyes.

  Miss Winifred looked raven-eyed and bleak. She, too, stood tall and straight, but lacked her nephew's muscularity. She was as gaunt as the winter cottonwoods.

  "… held him green and dying…"

  Another poet raped. Carly swallowed hard but still made a stifled sound. She sensed Miss Winifred looking at her and schooled her mouth into a flat line. Now was the wrong time to let her peculiar sense of humor off its leash.

  Think of something sad, she told herself firmly. Think of Dylan Thomas spinning in his grave.

  A raven made liquid noises as it talked to itself in the cottonwoods. The sounds were too much like laughter for Carly's comfort. She bit the inside of her lip-hard-and hid her emotions beneath a blank face. It was the same thing she'd done all through her school years, when assignments about searching out your parents were given out, or when questions were asked about her family history.

  She was adopted. The file was sealed. End of assignment and casual conversation.

  But not an end to feeling different,
to being outside the vast mainstream of human experience, a nameless reject from someone's family tree.

  Stop with the pity party, Carly told herself. Martha and Glenn raised me better than most kids are raised by their biological parents.

  She shifted, trying to bring her feet to life.

  The minister was made of sterner stuff. Only his lips moved.

  Andy glanced sideways at Carly and winked. She ignored him. Even without the green tinge to his skin, the scion of the Quintrell family didn't appeal to her. He was a little too in love with himself. All right, a lot too in love with himself. Unfortunately, other than the employees' kids, Carly was the only woman under forty on the whole ranch. Two seconds after Andy met her, he'd decided that she was going to take the curse off the boring rural nights.

  Finally the minister ran out of poets and signaled for the casket to be lowered into the grave. The mechanism worked slowly and not quite silently. When it was finally still, Josh threw the obligatory handful of dirt on the casket.

  "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," he said quietly.

  Winifred surprised everyone by dumping a double handful of soil onto the casket. Her expression said she'd like to shovel more in and be done with it-and the Senator.

  Carly made a mental note of her employer's hard pleasure in the Senator's death. If any of the Quintrells were surprised by Winifred's actions, no one showed it. That, too, intrigued Carly. Emotions were the flesh and wine of family history.

  As the governor and his wife withdrew from the graveside, Father Roybal went to Josh. "I'm sorry, my son. Although the Senator never confessed to me, I feel that God will welcome this good man's soul into His keeping."

  Winifred made a sound rather like the raven's.

  Josh ignored her. "Thank you, Father Roybal. You and your church have brought comfort to many of New Mexico's citizens. I'll be certain to express the Quintrell family's appreciation in a more tangible way in the years to come."