St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

protests, she’d driven out early in her newly cleaned and shod SUV, eager to interview Winifred on various subjects, including the possibility of the Senator’s illegal offspring. Dan had followed her in his own truck. The extra hour delay before the memorial service had given Carly more time to talk with Winifred—and to prepare herself for another poet-mangling effort by the good minister, who was hovering in the hallway near Winifred’s suite like a car salesman looking for a live customer. Dr. Sands hovered with him. He hadn’t wanted Winifred to exert herself talking.
    Winifred had told him to get out.
    Silently Dan handed Carly another photograph for Winifred to look at. The box of plastic sleeves and forms that the airline had misplaced had been waiting at the ranch when he and Carly arrived for the service. While she talked with Winifred, he put various photos and documents between sheets of the clear protective plastic.
    Winifred coughed. The sound was husky and dry, shallow, like her breathing. Dan had heard unhealthy noises like that in places where war or plain governmental incompetence kept antibiotics from reaching hospitals and villages. He wasn’t a medic, but he really didn’t like the sound of her breathing. He knew pneumonia was most dangerous when the chest was tight, not when the lungs loosened.
    “Are you sure you should be talking, Miss Winifred?” he asked gently.
    She ignored him and peered through reading glasses at the photograph Carly was holding out. Normally Winifred wouldn’t have needed—or admitted that she needed—glasses, but she was too tired to struggle tonight.
    “Andrew,” she said. “Grammar school.”
    Carly filled in a label, peeled it from its backing, and stuck it to the plastic sleeve. Dan handed Winifred another sleeved photo.
    “Victoria. After Pearl Harbor. She was seven.”
    Carly entered the data and labeled the photo.
    “Victoria. On D-Day. Polio. Killed her before—she was ten.”
    “You need to rest,” Carly said quickly.
    “I need—to die,” Winifred said.
    Grimly Carly sorted through the pictures she’d selected for positive ID by Winifred. She’d hoped to find some of Josh and Liza after they were ten, but so far she’d come up empty. All the school and professional photos were of Andrew and Victoria. Family snapshots had stopped after Victoria died. The closest thing to group photos Carly had found after 1944 were the yearly political barbecues. Often as not, neither Sylvia nor the children attended—or if they did, there weren’t any photographs to prove it.
    The Quintrells weren’t what Carly would call a close family. No surprise there.
    When the photographs ran out, there was a list of names. “These are the Senator’s possible children,” Carly said in a low voice. “That is, these children were born to women within ten months of a probable liaison with the Senator. None of the birth certificates list the Senator as a father. Often they list another man, but you asked me to ignore that, correct?”
    Winifred nodded curtly and took the list. Eleven names stretching over a period of sixty years, but most of them were clustered around the years before the Senator became a senator.
    Jesús Mendoza. María Elena Sandoval. Manuel Velásquez. Randal Mullins. Sharon Miller. Christopher Smith. Raúl Sandoval. Maryanne Black. Seguro Sánchez. David McCall. Suzanne Fields.
    All or none of them could be the Senator’s. Four of them were dead. Two of them were grandmothers or great-grandmothers. Not one of them had claimed to be the Senator’s offspring.
    The name Winifred had expected, hoped, feared, wasn’t there.
    She handed the list back to Carly. “Keep digging. There were more kids born than are on this list.”
    Carly started to object but thought better of it.
    “Why didn’t Sylvia divorce the Senator?” Carly asked as she put the list away.
    “Catholic. And keeping the land. For Andrew.”
    “Then Andrew died and she had a stroke.”
    “No,” Winifred managed. “Tried to—kill the Senator. Fought him. Survived. Brain didn’t.”
    Carly and Dan both went still. There was nothing, not even a hint of a whisper, in the family record or in the doctor’s report after Sylvia’s so-called stroke.
    “My God,” Carly said. “How did you—”
    “Find out?” Winifred cut in.
    “Yes.”
    “He told me—to let her die. And why.”
    “But you didn’t,” Carly said.
    The line of Winifred’s mouth was too savage to