St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

enough to ask Dan more questions, but didn’t. She really hated sugary or milky coffee. If she asked for it, she’d have to drink it. “No thanks.”
    Lucia put the tray in front of her guests, sat down next to Carly, and grabbed the envelope. It was several inches thick and patched many times with various kinds of tape.
    “It’s been years since I looked at any of these.” Lucia pulled out a sheaf of photos of all sizes. “None of the kids are interested yet. Maybe they’ll never be.” She shrugged. “What will be will be.”
    Carly looked at the weariness on Lucia’s face, in the line of her shoulders. “I appreciate this, but I don’t want to keep you from anything.”
    Sleep, for instance. The woman looked like she could use a few weeks of it, uninterrupted.
    Lucia’s smile was tired and real. “The children are sick. It will pass. I wouldn’t want to disappoint Miss Winifred.”
    “She would understand if—”
    “No, no.” Lucia waved off Carly’s words and began spreading pictures on the coffee table.
    Most of them were school photos, baptisms, marriages, engagements, Quinceaneras—a girl’s coming-out party at fifteen—first babies, funerals, graduations, and formal celebrations. Since they weren’t of members of the Quintrell or Castillo family line, the pictures weren’t much use to Carly. She’d seen many like them; only the names attached to the smiling faces differed. That was one of the things that struck her each time she opened a family’s photo collection—the sameness of the pictures, the singularity of the identities, and the subtle genetic threads weaving it all together. She’d become pretty good at picking out the shape of eyes, smiles, posture, hairlines, bone structure, and the like, as each appeared and reappeared from generation to generation.
    So she smiled and commented on healthy babies, beautiful young girls, and handsome men as picture after picture drifted into her lap.
    “Wait,” Carly said, holding up a faded color photo. “Isn’t that Senator Quintrell on the right?”
    Dan went from half-asleep to full alert.
    “ Sí, yes,” Lucia said. “He gave a big party on his ranch the first time he was elected from this district, and every year thereafter. Armando’s grandfather, Mario, was always one of his biggest supporters. The Senator remembered friends.” She flipped through a lapful of pictures. “See, here he is again, at the baptism of Armando’s father, and at Easter mass in the San Geronimo chapel in Taos.”
    Carly looked at all the photos, but reserved special attention for the ones that had been taken at the yearly barbecue. Winifred hadn’t showed her anything like these. From the clothes and hairdos on the women, the first barbecue had been held in the 1930s. Another photo displayed clothing from the 1970s, platform shoes and unlikely combinations of colors and fabrics. A third photo showed the full-circle skirts, stiff petticoats, and poodle appliqués of the 1950s.
    One of the women—a teenager, actually—tickled Carly’s sense of the familiar. She was certain she’d seen the woman before, or maybe her sister or mother or cousin or aunt or daughter. It was in the way the young woman held herself, the tilt of her chin, the shape of her eyes.
    “Who is this?” Carly asked.
    “The Senator’s daughter, Liza.” Lucia crossed herself. “La pobrecita.”
    Silently Dan willed Carly to put the photo down and keep going.
    She didn’t. She let other photos pile up in her lap while she memorized the young woman in the picture. This was one of the few pictures she’d seen of Senator Quintrell’s second daughter. The wild child. Either the Quintrell collection had been purged after the family threw her out, or else there never had been many photos of the beautiful baby who grew up to be something ugly—clinically diagnosed as a pathological liar, arrested as an alcoholic, a junkie, and a whore.
    Impassively Dan looked at the picture of his grandmother and said not one word.

QUINTRELL RANCH
TUESDAY, BEFORE DAWN
15
    CARLY STRUGGLED OUT OF A NIGHTMARE OF GUTTED RATS AND BLOOD SPURTING IN time to a ringing phone. The phone, at least, was real.
    With a groan she sat up, shivering in the chill air, and tried to remember where she was so she would know where the phone was. The only light in the room came from the moon. Her breath hung in the air. Despite her best efforts, the fire in the little adobe hearth had gone out, leaving the room