Always Time To Die (15 page)

“Wires.”

“Wires,” she repeated. Then she understood. Her breath came in raggedly. “You don’t really think anyone would rig my files to explode?”

“Paranoia is just part of my job description.”

Carly swallowed hard. “What job is that?”

“I’m on vacation.”

Dan reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folding knife. A flick of his thumb opened up a wicked blade. He didn’t really expect anything lethal in the box, but he didn’t want to die with a surprised look on his face. Gently, patiently, he slit each flap where it joined the box until nothing visibly attached the flaps to the box. The flaps shifted and slid to the floor.

Nothing on top but papers.

“How does it look?” he asked.

She cleared her throat. “Normal.”

“About as full as it was the last time you closed it?”

“I guess so. I don’t stuff the boxes. It creases everything.”

“Okay.” He casually riffled through the papers inside. No wires. No rats. Not even a mouse turd. “Looks good. Check it out for anything obviously missing.”

Carly crouched next to him and flipped through the box. Notebooks, genealogical forms, manila envelopes of photos or documents labeled as to approximate decade and/or family relationship. There wasn’t anything missing, but something wasn’t right.

“Someone has been through this,” she said.

“You sure?” he asked without looking up from his study of the remaining boxes.

“Yes. I’m totally anal when it comes to my work,” she said. “Genealogy and family history are built on small facts. If you don’t organize, organize,
organize
every single little piece of information you find, you’ll drive yourself crazy looking for proof of something that you’ve already researched and nailed down—and then put the document in the wrong place. But in this box, an envelope holding documents is mixed up with the photo envelopes. The decades are out of order on the photo envelopes. It’s not a big thing,” she added, rearranging envelopes as she spoke, “but it’s real.”

“Anything missing?”

“No.”

“Check these out.”

She looked up. The other cartons were open. She was pleased to see that the flaps were still attached to the boxes. She started going through the contents quickly.

“Same thing on all of these,” she said after a few minutes. “Nothing missing. Everything not quite in order. Wonder what they were looking for. Or maybe they were just nosy.”

Dan stacked the three cartons on one another and picked them up as a unit. “I’ll put these in the truck.” Then he saw the look on her face. “What?”

“I was thinking of breaking into a chorus of how nice it is to have a man around the house. I usually lift those suckers one at a time.”

“I’m too lazy to make that many trips. Get the door for me, will you?”

Carly grabbed a camera case and a briefcase and trotted after him, opening doors as needed. They repeated the process until she had everything she needed but her suitcase. Dan picked it up and headed for the door.

“Wait,” she said. “I forgot my pajamas.”

He smiled slowly. “Don’t feel you have to wear any on my account.”

“Ha ha.” She grabbed the pajamas from the bedspread and then recoiled with a gasp.

Instantly Dan was between her and the bed.

No rat.

No gore.

Just a note made from letters cut out of newspaper headlines:

DO
N
T
C
o
M
E

B
A
c
K

SANTA FE
TUESDAY NIGHT

THE GOVERNOR
’
S MANSION HAD BEEN DESIGNED TO INVITE VISITORS TO BE COMFORTABLE
and learn about New Mexico’s distinctive art and artists. The national TV personality pacing the parlor and waiting to talk to the governor wasn’t gracious, comfortable, or artistic. She was, however, distinctive. Jeanette Dykstra had a huge national following for her television show
Behind the Scenes,
a combination of gossip, speculation, ambush interviews, and “news” of the sort that gave journalism a bad name.

Anne Quintrell set her teeth delicately, pasted on a smile, and walked toward the small-screen bitch queen. Dykstra looked older offscreen, harder, almost skeletal. It was the tyranny of TV’s added twenty pounds, which resulted in a constant diet for people who made their living in front of a camera.

Anne understood the skinny edict. What she didn’t understand was why women with brown eyes and olive skin thought they looked good as a bleached-crispy blonde.

“Ms. Dykstra, I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” Anne said. “My secretary didn’t mention an evening appointment.”

“Call me Jeanette.” The reporter smiled, showing perfect teeth and no warmth. “Obviously there’s been a mistake. My appointment was with the governor.”

