Chapter 31

QUINTRELL RANCH

THURSDAY 4:00 a.m.

A BLEARY-EYED DR. SANDS CONFIRMED WHAT EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW: SYLVIA Castillo Quintrell had died in her sleep. He went to the telephone and called Governor Quintrell on his private line.

"What?" The word was a growl.

"Governor Quintrell, this is Dr. Sands. I'm sorry to tell you that your mother has passed away."

At the other end of the line, there was silence, a woman's voice asking a question, and then Josh said, "Thank you for calling. Do you need anything from me immediately?"

"No. Miss Winifred has a list of Sylvia's wishes. She'll be cremated and her ashes scattered over the ranch. Given that she has been ill for so many years, I've recommended against an autopsy. There's no point in distressing the family any more than death already has. It's a miracle she lived as long as she did."

"I appreciate that. I have nightmares about the sleaze media ghouls drooling over autopsy photos. How is Winifred doing?"

"Not well," Dr. Sands said. "She wasn't strong before this. Pneumonia in a woman her age is very dangerous, but she refuses to go to a hospital."

"Sylvia was all she had to live for."

"Yes. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but you should be prepared. It's quite probable that Miss Winifred's life span can be measured in days. A few weeks at the outside. She's not responding well to the antibiotic. I'll switch to another, of course, but in patients her age, pneumonia often is the body's way of saying it's tired of struggling with life."

"You think she's given up?"

"Finding her sister dead was very hard on her."

There was a long silence.

Finally Josh said, "I'll check my schedule, but I don't think I'll be able to get up to the ranch today. I'm booked for three meals a day in New Hampshire for the next six days. But if I could combine seeing Winifred with a memorial service for Sylvia… yes, that would be possible. A red-eye both ways. There will be a memorial for Sylvia Quintrell within forty-eight hours."

Dr. Sands was impressed with Josh's ability to juggle personal and private demands when awakened from a dead sleep at 4:00 A.M. "In addition to my condolences, Governor, please accept my congratulations. I believe you'll make a fine president."

"Thank you. I'll send you an invitation for my next fund-raiser."

Laughing, Dr. Sands hung up the phone and made arrangements to have Sylvia's body taken to a crematorium.

Chapter 32

TAOS

THURSDAY MORNING

"What do we have so far?" Carly asked, looking at her checklist.

Dan shifted on the uncomfortable wooden chair that was the best the newspaper archive offered. He was bleary-eyed from old photos and computer monitors, and frustrated by his relentless physical awareness of Carly. Yesterday's hours and hours of solid, boring groundwork on Winifred's project should have taken the edge off his need.

It hadn't. It was there today, up close and personal. If Carly felt the same way, she wasn't sharing the information.

Swearing silently, he tapped out a 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, Maria, survived. In May of 1887, Maria 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, Maria 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 Maria 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 AJ. Three, universally known as the Senator, and Sylvia Maria 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 older. I'm saving them for later. Winifred only-"

"Wants Castillo history," Dan cut in. "Got it. On to Generation Three, children of the Senator and Sylvia. Whoa. There's a lot of stuff. Once the Senator became a senator, he couldn't take a dump without the paper doing a two-page spread."