Always Time to Die Read online

  “But not all women are suited for marriage, are they?” Carly continued in the same friendly voice. “Though it’s a pity you don’t have Miss Winifred’s resources. Being a housemaid at seventy sounds quite bleak.” Carly’s sympathetic smile was all teeth.

  Alma was forced to smile and nod in return, the timeless response of someone who didn’t comprehend a language—or wanted to appear not to understand.

  “Very good,” Carly said. “You’re quite pretty when you smile.” For a bitch.

  The maid turned abruptly and led the way through a living room, past a small kitchen-dining area, and through the double doors that combined Winifred’s bedroom with her sister’s rooms. With a curt gesture, Alma turned and walked away, her spine straight and her dark slacks rumpled.

  Carly took in the room with a glance. Sylvia Quintrell was a slight, motionless mound beneath the blankets of a hospital bed. An IV dripped fluid and medicines into her body. A feeding tube lay concealed beneath the blankets. The bed was positioned so that its occupant could look out over the patio gardens and pool. The murmur of Jeanette Dykstra’s muckraking talk show Behind the Scenes came from an old TV set.

  The room was hot enough to grow orchids.

  Winifred sat in a leather recliner next to the bed. She was wearing black—blouse, jacket, slacks, and shoes. It wasn’t out of respect for the recently dead Senator. Black was simply her preferred color.

  Her eyes were closed and her right hand was wrapped around her sister’s slack fingers. An old, heavy Indian turquoise ring and matching cuff bracelet rested uneasily on her lean hand and wrist. The silver gleamed with the soft patina of constant use.

  Slowly Winifred opened her eyes. They were dark, full of emotions. Carly wondered if the older woman would be willing to share those emotions with the family historian she’d hired, apparently over the protests of the rest of the Quintrells.

  “Sit down,” Winifred said, gesturing toward an overstuffed chair. “Take off your jacket.” She leaned forward and fed a chunk of piñon into the fire. “I keep the room warm for Sylvia.”

  Gratefully, Carly peeled off her jacket and hung it over the arm of the chair. “Thank you.” She looked toward the bed. “How is she today?”

  “Same as every day.”

  Right, Carly told herself. For now, I’ll shelve the topic of Sylvia Quintrell.

  Winifred shifted the recliner lever so that the chair supported her legs. The soles of her sturdy shoes were scuffed and worn. Her skin was pale beneath its normal olive color. She looked exhausted and determined in equal measure. Breathing seemed to be an effort.

  “We could do this tomorrow,” Carly said. “The funeral must have tired you.”

  Winifred waved a gaunt hand, dismissing the younger woman’s concern. “I’m fine.”

  Carly twisted the microphone pickup so that the tiny head was pointed toward Winifred. The sound quality would be uneven, depending on who was speaking, but she was used to that. She opened her laptop, called up the Quintrell file, and prepared to type as needed.

  “You’re aware that my recorder is on?” she asked.

  “You told me that whenever I saw you I should assume I’m being recorded,” Winifred said. “I have a good memory, Miss May. I don’t need any fancy gadgets to tell me what I heard a few hours ago.”

  Neither did Carly, but the recordings sure saved arguments over who said what and when.

  “I envy your memory,” Carly said, checking that the computer was ready to go. She had a digital camera, too, but didn’t want to start taking pictures until everyone was more at ease with her.

  “Where do you want to start?” Winifred asked.

  “That depends on what you want to accomplish. How far do you want to trace the Quintrell history—”

  “I don’t give a tinker’s damn about Quintrell history,” Winifred cut in. “It’s Sylvia’s and my history I want preserved. We go back a lot farther than the Quintrells. I traced us back all the way to Ferdinand the Great.”

  “Fascinating,” Carly said, trying not to sigh. Most connections to distant, famous ancestors were wishful thinking. Modern descendants weren’t happy to hear that their illustrious family tree existed only in some dead grandparent’s mind. “Do you have documentation?”

  “My mother got it from her mother, who got it from her father’s sister, who was told by her mother.”

