St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

few more commands on the keyboard and hoped she would catch up with him soon. Never had the wait for someone to discover what was obvious to him seemed so long.
    While Dan worked, Carly unrolled a sheet of paper that was twenty inches long and ten wide. Penciled notes went down the left margin. A faint grid divided the sheet into six long sections. The top center of the sheet was labeled CASTILLO SISTERS , GENERATION 6. From there, each horizontal section was labeled 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, separating generations of the family.
    “Marriage date for Isobel Castillo and the first Andrew Jackson Quintrell is March 11, 1865,” Dan said. “Isobel was born in 1850, probably before March 11, because her age is given as fifteen for the marriage. Quintrell was thirty, according to his Civil War record. Johnny Reb, by the way.”
    Carly wrote quickly, connecting married couples and keeping track of special dates along the margin for each generation. It wasn’t the approved method for creating a genealogy, but it worked for her. Later she would transfer everything onto ready-made forms.
    “Still want me to concentrate on the female Castillos?” Dan asked.
    “For now. I’ll go through the list of possible illegitimate offspring later. I can’t believe there are eleven of them.”
    “All maybes,” he reminded her.
    “The Senator was a swine.”
    “Swine are fertile.” Dan looked at the computer screen. “Isobel’s sister Juana married Mateo on June 3, 1870, at the ripe old age of seventeen. Mateo’s age isn’t listed. Neither is his family history.”
    “Surprise, surprise,” Carly muttered. “If Juana wasn’t Isobel’s sister, I doubt that the marriage would have made the newspaper at all.”
    “Welcome to the wonderful world of society sections.” Dan hit another key. “Juana died in childbirth in September of 1872. The baby, María, survived. In May of 1887, María married Hale Simmons. She died of cancer after a long illness on August third, 1966. Since a surviving husband isn’t mentioned, I assume old Hale kicked the bucket before then. Nothing in the archives about a funeral, though.”
    Carly worked quickly, neatly, filling in blanks with a mechanical pencil, the better to erase it later if/when new information appeared.
    “After an improbable gap of almost thirty years, María gave birth to—”
    “Improbable? Is that what the archive says?” Carly cut in.
    “No. It’s plain old common sense.”
    Smiling, Carly put a question mark in the margin and said, “Go on.”
    “Sylvia María Simmons y Castillo, no exact birth date. All we have is 1916.”
    “That’s okay. I have lots of sources I haven’t tried yet. We’ll stick with the archives and Winifred’s stuff for now and fill in gaps later.”
    “Eighteen years after Sylvia’s birth, in a totally fab June wedding complete with white roses and just yards of satin—”
    Carly snickered at Dan’s warbling tone and kept writing.
    “She married Andrew Jackson Quintrell III. Do I get to mention the Quintrells now?”
    “Hard to avoid them.”
    “Let’s see…A. J. Three’s grandmother was Isobel and his great-aunt was Juana, right?”
    Carly nodded and looked up. “Why?”
    “I’m trying to figure something out. Sylvia’s grandmother was Juana and her great-aunt was Isobel, right?”
    “Right. So?”
    “So they were cousins, of a sort.”
    “Not close enough to upset the civil or religious authorities. From what you translated on the death certificate Winifred gave me, Isobel and Juana were only half sisters and might even have been simply cousins. You’d have to be a genealogist to even care about the degree of blood relationship in their offspring. Besides, consolidating the land came first. Ask the royal families of Europe. They raised cousin-marrying to a high art.”
    Dan stared at the screen a moment longer, trying to figure the exact degree of kinship between offspring of half sisters or cousins twice removed. Or was it three times? He shrugged. If Carly decided it mattered, he’d strain his brain over the answer. Better yet, he’d let Carly strain hers.
    “I’ve got the wedding date for A. J. Three, universally known as the Senator, and Sylvia María Simmons y Castillo,” Carly said. “And the four children’s birth dates, plus three death dates for the kids.”
    “Plus the Senator’s death date. Wonder whatever happened to his sisters? He had three of them, right?”
    Carly checked her notes. “Three, all