St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

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 canapés,” she said, patting a round hip. “I didn’t need the calories anyway.”
    “So the sheriff still thinks it was the food?” Carly asked.
    “That’s what he said.”
    Before Carly could say anything more, Dan’s arm tightened around her waist. She glanced at him. A slight negative motion of his head told her that he didn’t want to upset Melissa.
    Yet.
    Carly smiled and said