St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

cheekbones. This woman is in full mourning clothes holding what appears to be a stillborn baby wrapped in baptismal white.”
    Dan’s fingers paused over the computer keyboard. “You’re joking.”
    “No.”
    He glanced up at her in disbelief.
    “It’s true,” Carly said. “Women often were photographed with their dead children and the image sent to distant family members as a kind of memorial for the dead child. With multiple camera lenses, multiple photos could be taken at the same time, so you could send out as many memorial photos as you had the money and patience for.”
    He raised his dark eyebrows. “A lot of cultures make offerings to the dead, but this is a new one to me.”
    “The nineteenth century had a much greater understanding of the inevitability of death and the importance of death rituals than we do in the twenty-first. They lived a lot closer to the bone then.”
    “So some of the men in those photos who look like death masks probably were?”
    “Dead?”
    “Yes.”
    She nodded and began photographing the tintype, talking as she worked. “Mortuary photos or funerary photos or whatever you call them had quite a vogue. They were a way to unite families separated by miles that couldn’t be covered any faster than a horse could gallop or a ship could sail.”
    He glanced sideways at Carly. She was wearing jeans and one of his old sweatshirts, no makeup, barefoot, clean white cotton gloves on her hands, wielding a high-tech camera, and talking matter-of-factly about the great American taboo—death.
    “Not that they didn’t pretty up death,” she added. “The family corpses were washed and dressed in their finest for the photographers. The only time death was taken head-on was with posthumous photos of criminals. Then the bodies were just propped up so that the camera could record the bullet holes and the faces. Proof of death, as it were. Much easier than hauling a corpse all over the West to claim a Dead or Alive reward.” She put her fists into the small of her back and stretched. “Same for hangings. Photo cards of executed outlaws were real moneymakers for some photographers.”
    Subtly Dan shifted in his chair, easing his healing leg into a new position.
    Carly saw the motion. “Maybe we should take a break.”
    “I’ve got another two hours before I get restless.”
    “But your leg—”
    “Is fine.” He held his hands over the keyboard. “What’s the next image?”
    She swallowed her objections and picked up the next tintype, describing the presentation case, background, and other pertinent aids to dating. “Same woman, different mourning dress, different baptismal wrap for the child, who looks to be perhaps two months old. Dress is very flat down the front, cinched severely at the waist, and has a short train. Probably late 1870s.”
    Dan typed in the description of the mortuary image. The next three tintypes were the same—only the style of the mourning clothes and the age of the dead child changed.
    “Okay, that takes care of the deceased,” Carly muttered, taking a final photo. “On to the kids that made it.”
    “Six dead children, none of them old enough to crawl. It’s a wonder that she survived,” Dan said. “You’re sure they’re all the same woman?”
    “The black rosary dangling from her hands looks the same in each image. When I enhance it digitally, I’ll be certain.”
    The next three tintypes were of living children, two girls and a boy. Even as a baby, the stamp of the first Andrew Jackson Quintrell came down in the son’s pale, brilliant eyes. His mother was in the shape of his jaw and the tiny ears.
    “If you’re right and the woman is Isobel,” Dan said, “then the boy is A. J. Quintrell Junior. His sisters are…” He frowned and rummaged in his mind through old research, the kind that had made his mother so angry she didn’t speak to him for a week. “María and Elena, I think. Their birth would have been announced in the newspaper. Ditto for their death.”
    “Do you remember any details? Winifred only talked about these,” Carly said, pointing to a swath of tintypes on the bed that looked very similar to the ones they had just recorded.
    He shook his head. “Mom never talked about her immediate parents, much less her great-greats.”
    Carly made a frustrated sound. “No matter what Winifred wants to believe, this is part of her family, too.”
    “She’s paying the bills.”
    “Still, I don’t like doing a half-assed