Anne’s smile didn’t falter. “I’m so sorry. Someone must have forgotten to notify you. The governor cleared his calendar after his father’s sudden death.”

“Sudden?” Dykstra’s dark eyebrows pinched together.

“Death is always sudden, even when it’s expected.”

Dykstra looked at the immaculately dressed governor’s wife; no ambush photo op would ever find a hair out of place on her. And there wasn’t any hint of gossip about a bad marriage or girls on the side. Or boys. Nothing but Ken and Barbie Quintrell smiling out at the world. Dykstra looked around the parlor, noting the colorful, carefully stenciled designs on the dark beams, the beige overstuffed furniture that somehow managed not to be casual, and the expected southwestern art. Nothing juicy here, either.

The silence grew.

“I’m sure the governor will be glad to reschedule,” Anne lied. “He has great admiration for your work.”

“That so?” Dykstra made a sound that was close to a snort. “Then the rumors must be true.”

“What rumors?”

“That Josh Quintrell is running for president.”

“My husband is governor of New Mexico, and is honored to be trusted by the people with such an important responsibility.”

“That’s what they all say. Then they throw their hat into the presidential ring and never look back.” Dykstra’s brown eyes narrowed. “Your husband has some real handicaps in a presidential race.”

“Since he’s not—”

The other woman kept talking. “His son is a boozy screwup who goes through women faster than a ten-million-dollar athlete. The governor keeps his poor ill mother shut away from the world. His dear, recently departed father was a womanizer the likes of which we haven’t seen since the heyday of the Kennedys. If anybody looks, I’ll bet there are bastards galore out there with the Senator’s blood in them. Your husband’s family is the stuff of soap operas.”

Anne kept her pleasant expression in place. She’d had a lot of practice smiling through her teeth at the gossips, groupies, and guttersnipes who pursued high-profile politicians. “My husband is a compassionate, intelligent, public-minded man who has done a great deal for the citizens of New Mexico.”

“And zip for his family. Half the voters in America are women. They have a right to know what kind of man is asking for their vote. I’m sure the governor would like to have an on-camera half-hour interview at the ranch with
Behind the Scenes,
exploring the tragedy of his personal life contrasted with the success of his professional life.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Anne said neutrally. “I’ll tell the governor of your offer.”

“You do that.” Dykstra readjusted the strap of her leather briefcase. “And while you’re at it, tell him that without his cooperation,
Behind the Scenes
will air a segment on his family life just in time for the major primaries. Some of the topics I’ll cover will include his mother’s doctors, people who remember his tragically murdered drug addict/slut sister, rumored illegal sources of campaign contributions, and any of the Senator’s bastards we find between now and then. If the governor prefers to cooperate with us, we’d concentrate on him rather than his sister, father, bastards, and tainted money.” She smiled thinly. “When he thinks about it, I’m sure the governor will want to put his own words before the people.”

The man who was a cross between a butler and a bodyguard appeared in the doorway as though summoned. Or perhaps he’d merely been eavesdropping and decided to step in. Dykstra didn’t know and didn’t care. She’d gotten her message across.

“Please give Ms. Dykstra a card for the governor’s appointment secretary,” Anne said to the man. She turned to the TV journalist and held out her hand. “A pleasure meeting you. If I can help you in any way, don’t hesitate to call.”

Anne kept her game face on until the bodyguard showed Dykstra out. Then she turned and walked quickly toward the governor’s home office. She knocked lightly and pushed the door open without waiting for an invitation.

“Josh, we’ve got a problem.”

TAOS
LATE TUESDAY NIGHT

DAN GLANCED AROUND HIS RENTAL HOUSE
.
IT LOOKED LIKE A PHOTOGRAPHIC
archive after a tornado. Piles of pictures were everywhere—table, chairs, bed, dresser, leaning against the wall, and all over the floor.

“Okay,” Carly said. She peeled off her slightly dusty cotton gloves and pulled on a clean pair. “Normally I’d go over all these in detail with Winifred first, but she wasn’t interested in any photo that had anyone except a Castillo in it.”

