Always Time to Die

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “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.

  QUINTRELL FAMILY GRAVEYARD

  TUESDAY MORNING

  2

  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.”

  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 passé,” 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 Senator’s grave.

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

  TAOS

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  3

  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.”
<
br />   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 carnitas. 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. Piñon 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.