  “I see. Anecdotal evidence is always a lively part of any family history,” Carly said carefully. “Physical evidence, such as land grants, marriage and birth registers, military records, church—”

  “I have them, too,” Winifred interrupted curtly. The hand wearing the turquoise ring waved in the direction of a huge antique desk. “All the way back to the seventeenth century.”

  Wonderful, Carly thought with no enthusiasm at all. That leaves a gap of six hundred years before we get to the eleventh century and Ferdinand the Great.

  Carly typed quickly on her laptop computer. “I’m eager to go through those papers, but I’m unclear as to what you want me to do. How far back in time do you want my narrative of your ancestors’ lives to go?”

  Something unpleasant flared in Winifred’s black eyes. It was in her voice, too, rough and nearly savage.

  Computer keys clicked softly as Carly’s flying fingers took note of the dark emotion.

  “The original land grant was given to the husband of Ignacia Isabel María Velásquez y Oñate before the Reconquista,” Winifred said.

  Carly flipped through her memory of early Spanish history in the area that became New Mexico, and pulled out the date. “Late in the seventeenth century.”

  “My ancestors held land in Taos before the Indians rebelled.”

  “That’s what makes this so exciting for me.” Carly leaned forward with an eagerness she couldn’t hide. “I love working with a family line that has roots deep in a state’s history. Do you know the name of the original holder of the ancestral land grant?”

  “Juan de los Dios Oñate.”

  Carly wondered if the older woman knew that “de los Dios” most often meant a bastard child. De Jesús was another popular name for the fatherless. The custom came from centuries earlier when marriage was expected only of noblemen, but conception came to all classes of women. The luckiest of the noble bastards found favor with their aristocratic fathers. Apparently Juan de los Dios Oñate had been one of the lucky ones. Land grants hadn’t been handed out to people who didn’t have influence with the Spanish court.

  “Do you—” began Carly.

  A sharp gesture from Winifred cut off the words. She leaned toward the bed, staring intently. Sylvia’s head turned slowly toward the room. Her dark eyes were open, and as vacant as the wind.

  “What is it, querida?” Winifred said gently to her sister. “Did you hear the new voice? This is Miss Carolina May. She has come to write our family history. All of it.” Winifred’s smile was as predatory as her voice was soothing. “There will be justice, dear sister. On the grave of our mother the curandera, I promise this.”

  TAOS

  MONDAY MORNING

  6

  DAN SHUT THE WEATHERED DOOR OF THE TAOS MORNING RECORD BEHIND HIM. HE nodded to the receptionist-secretary whose improbable red hair defied the lines in her face. She’d worked for the Record longer than Dan had been alive and her hair color never changed.

  “Those better not be doughnuts,” she said, sniffing the air hopefully. “My doctor told me to watch the sugar.”

  “I never touch doughnuts,” Dan lied, heading for the editor’s door.

  “Huh. There’s powdered sugar on your lips.”

  “Oops. Snow. That’s it—snow.”

  Smiling, shaking her head, the woman went back to typing.

  Dan walked down the hallway. The uneven floor was the legacy of centuries of use and the random settling of the earth beneath the building. The door to the editor’s office was ajar for the simple reason that the doorframe itself was warped.

  Gus lo
oked up. As usual, there was a telephone pressed to his ear. He held up two fingers.

  Two minutes.

  Dan set the box of doughnuts on the desk, poured himself a mug of the black sludge Gus called coffee, and looked over the framed front pages in the editor’s office. Except for those chronicling the Senator’s career, and that of his son the governor, most of the biggest headlines were more than a century old. In Taos, not much in the way of banner headlines happened from year to year.

  The printing presses had arrived in the 1830s, and the Spanish newspaper that ultimately became known as the Taos Morning Record began. The Mexican governor made large land grants in 1842, with the major benefactors being Señor Baubien and Señor Miranda of Taos. Soon afterward, Lucien Maxwell married Baubien’s daughter and set the stage for the Lincoln County War. Kit Carson and Lucien Maxwell, both of Taos, scouted for John Frémont in the 1840s. The Mexican-American War flared in 1846. The Civil War rated a passing mention because it kept the newly created Territory of New Mexico from becoming a state. Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett played out their violent destinies in the 1880s. Statehood in 1912 rated a headline as big as the paper.

