"Sorry, Mother," Dan said neutrally. "I keep forgetting that reality isn't welcome here."

"Daniel." John's voice was a warning.

Dan lifted his coat off the back of the chair and said to his father, "Call me when you want to get that tractor running."

He closed the back door carefully and told himself he couldn't hear his mother weeping.

But he could.

Chapter 4

QUINTRELL RANCH

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

ANDY QUINTRELL V REACHED FOR ANOTHER BEER, ONLY TO HAVE HIS FATHER TAKE the can away.

"You need to sober up," Josh said.

"Why?" Andy waved his hand casually. "Not a camera in sight."

"Winifred's pet historian has cameras and her digital recorder is always on."

"Who cares?"

Anne Quintrell walked into the kitchen. "I do. Your father does. You should."

"Because you want me to be a senator when I'm thirty?" Andy belched richly, legacy of the two beers he'd drunk without a pause. "What about what I want, huh? What about that?"

Anne smoothed back hair that was already perfectly in place. "What do you want?"

"To get laid."

Disgust flickered over Anne's face.

Josh laughed roughly. "A real chip off the old block, aren't you?"

"Hey, Granddad humped everything he saw and he spent his whole life being reelected."

"That was then," Josh said. "Today that kind of womanizing won't fly at the polls."

"Fuck the polls."

"It's about the only thing you haven't jumped," Anne said tiredly. "Why can't you just keep it zipped?"

Andy rolled his eyes. "Spoken like a nun."

"Then get married," Anne said. "The Meriwether girl would be an excellent wife."

Andy made retching sounds. "I've seen better-looking dog butts. Just because her father's a senator doesn't make her hot."

"Hot?" Casually Josh reached out and jerked his son to his feet. "Listen to me, Andy, and listen good. I've had it with your hyperactive dick."

"Josh-" Anne began.

"Not now," Josh said without looking away from his son. "You have two choices. Grow up or sign up for the Marines. They've made men out of sorrier boys than you."

Andy closed his eyes. "Not another lecture on the value of serving your country."

"No lecture. Just fact. I'm through supporting you and I won't let your mother give you so much as a dime."

Andy's eyes snapped open. What he saw in his father's eyes made him cold.

Josh nodded. "That's right. This is the end of the line. The Senator kept seeing himself in you, kept smiling at the thought of you drinking and screwing your way through life."

"He understood me," Andy said.

"He's dead. Times change." Josh let go of his son. "Change with them or get your spoiled ass out of my life."

Andy looked at his mother.

"No," Josh said. "She can't help you. The Senator who understood you so well left everything to me."

"How will it look if you simply throw out your only child?" Anne asked quietly.

"I'll pay for rehab in Santa Fe. After that, he's on his own."

"Rehab?" Andy said. "You're crazy. I'm not an alcoholic or-"

"If you refuse rehab," Josh interrupted, "I'll give a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger interview to Jeanette Dykstra for her sniggering TV

show. There are more parents out there with screwups for kids than solid citizens. If anything, my standing in the polls will go up."

"That's all you care about!" Andy shouted. "That's all you've ever cared about!"

Josh shrugged. "And all you care about is getting laid. So what?"

A volatile mix of tears and rage shimmered in Andy's eyes. He pushed past Josh and slammed out the back door of the kitchen.

"He has an appointment in Santa Fe with the New Day Clinic on Monday at ten o'clock," Josh said to his wife. "If he doesn't keep it, he's on his own."

"But this is so… sudden," she said, shaking her head.

"Only for you. I've been ready to throw him out for ten years. But if I so much as lectured Andy, he'd go crying to you or the Senator."

"But Andy's so young," she whispered.

"Men his age have fought and killed and died."

"You say that like you approve."

Josh swore wearily. "We've had this conversation too many times. Andy either cleans up his act or I'll cut him loose. Conversation over."

"The king is dead, long live the king, is that it?"

"That's it."

Tears magnified her eyes. "I'll divorce you."

He smiled slightly. "No you won't. You want to be first lady as much as I want to be president. You've worked and sacrificed for that goal all our married life. You won't throw it away because a spoiled child pitches a fit."

Two tears slid down her cheeks. She didn't want to agree with him, and she knew that he was right. "You know me too well."

"That's what it's all about. Knowing people. When you know what they want, you have them by the short and curlies." He finished his coffee and set the cup aside. "I'll be in the Senator's study going through papers."

She sighed. "Need any help?"

"I'll let you know if I do."

But before he let anyone read over his shoulder, he'd be certain that the Senator had died without confessing his sins in a private journal.

Chapter 5

QUINTRELL RANCH

SUNDAY EVENING

CARLY WALKED DOWN A HALLWAY IN THE OLD CASTILLO HOME. WITH EACH STEP SHE murmured into her lapel, where she wore a nearly invisible microphone that was attached to a digital recorder at her waist.

"I wish the walls could talk," she said quietly.

The walls in question were adobe, more than two feet thick at the base, and older than the United States. At least, one of the walls was that old; it had once held up the front of the original Castillo ranch house. The other walls dated from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Castillo in residence had been favored by the new nation of Mexico. With the new duties and authority came prosperity. The rectangular shape of a gracious Spanish-style home had been built around a courtyard alive with fruit trees and the silver dance of fountains.

From what Carly had discovered, the Castillos' enviable position had lasted only two decades, until New Mexico was ceded by Mexico to the United States after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Then the customs of the Spanish, the Indians, and their culturally mixed children known as genizaros had bowed before the onslaught of Navajo raiders, Kit Carson, and land-hungry citizens from the eastern coast of the young, brawling United States.

"It seems so long ago to me," Carly said in a soft voice, running her fingertips over the much-plastered surface of the adobe wall. "But it isn't. Winifred's grandmother lived through it." What -would it be like to know who your grandparents and great-grandparents were, what they felt, how they'd lived?

But that was one thought Carly didn't murmur into her microphone.

"The Castillo family, or some member of it, continuously occupied this house since it was built," she continued. "Then, after the new house was built by the Senator and his wife, the old house became basically a guest quarters. From the look of the furnishings-antique and in reasonably good condition except for the dust-the guest house hasn't been used very much."

She continued down the hall, then hesitated at the door leading to the central courtyard. "It's an odd feeling to see wooden doorsills worn concave by the passage of generations, doorways so small that I feel like ducking when I go through them, and I'm barely five foot four inches. Good food, good medicine, and suddenly bigger people are born to each generation."

With a hard tug, she opened, then pushed the door shut behind her. As she hurried across the courtyard, a few dead leaves lifted on the wind, curling around her ankles like a cold cat. She could have stayed warm by taking the longer route through the hallway-gallery that ran along the inner side of the rectangular house, but she felt the need for fresh air.