Tonight the kitchen looked like it hadn't been used for much more than coffee and a light dinner for the family. Dan wondered if Carly had been included, or if she'd settled for a snack scrounged from the bottom of her big purse.

Sooner or later she'll get the message that no one but Winifred wants her here.

He hoped it would be sooner, before anyone got angry enough to hurt the pretty woman with light in her eyes and laughter in her voice.

Though it had been years since Dan had been inside the ranch house, he hadn't forgotten the turns and hallways and doors separating the kitchen from Miss Winifred's suite. He didn't meet anyone along the way. Melissa and Pete had probably already retired to their apartment. The maids had gone home. During the summer, the hired hands lived in the bunkhouse or in one of the house trailers tucked back in the trees along a curve of the hill. In winter, the buildings were empty.

When Dan had been younger, he'd spent the summer tending sheep and cattle on the ranch and learning to hunt with the Snead brothers. They'd been barely a decade older than he was, yet they'd been great teachers. Like their mother and grandfather, they were "wolfers," hunters hired to keep predatory animals in check. Even as an adult, Jim managed to scratch out a living in the high country. Blaine had ended up in prison for armed robbery.

Long ago, far away. But, damn, those men could shoot.

At least, Dan had thought it was long ago and far away until he'd seen tracks on Castillo Ridge yesterday. A man's tracks, and a dog's. He couldn't be certain who else had hiked several miles to watch from afar while the Senator was buried, but Dan knew that only someone with Jim Snead's skill as a stalker could have gotten within fifty yards of Dan and not given himself away. Since Jim was the best man on the stalk in northern New Mexico, it figured that he was the one who left the tracks.

Wonder why he didn't say hello.

Wonder why he was there, period.

Maybe that's why he didn't show himself. He didn't want to answer questions.

Dan knocked lightly on the wide double doors that had been put in to accommodate a hospital bed. In the warm months, Winifred rolled her sister outside. If it made any difference to the patient, only Sylvia knew.

"Who is it?"

"The curandera's son."

The door opened slowly. Winifred's black eyes looked Dan over. "Heard you were back. And busted up."

"A little accident, that's all."

She made a sound that said she didn't believe him, but she stepped aside. "Well, come on in."

The heat of the room brought sweat out across Dan's back. His glance went around the room, missing nothing, including a surprised Carly sitting on the floor surrounded by photos of all ages and sizes. He nodded coolly to her.

He didn't like discovering that he'd driven forty minutes over frozen ruts because he hoped to catch a glimpse of a busybody's smoke-and-gold eyes.

"You're looking well, Miss Winifred," Dan said. It was a lie; she looked tired, pale, and unusually gaunt.

"Wish I could say the same about you." Despite her curtness, Winifred smiled. "I was hoping you'd come around to see an old lady. About time you remembered your manners."

He shook his head. "You haven't changed a bit."

She gave a bark of laughter. "What did you expect, a miracle? God has better things to do than transform me. Give me a hug and I'll forgive you for waiting so long to see me."

Carefully Dan hugged the woman who was old enough to be his grandmother and tough enough to be Satan's sister. Winifred was all sinew and bones and attitude. The realization that he'd missed her amazed him. Like the Snead brothers and the warmth of his parents' kitchen, Winifred was part of a childhood that he only now was coming to value instead of simply accepting as a given.

"How is Mrs. Quintrell?" Dan asked.

"Winters are hard on her," Winifred said, looking toward the bed.

Dan nodded as if he thought Sylvia noticed the difference in the view out her windows from spring to summer, fall to winter. But the changing seasons mattered to Winifred, so they had to matter to Sylvia.

Sometimes he wasn't sure what Winifred believed in the silence of her own mind, but he knew that those beliefs made it possible for the old woman to face another day of caring for a sister who would never care about anything in this life.

"Well, what did your mother send me?"

"I'm an errand boy, not an herbalist," Dan said. "All I know is the package with the red tape is for fever and cough. Mom said you'd probably be needing that if you have the flu that's been working its way through the valley."

"Let's see what you have," Winifred said, stifling a cough. "I can't afford to be sick. Sylvia needs me. Without me, she'd die."

Dan believed it. Certainly nothing else was keeping Sylvia alive.

He began pulling paper packets from his jacket pockets. Next came small baked-clay containers, plus one larger one, until finally his pockets were empty. He peeled off his jacket and hung it over his arm. The room was way too hot for anyone healthy.

Which explained why Carly was wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans, bare feet, and a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her feet were narrow and high-arched. Bright purple toenails struck a note of rebellion.

Something Celtic had been tattooed on the inside of her right ankle. He wondered what the design was, and if it would feel or taste different from the rest of her skin.

Deliberately he ignored that line of thought and looked back at Winifred. She picked up each package and container in turn, sniffed, and nodded approvingly.

"No one equals your mother," Winifred said, "except maybe my mother's grandmother, and there were whispers about the unfortunate state of her soul."

Dan saw that Carly had quietly come to her feet and was standing nearby, close enough to catch what he and Winifred said.

Recording every word, I'll bet.

He tried to be irritated, but whatever scent Carly was wearing smelled better than everything else in the room.

Innocence and spice. Hell of a combination.

"Don't let me interrupt," Dan said. "Like I said, I'm only a delivery boy."

Winifred laughed huskily. "You stay put and let me see you. Thought we'd lost you this time for sure."

"Just a climbing accident," he said. "Those volcanoes are tricky."

She snorted and gave him a look that told him she knew what had really happened. Somehow, someway, she knew.

It has to be the Sandoval family, Dan decided. Smugglers' grapevine. Drug runners' grapevine. Curanderos' grapevine.

Shit. I'd really hoped it wasn't the Sandovals.

And he'd known it was.

That was why he was on "vacation" leave in northern New Mexico, where Sandoval men had been devils and their women had been patient saints for three hundred years.

Winifred nodded once, abruptly, and turned back to Carly.

Message delivered, Dan thought. Too bad I'm not sure which side of the law Winifred lives on.

"We were talking about my childhood memories," Winifred said to Carly.

"Yes," Carly said eagerly.

"My grandfather and grandmother were both Castillos." As Winifred spoke, she sorted through the herbs and potions and salves Dan had brought. "They weren't close enough in blood to bother the church, and not distant enough to divide up the Onate grant even more. My grandmother died giving birth to her first child, my mother Maria. Maria was fourteen when she married the son of a blue-eyed Anglo bandit. Not that we thought of our father that way, a bandit. Hale Simmons came from a long line of men who'd lost one war after another, either the Civil War or older wars in Scotland. Those men didn't have much use for governments and laws that took what a man earned."