  After that, very little that was both local and newsworthy happened until the 1960s, when a ski resort was opened, the Senator’s oldest son was killed in Vietnam and his other son injured, the hippies invaded Taos County, and a triple murderer was caught with a bloody knife. The fact that one of the women murdered was the Senator’s wild-child daughter—a clinically designated pathological liar and a famous druggie—was discreetly mentioned, but not emphasized. Just one of three female bodies.

  Much more ink was given to the Senator’s grief over the death of his oldest son and his dedication to discovering and celebrating the service history of every Taos County veteran of the Vietnam War. Instead of lobbying for a memorial just for his son, the Senator dug into his own pocket and commissioned a statue listing the names of each Taos County hero of an unpopular war.

  Other important local news was the big bridge over the Rio Grande gorge outside of town, which saved the locals a long detour and increased tourism greatly. The most recent excitement was years ago, in 1998, the four hundredth birthday party of New Mexico, historic land of many nations.

  Is this why I came back? Dan wondered. To read about how men and women from a rural county had to go halfway around the world to die?

  No matter who lives or dies, nothing really changes.

  Gus hung up and reached for the carton of pastries. “Thanks for the doughnuts. I’m starving. Marti was up all night with the youngest and my cooking is caca. Is Dad’s back still bothering him?”

  Dan turned and watched his foster brother take a huge bite out of a bear claw. “I’m starving, too, so save at least one for me. And if it’s still bothering him, it didn’t show. We hiked six miles yesterday.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “I felt like it. He felt like coming along.”

  “Huh.” Gus swallowed the last of one doughnut and reached for another. “Any coffee?”

  “Besides the sewage you keep in that pot?”

  Gus winced. “Yeah.”

  “Sorry.” Dan saluted with the mug he’d barely sipped from. “This is as good as it gets.”

  “I keep thinking if it’s bad enough I won’t drink as much.”

  “Has it worked?”

  Gus eyed the coffeepot warily. “Most of the time. But I didn’t get much sleep last night, so…” He shrugged and refilled the stained mug that rarely left his desk. “How’s the leg?”

  “Better.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “It’s always true.”

  Gus sipped, grimaced, and hastily ate more pastry. “Considering that your leg wasn’t worth much when you got here, I guess you’re right.” Covertly he looked at his older brother’s posture. Erect and relaxed at the same time. Must be some trick they taught in Special Ops, because the regular army sure hadn’t made a long-term dent in Gus’s habitual slouch.

  “Where’d you hike?” Gus asked.

  “Castillo Ridge.”

  “Pretty. In the summer.”

  Dan shrugged and ignored the question implicit in his brother’s words.

  Gus went back to the sweets. He’d learned in the last few months that when Dan closed a subject, it stayed that way.

  The phone rang.

  Gus picked it up, listened, and automatically glanced through a window into the adjacent room to see if one of the paper’s three part-time reporters was warming a chair. “Thanks. Someone will be there in ten minutes.” He hung up, hit the intercom, and gave Mano his marching orders. The reporter slammed a hat over his red hair, grabbed his jacket and camera, and hurried out.

  “Bar brawl?” Dan asked idly.

  “Cockfight. The sheriff busted Armando again.”

  “Sandoval?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought he was in the joint for running dope.”

  “That’s his older brother. His mama assures everyone that Armando is a good boy, goes to mass every day and twice on Sundays, yada yada yada.”

  “Is he dirty?” Dan asked.

  “Oh yeah. Never make it stick, though. The hispanos were here a long time before you Yankees, and the border is a joke played by mother nature on Uncle Sam. If the sheriff gets within ten miles of the Sandoval clan’s dope operations, bells go off from here to the poppy fields of Mexico.” Gus yawned and rubbed his face with one hand. “Every so often they throw the sheriff a bone and get caught with fighting cocks. Big honking deal.”

