Chapter 42
TAOS
EARLY FRIDAY AFTERNOON
CARLY PUSHED AGAINST THE PLYWOOD, HOLDING IT IN PLACE WHILE DAN HAMMERED nails in. The result was ugly, but kept the wind out of the little house. And right now, the wind was blowing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes.
"I still think-" Dan began.
"No," she cut in loudly. "Not unless you have something new to say."
"Shit."
"That's not new."
He said something in Portuguese.
"Same word, different language," Carly said.
He drove the rest of the nails in silence, letting the crack of steel on steel express his frustration. The longer he thought about Carly's position, the less he liked it. He didn't need a sixth sense to know that the whole situation was spiraling out of control.
How can anything so sweet and soft-looking be so bloody stubborn?
Carly winced as the final hammer blow drove the nail in so far the hammer left a dent in the plywood. "Feel better now?"
He shot her a jade green glance. Then the corner of his mouth turned up. "Yeah."
She let out a long breath of relief and smiled at him. "Thank you."
"For what?"
"Not hammering on me until I gave up."
"Would it have worked?"
Her smile faded. "I'm scared, Dan."
He tucked the hammer into the back of his jeans and pulled her close. "That's the first intelligent thing you've said in hours." Before she could argue, he kissed her until she forgot everything, even fear. Slowly he lifted his mouth and leaned his forehead against hers. "We'll get through this. There might be some mutual yelling from time to time, but I respect your courage too much to want to hammer it out of you. Okay?"
His eyes were a vivid green blur to her, whether from her tears or being so close she couldn't focus, she didn't know and didn't care. "Okay. But I don't feel real brave right now. I keep thinking about being alone on that ranch road, no one to pull me back and make me walk and…"
"I keep thinking about it, too. I don't want to lose you, Carolina May. I spent too long wondering if I'd ever find someone like you."
Her stomach growled as she kissed him. "You see what you do to me," she said.
"Starve you?"
"Make me feel safe enough to be hungry."
He smiled slowly and took her hand. "C'mon. I've got chili left. I'll heat it while you check out more of those so-called might-be senatorial offspring."
He opened the front door and nudged Carly into the relative warmth of the house.
"The problem is that a lot of those offspring are dead," Carly said, frowning, "others have moved away, and all I have to go on is community speculation. The only way to be certain if they're the Senator's is DNA testing, and for that to be effective, we have to have a DNA profile of the Senator first. Short of exhuming him, there's no way to get a sample for testing. Unless he froze his sperm for the ages, or something like that."
"I'm sure if he had, it would have been front-page news in town." The door closed behind Dan, shutting out the wind. "As for exhumation to take a tissue sample, I don't see that happening short of a court order, and I don't see us getting a court order."
"Not unless the governor agrees, and I figure that will be about the time they hold the Summer Olympics in Siberia. Josh Quintrell really doesn't like Winifred's project."
"Ya think?" Dan asked sardonically. He lit a match, turned on a burner on the stove, and started heating chili.
"So why keep on pursuing the maybe offspring?" Carly asked. "It's a waste of time. We can't prove anything more than rumor and innuendo, and that's not the sort of thing I feel happy about putting in a family history."
"Why pursue the offspring? Because Winifred told you to and she's paying the bills?"
Carly smiled wryly. "Okay. But it doesn't get us any closer to why somebody wants me to leave."
"If we assume that someone doesn't want the history done-"
"Good assumption."
"-then getting the history done will get us closer to whoever is behind scaring you," Dan finished.
It will also get Carly the hell out of Taos.
But he kept that to himself because she didn't want to hear it.
Carly's expression said that she wasn't impressed with her assignment. With a shrug, she got a three-ring binder from one of her boxes in the living room and sat at the little card table that served as a dining table.
"Okay," she said, flipping the binder open. "Here's what I have so far. Let me know if any of the names tickle your fancy. Jesus Mendoza-son of Carlota Mendoza, a maid at the Quintrell ranch-went into the army, went to war, got decorated, married a San Diego woman, had four kids, died fifteen years ago. None of the kids have any connection to Taos or the Quintrells that I've been able to discover."
Dan wrapped some tortillas in tinfoil and tucked them in the oven.
"Maria Elena Sandoval, daughter of one of the many Sandovals running through New Mexico in general and the Quintrell ranch in particular. Cousin lovers every one of them."
He snickered.
"Maria Elena Sandoval finally married a gringo and moved to Colorado. Two children. No particular contact with New Mexico. She's dead, the children have married and had children of their own. One lives in Florida. One in California."
Dan tested the chili, stirred, and listened to the litany of people who were either old as dirt or already dead. Some hadn't left children. Most had. None of their names made him pause.
"Randal Mullins. His mother was Susan Mullins, who worked at the ranch."
Dan frowned and stirred chili. "Mullins. Susan's son."
Carly checked. "Yes."
"I've run across his name before. Isn't he on the Senator's monument to the local dead in Vietnam?"
Carly flipped to the back of the binder, where she had printouts of important documents. The newspaper article that had listed the dead soldiers was one of them. She ran her finger down the column of names.
