St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

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