  “Sounds like the same old same old.”

  “Nothing changes but the names of the players.” Gus grinned suddenly. “I love it.”

  Dan hesitated, then asked, “Don’t you ever get tired?”

  “Of what?”

  “Crooks being crooks. Cops being cops. A big dumb mutt chasing its own dumb butt.”

  “Nope.”

  “But you don’t print even half of what you know. Doesn’t that get to you? Don’t you want to grab people and shake them and say, ‘Look around you, fool. Everything you think is true is a lie.’”

  Gus’s dark eyes widened. “No, I can’t say as I do.”

  Dan shook his head.

  “Look,” Gus said calmly. “There’s print news about elections and drunks and governments and traffic lights and cockfights. Then there’s what everybody knows about everybody else, the kind of stuff that’s better kept out of print. And sometimes there are the kind of secrets that only one or two people know, the kind people kill over. I don’t look for those kinds of secrets. Neither does anyone else with half a brain.”

  “What do you do when public and private knowledge intersect?”

  “That’s when I don’t like my job, because that’s when people I know are getting hurt.”

  Dan shook his head again. “The Sandoval clan is running drugs for one of Mexico’s highest elected officials, pimping for underage Mexican prostitutes who may or may not have agreed to their new career, and selling babies as a sideline. The Quintrells have used public office to get rich at the cost of people who are poor or simply unaware—BLM land leases, national forest leases, land swaps with the government to make the family land more valuable, employing illegals, legislative favors for their—”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Gus interrupted. “Hell, tell me something everybody doesn’t know. Have you ever heard of a big politician who left office poorer than when he went in?”

  “Why isn’t that in your newspaper?”

  “My newspaper? In my dreams. Guess who owns the newspaper now?”

  “The Quintrells?”

  “God, no. That would be too obvious. A good friend of a rich donor who—”

  “Never mind,” Dan said over his brother’s words. “I can fill in the blanks. Only happy Quintrell news makes print.”

  Gus shrugged. “You think it’s any different with any other paper anywhere in the world? All papers have a
n editorial page. Daily news stories that contradict that editorial view don’t get published or else they’re put way in the back with the personals.” He yawned. “Stories that polish the editorial viewpoint get good play above the fold on the front page. Human nature, that’s all. No conspiracy or secret handshakes necessary.”

  Dan grabbed a doughnut and bit into it like it was an enemy. He knew all about editorials and human nature and the denial of the elephant under the electoral rug.

  “None of this is news to you,” Gus said, “so why the snarl?”

  Dan shrugged and chewed. “Sometimes I get a gutful, that’s all.”

  “You came back from wherever you went with a permanent gutful.”

  “There was plenty to eat.”

  “And you still don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why bother? Nobody wants to know.”

  “I do.”

  Dan dusted off his hands. “No you don’t. Not really. No one does. And I don’t blame them. I wish I didn’t know.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “So, does Lila have the flu?”

  Gus swallowed the change of subject along with the bitter coffee. “Seems to. It’s going through the kids one at a time.”

  “The joys of parenthood. Have you and Marti had the bug?”

  “So far so good.” He grinned slyly. “Want to come to dinner?”

  “Sure. I’ll cook.”

  “I was kidding. I don’t want you to get sick.”

  “I won’t. I’ve been inoculated against stuff you can’t even dream of.”

  “You sure? I’m afraid Marti’s coming down with it. She looked pale this morning.”

  “What do you want me to fix?”

  “Garlic chicken,” Gus said instantly.

  “When do you want to eat?”

  “Six. If I’m not there—”

  “I’ll leave it in the oven on warm,” Dan said, “just like Mom used to.”

  “You don’t have to. Really. I was just kidding.”

  The shadow of a smile flickered over Dan’s mouth. “I want to. I can’t stop or even slow down the train wreck of international politics, but I can see that my brother and his family get a warm meal when they’re sick.”