"Good catch," she said after a moment. "Randal Mullins. Died in 1968. Four years after the Senator's first son died. Wonder if they knew each other?"
"It's possible," Dan said slowly. "A lot of guys made it a point to get to know other soldiers who were from their own home areas. Made them feel less lonely. But since Mullins and A.J. are both dead, having them know each other won't do us much good."
"Do you suppose the governor knew about Mullins, a man who was possibly his half brother?"
"Doubt it. The governor didn't spend much time here as a kid, so he wouldn't have heard the gossip. I think he was in Vietnam when Mullins died. I'll have to check."
Carly sighed. "Right. Anyway, Randal never married, so we can't ask his children what they remember, if anything, of their father's childhood or their grandmother's likelihood of having a Quintrell child."
"Randal could have had children without a marriage license."
"Bastards having bastards," she muttered.
He smiled slightly.
She made a mark by Randal's name. "How would we go about chasing his offspring?"
"He had a half sister, Betty. Mom went to school with her."
"Your mother mentioned her?"
"Fat chance." Dan spooned chili into a bowl. "There's a photo somewhere in the newspaper archive of two pretty grammar school kids dancing around a Maypole. Mom was one of the kids. Betty was another."
"Is Betty or her mother still alive?"
"Susan Mullins was killed along with my grandmother in 1968. Another sex worker was killed at the same time. Some guy wired on angel dust."
"So Susan knew your grandmother?"
Dan shrugged. "They worked the same alleys, if that's what you mean."
Carly winced. "What about Betty?"
"She died twenty years ago, after her husband divorced her. Suicide. She worked at the Quintrell ranch until the booze and downers got to her. I think you have the article about it on your computer or in the prin
touts."
"I do?"
"Under the single or double hits for the name Quintrell. How hot do you like your chili?"
"Are we talking temperature or spice?" she asked, flipping through a list of articles she'd printed out.
"Temp," he said.
"Anything above freezing."
He smiled, dished a bowl of chili for her, stuck a spoon in, and set everything in front of her on the card table. "Tortillas?"
"Please," she said absently, reaching for her computer. She booted it up and began to eat while the machine tested all systems, reassuring the silicon brain that everything was in working order.
Dan sat down kitty-corner from her, uncovered the tortillas, and flopped one over her bowl of chili. She rolled the tortilla, scooped chili, and kept on eating, waiting for her computer to be fully functional. Then she did a search of the Quintrell database for an article that mentioned the Quintrell name along with the name Betty.
"Was Mullins Betty's last name?" Carly asked.
"No. It was something common. Smith or Jones or Johnson, something like that."
"How do you know all this stuff? And don't tell me you grew up here. A lot of people did and they don't know squat about the local begats."
Dan chewed, swallowed chili, and swallowed again. "I was an odd kid. People interested me. Not just in the here and now, but what they were when they were young, and their parents, and grandparents." He shrugged. "Maybe it came from not knowing who my grandfather was. Maybe I was just nosy. I spent a lot of time checking out old school yearbooks, working in the newspaper archives, trying to computerize everything so all I had to do was hit a button and watch the patterns emerge."
"Patterns?"
"Who was named, who wasn't, who stood next to the Quintrells in the photos, who didn't, who went to weddings and funerals and baptisms and political rallies." He shrugged. "All kinds of things. Like I said. Nosy."
"Or curious about all the things your mother refused to talk about."
"That too."
"So what did you learn?"
"More about local marriages, births, divorces, and drunks than I should have," he said dryly. "Mom saw me drawing up these elaborate relationship charts featuring people on the Quintrell ranch and their cross-connections with the local community-it was for my senior high school project. Man, did the caca fly. She got furious and said that the past was dead and buried and should stay that way."
Carly's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. "Did you argue with her?"
"No, I asked her if it was true that the Senator was my greatgrandfather."
Carly swallowed hard. "What did she say?"
"She told me if I ever mentioned that name again in her home, I could start packing."
"Yikers."
"Yeah. So I shifted the topic of my senior project to protecting newspaper archives through specially designed computer programs. Then I started applying to every out-of-state college that might have me. I'd had a gutful of this place."
"Where'd you end up?" Carly asked.
"Georgetown. Did I mention I was a geek with high grades who swam a mean backstroke and won various shooting contests? Georgetown gave me a full scholarship."
"Athletic?"
"Nope. They wanted my brain, not my body."
She smiled to herself. "They didn't know what they were missing."
His thumb skimmed her jaw line. "Neither did I. Wait, it was Smith."
"What?"
"Betty Smith, then she married someone-Shilling or Shafter or something like that. Melissa is their kid."
"Melissa Moore?"
He nodded and took a big bite of tortilla.
"So Melissa could tell us about her mother who was half sister to Randy Mullins who might have been the Senator's bastard?" Carly asked.
Dan swallowed tortilla. "Maybe. If she knows anything and wants to talk."
"I'm sure Winifred will help with that."
"If she's well enough to care. What about the rest of those names, the maybe-bastards?"
"I hate that label."
"What?"
"Bastard. Like it's the kid's fault."
