St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

hissed a word through her teeth. She hated talking about her so-called family. With impatient motions, she opened the door and got out of the truck. “I need to move around. I’ve done enough sitting.”
    Zach got out and followed her. She covered the ground easily, quickly, with the stride of someone used to hiking miles wearing a backpack. Smoke jumpers, the military special ops, and dedicated trekkers all had that walk.
    None of them looked as good as Jill from the rear.
    Deliberately he glanced away. Last thing he needed was an inconvenient lust for a client. Especially a client with an art and art history background who wasn’t in any hurry to talk about the paintings that somebody cared enough about to cut up her car and threaten to kill her for.
    I know you like her, Faroe, but it has to have occurred to you that Jill could have painted the things herself.
    It sure has occurred to me .
    And the more Zach saw of the Breck ranch—poverty central or he’d eat what was left of the barn—the more it seemed likely that Jill wouldn’t mind having some money to play with.
    She circled the black ruins and went to the untouched metal windmill that was drawing water up for a ranch that no longer existed. She stared at the cool water pouring into the big tank, spilling over, filling ditches to irrigate pastures where stock no longer grazed.
    Zach waited and watched Jill. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that family life wasn’t her favorite topic.
    She stared at water flowing into the tank, ripples chasing across the shimmering surface, the liquid of life overflowing to run down irrigation ditches.
    Just when Zach had decided that St. Kilda would have to dig up the family past for him, Jill started talking again.
    “I have three full brothers,” she said evenly. “Older. A lot older.Mom had a series of miscarriages in between and after the last son was born. When she went to the local midwife, she was told that she should pray more, it was God’s will that she bear children. Mom nearly died trying to carry out God’s will. Then she went to Salt Lake City and found a doctor who didn’t put religion before his patient’s needs.”
    Zach watched the expressions shifting over Jill’s face like shadows over the landscape. He listened with an intensity that she didn’t notice. She didn’t like her past, but it was very much a part of her.
    “Whatever the doctor gave her worked,” Jill said. “No more miscarriages. No more babies, either. About that time my father became a fundamentalist. He moved everyone to New Eden, set up a house, married a sixteen-year-old, and had more children. He took a third wife. She was fifteen. Babies. A lot of them. Mom stuck with him.”
    Though Jill’s voice was even, her eyes were narrow, her mouth flat. She didn’t understand her mother. She didn’t like her father.
    She detested fundamental Mormonism.
    I was raised by women in a militantly testosterone-free zone.
    Now Zach knew why.
    “Then Mom got pregnant with me,” Jill said. “I suspect she thought she was safe from the baby mill—menopause and all that—and stopped whatever birth control the doctor had given her.”
    “That’s how I came into the world,” Zach said.
    Jill smiled crookedly. “So you were an ‘oops’ baby, too.”
    “Pretty much.”
    She let out a long breath, and with it some of the tension that had come when she talked about the childhood she’d tried very hard to forget.
    “Mom hung on to the pregnancy, had me, and gritted her teeth when her husband took a fourth, really young wife,” Jill said. “At least I assume my mother gritted her teeth. Maybe she was relievedthat he wasn’t dogging her sheets anymore.” Jill blew out another breath. “Whatever. She stuck with him until she overheard plans for my marriage to one of the elders. I was eight.”
    Zach’s eyebrows shot up and he said something under his breath.
    “Oh, the marriage wasn’t supposed to be consummated until I started having periods,” she said acidly. “You see, the elders were worried about me. I wasn’t a good little fundamental wallflower. So they arranged for me to move in with some old man’s extended family until I was ready to have babies. Then I’d be his fifth wife.”
    Zach didn’t know he was angry until he felt the adrenaline lighting up his blood. “That’s illegal.”
    “Not in fundamental Mormon country. The mainline church doesn’t support plural wives, but it doesn’t