St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

archive after a tornado. Piles of pictures were everywhere—table, chairs, bed, dresser, leaning against the wall, and all over the floor.
    “Okay,” Carly said. She peeled off her slightly dusty cotton gloves and pulled on a clean pair. “Normally I’d go over all these in detail with Winifred first, but she wasn’t interested in any photo that had anyone except a Castillo in it.”
    Winifred’s illness, which had severely limited the interviews, was bad enough. But her stubborn determination to ignore the Quintrells, Sandovals, and everyone else not a Castillo was making Carly’s work a lot harder than it had to be. No matter what Winifred’s prejudice dictated, the families were all deeply intertwined. Leaving out such important connections would gut the family history.
    You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit, Carly reminded herself.
    She didn’t think that digging up a list of the Senator’s bastards made up for otherwise ignoring the Quintrells. Especially as the list of his lovers was as long as her arm. When the Senator hadn’t been in Santa Fe or Washington, D.C., he must have been shagging everything female in Taos County. It gave Carly a whole new slant on the disease called satyriasis.
    “Let’s see what we have,” she said.
    “A disaster, that’s what.” Dan gestured to the papers everywhere. “I’ll have to rig hammocks for us to sleep in.”
    She grinned. “You rig them, I’ll fill them with photos.”
    “You would, too.”
    “You bet. This is the messiest part of the job, and in some ways the most important.”
    He shook his head, but he was almost smiling. He’d enjoyed watching Carly’s concentration as she went through envelope after envelope of Winifred’s photos and decided on a probable date for each image. The much smaller group of Sandoval photos had been set out on the card table.
    When he wasn’t enjoying the view, he was running the names on Winifred’s list through his memory bank and that of the newspaper. Trying to take the times the Senator—at whatever age—had been home to diddle the locals and matching those times against the online birth registry nine or ten months later was like a logic problem.
    He enjoyed it.
    “We’ll start with the daguerreotypes,” she said. “Unless I see something that doesn’t fit, I’ll assume that the dags are no earlier than 1840 and probably no later than 1860.”
    “Why?”
    “Daguerre patented the process of photography on metal in 1840. By 1860, ambrotypes and tintypes largely replaced the daguerreotype.”
    “I’ve never heard of an ambrotype.”
    “Most people haven’t. They were produced on glass instead of metal. They were easy to look at. You didn’t have to tilt the glass this way and that to see the image, the way you do with a dag. See?”
    She held out a daguerreotype to Dan on her palm. He had to tip her hand in various directions before light met the metal at an angle that revealed the image. Even then, it wasn’t easy to see.
    “It shifts,” he said.
    “From a negative to positive image,” she agreed. “That’s how you know it’s a daguerreotype instead of a tintype.” She put the image back in its place. “Ambrotypes were a lot easier to produce than dags. No long exposures with the sitter’s head held immobile in a contraption that must have come from the Spanish Inquisition. Dags were expensive. Ambrotypes were cheaper. Not cheap, mind you. No new technology ever is. Ambrotypes were really popular in the mid-1850s.”
    “Then someone developed a better technology?”
    “Better, cheaper, and a whole lot quicker. Tintypes.”
    Dan looked at the various images scattered across his house. So many ways to take pictures, so many things to mount the images on to preserve them. “So tintypes are photographs on tin?”
    “No. Iron. Originally they were called ferrotypes or melainotypes, a salute to the iron backing. Then they got the name tintypes because tin shears were used to cut up the photographic plate into halves, quarters, sixths, ninths, even as small as one-inch square. There wasn’t another really significant advance in photography after that until the 1880s, when flexible film and Kodak cameras made everyone his own historian.”
    “I’d swear some of those paper photographs are older than 1880,” Dan said, looking at the bed.
    She followed his glance. “Absolutely. The paper print process was developed at the same time as daguerreotypes. But paper didn’t