"The only bastards I care about are self-made." He tugged at a stray piece of her hair, the one she kept twisting around her finger when she was fretting. "Illegitimate child takes too long to say and love child is the kind of lie that turns my stomach. My mother wasn't any man's love child."
The edge to Dan's voice reminded Carly that small towns had long memories and short forgiveness of personal choices. Diana had suffered for being born outside of marriage. Diana's son accepted that, but he didn't have to like it.
Carly turned back to her list of names of children perhaps conceived and certainly forgotten by Andrew Jackson Quintrell III, known to most as the Senator and to his sister-in-law as a philandering son of a bitch. The more Carly knew about him, the more she agreed with Winifred.
"Sharon Miller," Carly said.
Dan shook his head. "No bells on that one."
"She was the daughter of the Senator's social secretary, born two years after he retired to Taos in 1977."
"What happened to her?"
"Her mother took her and left Taos when she was a year old. No contact with the Quintrells after that, at least not that I've found in the records. Next one is Christopher Smith. Son of the replacement social secretary. She was married, by the way, so it's likely the baby belonged to the husband, not the hound dog. It lasted six years."
"The marriage?"
"The job with the Senator."
Dan spooned a second helping of chili into his bowl and wondered how many more children the fornicating old goat had sired.
Chapter 43
QUINTRELL RANCH
FRIDAY EVENING
THE WINTER SUN WAS GONE FROM THE SKY, LEAVING ONLY THE FAINTEST TINGE OF yellow-green along the western horizon. Light glowed in great sheets of glassy gold along the front of the ranch house. The wind was fingernails of ice scraping over everything, lifting the recent dry snow into swirls and eddies.
"Brrrr," Carly said as soon as she opened the door of Dan's truck. "There's a reason I don't ski."
"Watch the path to the door," he said. "Nothing has been salted or sanded."
"Maybe they don't want visitors."
"More likely they're just easing back now that the governor's gone. Besides, the place is for sale. Once that sign went up, everyone working here had at least one foot out the door."
Squinting against the wind, Carly watched the last bit of color drain from the sky. Then she turned toward the buildings, seeing the Spanish influence in the old and high-tech modern in the new. They didn't clash; they were simply from different cultures and times.
"Centuries of tradition and he's just walking away from it," she said sadly.
"The governor?"
"Yes."
"He was never really a part of the ranch, or the family, for that matter," Dan said. "That was reserved for the heir apparent, Andrew Jackson Quintrell IV All Josh got was a long string of military boarding schools."
"Still…"
Dan put his arm around her waist and tucked her under his arm, shielding her from as much of the wind as he could. "Not everyone loves the past, Carolina May."
She sighed and leaned her shoulder against him for a moment. "Would you have walked away from this?"
"In a heartbeat. Let the governor sell it to someone who loves the land, loves the wildness and the silence and the wind."
She looked up at him. Against the radiant twilight, the planes of his face were drawn in shades of black. Only his eyes were alive, vivid. "It| sounds like you love it."
"The land, yes. The people?" Dan shrugged and started down the path, keeping her close to his side in case she slipped. "Most of the people can go to hell."
It was the lack of heat in his voice that told Carly he meant every word. "Don't you have any good memories of here?"
"Sure."
"Then why do you hate it so?"
"I don't hate it. I just don't like people who are more cruel than survival requires."
"Like the Senator?"
"He's one," Dan agreed. "Then there are the people who ragged on my mother for being the daughter of the town whore."
"And on you for being your mother's son."
"That stopped after I beat the crap out of some Sandovals."
She winced. "And you're still paying for it."
"Like I said-the smaller the town, the longer the memory. Too bad the people around here aren't as big as the land. But they aren't."
"Some of them are."
"Damned few. Not that the people here are worse than people anywhere else," he added. "They're simply no better than they have to be. And sometimes, well, sometimes that's just not good enough to get the job done."
He rapped on the front door.
A moment later, Melissa opened the door. Clearly she'd been waiting for them since she'd seen headlights coming up the long driveway. "Hello, Dan, Carly. Winifred said you'd be visiting. Something about wanting to talk to people, take pictures, and get the feeling of the ranch outdoors at night?"
"That's right," Carly said.
It had been as good an excuse as any she could think of to search the family graveyard and find out if the Senator's wild child had been buried there.
Melissa shrugged like the whole thing sounded like nonsense to her but it really wasn't her business. "Both of you are looking much better than I expected after talking to the sheriff."
Carly made a noncommittal sound and studied the other woman, trying to see Melissa as the granddaughter of the Senator. Fair hair artfully frosted to hide any gray. Eyes the right size and tilt to be Quintrell, but the wrong color. Long legs like the governor, long fingers. Like Dan.
Okay, stop right there, Carly told herself fiercely. Fingers are either long or short, fat or thin. That's four categories for all of humanity, which means a twenty-five percent chance that otherwise unrelated folks will have long fingers.
"We heard you were ill, too," Dan said.
"That will teach me to eat canapes," she said, patting a round hip. "I didn't need the calories anyway."
"So the sheriff still thinks it was the food?" Carly asked.
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