St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

checking out old school year-books, 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 great-grandfather.”
    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 jawline. “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.

QUINTRELL RANCH
FRIDAY EVENING
43
    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,”