Winifred’s illness, which had severely limited the interviews, was bad enough. But her stubborn determination to ignore the Quintrells, Sandovals, and everyone else not a Castillo was making Carly’s work a lot harder than it had to be. No matter what Winifred’s prejudice dictated, the families were all deeply intertwined. Leaving out such important connections would gut the family history.

You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit,
Carly reminded herself.

She didn’t think that digging up a list of the Senator’s bastards made up for otherwise ignoring the Quintrells. Especially as the list of his lovers was as long as her arm. When the Senator hadn’t been in Santa Fe or Washington, D.C., he must have been shagging everything female in Taos County. It gave Carly a whole new slant on the disease called satyriasis.

“Let’s see what we have,” she said.

“A disaster, that’s what.” Dan gestured to the papers everywhere. “I’ll have to rig hammocks for us to sleep in.”

She grinned. “You rig them, I’ll fill them with photos.”

“You would, too.”

“You bet. This is the messiest part of the job, and in some ways the most important.”

He shook his head, but he was almost smiling. He’d enjoyed watching Carly’s concentration as she went through envelope after envelope of Winifred’s photos and decided on a probable date for each image. The much smaller group of Sandoval photos had been set out on the card table.

When he wasn’t enjoying the view, he was running the names on Winifred’s list through his memory bank and that of the newspaper. Trying to take the times the Senator—at whatever age—had been home to diddle the locals and matching those times against the online birth registry nine or ten months later was like a logic problem.

He enjoyed it.

“We’ll start with the daguerreotypes,” she said. “Unless I see something that doesn’t fit, I’ll assume that the dags are no earlier than 1840 and probably no later than 1860.”

“Why?”

“Daguerre patented the process of photography on metal in 1840. By 1860, ambrotypes and tintypes largely replaced the daguerreotype.”

“I’ve never heard of an ambrotype.”

“Most people haven’t. They were produced on glass instead of metal. They were easy to look at. You didn’t have to tilt the glass this way and that to see the image, the way you do with a dag. See?”

She held out a daguerreotype to Dan on her palm. He had to tip her hand in various directions before light met the metal at an angle that revealed the image. Even then, it wasn’t easy to see.

“It shifts,” he said.

“From a negative to positive image,” she agreed. “That’s how you know it’s a daguerreotype instead of a tintype.” She put the image back in its place. “Ambrotypes were a lot easier to produce than dags. No long exposures with the sitter’s head held immobile in a contraption that must have come from the Spanish Inquisition. Dags were expensive. Ambrotypes were cheaper. Not cheap, mind you. No new technology ever is. Ambrotypes were really popular in the mid-1850s.”

“Then someone developed a better technology?”

“Better, cheaper, and a whole lot quicker. Tintypes.”

Dan looked at the various images scattered across his house. So many ways to take pictures, so many things to mount the images on to preserve them. “So tintypes are photographs on tin?”

“No. Iron. Originally they were called ferrotypes or melainotypes, a salute to the iron backing. Then they got the name tintypes because tin shears were used to cut up the photographic plate into halves, quarters, sixths, ninths, even as small as one-inch square. There wasn’t another really significant advance in photography after that until the 1880s, when flexible film and Kodak cameras made everyone his own historian.”

“I’d swear some of those paper photographs are older than 1880,” Dan said, looking at the bed.

She followed his glance. “Absolutely. The paper print process was developed at the same time as daguerreotypes. But paper didn’t become really popular until people figured out how to make multiple images. Prints. Then you had people making visiting cards and cabinet cards and stereographs. Unfortunately, everyone collected cards of the rich and famous and bought stereographs for the fun of it. Stuff you have in your family history box might have no more actual relationship to your family than I have to a postcard of Queen Elizabeth.”

Dan started to ask another question.

“But right now,” Carly said firmly, “I want to concentrate on describing Winifred’s dags for my file.”

She opened her computer to the file that held photographic forms for the Castillo project. Then she hesitated and looked up at Dan before she handed over the computer.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said. “It’s really boring.”

