St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

Lucia.” He lifted his shoulders slightly in a shrug. “But is a small thing, like a fly buzzing.”
    A corner of Dan’s mouth turned up. “Are your Colombian cousins still trying to kill me?”
    “In Colombia, maybe, but not here. Here I am el jefe. I say killing well-connected Anglos is bad for business.”
    “Yeah. You’d be up to your lips in jalapeños real quick.”
    “ Sí. New Mexico is not Colombia.”
    Yet.
    And Dan was doing everything he could to keep it that way.

TAOS
FRIDAY NOON
41
    CARLY STRETCHED , THEN BENT OVER THE MICROFILM READER AND WENT BACK TO work on the articles about the death of Isobel Castillo Quintrell in 1880, when she was only thirty. Reading between the lines, Isobel had been worn out by marrying at fifteen, then bearing three live children, plus ten premature or stillborn babies in the next fifteen years.
    “They had methods of birth control then,” Carly murmured into her recorder. “It must have been obvious what all the pregnancies were costing her. Why didn’t…cancel that. She was a deeply religious Catholic wife.”
    Carly read quickly, skimming for the facts she would need to recreate the funeral in print. “‘Predeceased by only sister, Juana de Castillo y Castillo, tragically lost during the birth of her first child in 1872.’ Editorial comment: the Castillo sisters had a hard time with labor and pregnancy; maybe their parents married one too many cousins. Or maybe they married and started getting pregnant too early. Interesting. Wonder if there are any studies about the correlation between very young brides and wives dying very young.”
    Her eyes searched the text, looking for names of people attending the funeral. There weren’t any unfamiliar names, so she went to the next item on her list and read, talking occasionally into her recorder. For the Castillo book, she would include reproductions of newspaper articles and images; she was already compiling a list for Dan to transfer. What she needed now was some sense of how close the children of the Castillo sisters had been.
    After two hours of reading, it was clear that major events—funerals, marriages, baptisms, Quinceaneras—were shared by first cousins. The generation after that there was more separation. They gathered for some funerals, but little else. The Quintrells became the backbone of the emergent gringo political system. The Castillo/Simmons/Sandovals stayed a fixture within the hispano community, making up a secondary, nearly parallel government. Instead of taxes, there was tribute. Instead of cattle, there was smuggling. Instead of English, there was Spanish and/or Indian languages.
    And through both cultures ran the same blood, the same genes, the same hopes and disappointments and joys.
    A feeling of excitement fizzed in Carly. She forgot the careful list she’d made and simply enjoyed the tapestry of family and New Mexico history that was condensing in her mind. This was what she loved about her job, the moment when the chaos of facts and questions stopped whirling around and settled into a pattern of family generations played out against a timeless land and a constantly changing culture. This was what she wanted to give to future generations of Quintrells and Castillos, an understanding that each person was part of a chain stretching back across the centuries and reaching out to the coming centuries. This was—
    The bang of the cellar door startled Carly out of her thoughts.
    “You’re back early,” she said without looking up from the reader. “Or is it Gus come to babysit me again?”
    “Keep guessing.”
    Carly spun around and saw Sheriff Montoya standing six feet away.
    He didn’t look happy to be there.
    She felt the same.
    “Good morning,” she said coolly. “Or is it afternoon?”
    “Doesn’t much matter. I understand you had some trouble out at the Quintrell ranch yesterday.”
    Well, that’s certainly blunt. “Trouble?” She shrugged. “Something didn’t agree with me. I was sick.”
    “What about your Siamese twin, Duran?”
    “He threw up, too.” She didn’t say any more. She didn’t like the feeling of being grilled like a criminal about something she hadn’t asked for and nearly hadn’t survived.
    The sheriff took off his hat and smacked it against his thigh. Snow sifted to the floor.
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked curtly.
    “Since when do citizens report hurling to the local cops?”
    “You can’t be as stupid as you sound, Ms.