“Groundwork often is,” he said, taking the computer, “but without it you don’t have anything except hot air.”

She let out a long breath. “Not many people understand that.”

“See?” He settled cross-legged on the floor near her. “Just one more thing we have in common.”

Carly looked at his innocent expression and crystal green eyes. “You’re laughing at me.”

“No, at me. I’m going to spend the next few hours working my ass off with a pretty lady instead of being all smooth and seductive and getting her in bed.”

“Can I have that in writing?”

His smile was as real as it was slow. “No.”

She felt like fanning herself but didn’t want to encourage him. He was way too sexy as it was.
Why did my hormones decide to wake up now? Is it my biological clock running amok?

She wanted to believe that. She really did.

And she was afraid the truth was that Dan pushed her female buttons just by being alive. Handsome she could shrug off. Intelligent with a wicked sense of humor slid right past her defenses.

I’m in trouble.
Then she smiled.
About time, too.

“What?” he asked, seeing her smile.

“Ready to type?”

He started to pursue the source of that secret feminine smile, then decided against it. He didn’t want to crowd her.

At least not too much.

Yet.

“Sure,” he said.

“Winifred Simmons y Castillo File. First image. Daguerreotype, half plate, frame is wood with embossed leather, hook-and-eye clasp, no photographer name or studio embossed on the velvet backing. Standing woman, dark hair, probably a riding hat. Costume simple, low waist, long, full skirt, slightly fuller sleeves on the forearms, large decorative buttons down the front, possibly a type of gathering or bustle behind, fabric is medium to dark with dark accents, backdrop is painted columns and drapery…”

As Carly continued describing the contents of the photo, she took several views of it with her digital camera, which was connected by cable to the computer Dan was typing on.

“Hey, you’re fast,” she said, watching him.

“Only for some things. For others, I’m slow and thorough.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and told herself that she was imagining a double meaning. Then she saw the curving line of his mouth and knew that anything she was imagining, he was, too.

And she couldn’t even call him on it without putting both feet in her mouth.

“Right,” she muttered. “Date assigned to first image is tentatively mid-1840s, based on the case and the costume.”

Dan started to ask a question, then didn’t. They would be up all night if he let his own curiosity off the leash. Even so, it was hard not to ask. Expertise of any kind fascinated him.

And he could have sworn some of those images looked familiar. It couldn’t have been family photographs from his own past, because his mother didn’t have any that were older than her children.

Carly downloaded the digital images of the daguerreotype into the appropriate part of the e-form Dan had just finished filling in. “Second image. Daguerreotype, half plate, wood case, embossed leather, rose motif. Standing woman, not the same person as in first image, appears old enough to be the mother of the first, same style of costume…”

Dan called up another blank form, typed quickly, and thought about how different this was from his usual reports, which were a combination of political rumor and innuendo, facts and body counts, educated insights and outright hunches, players and police and the poor sons of bitches caught in between. Those were the people he felt sorry for, wanted to help, and all too often had been able to do little more than bury the dead and pray for the living.

Maybe Carly had a point. If you investigated the past instead of the present, at least the blood was already dry.

Together Dan and Carly quickly described and catalogued six daguerreotypes. When they came to the seventh, Dan felt like a hunter that had just spotted dinner.

“I know that one,” he said, pointing to an image of a bride and groom. “I’ve seen it before.”

“Where?” Carly demanded. “Winifred ignored it when I asked questions.”

“Newspaper archives. I can’t remember if it was a drawing or a photograph of the original daguerreotype. But that’s the first Andrew Jackson Quintrell and his bride, Isobel Quintrell y Castillo. Only after her marriage, she was careful to use an Anglicized version of her name—Isobel Castillo Quintrell. So the daguerreotype was taken in 1865, New Mexico Territory, the year of their marriage. Probably taken in Santa Fe, but I can’t be sure. The article might name the photographer, or daguerreotypist, or whatever they were called, and will certainly give a date for the marriage.”

Carly grinned and planted a smacking kiss on Dan’s cheek. “Fantastic! Has anyone ever told you you’re a genius?”

“Kiss me again and you can call me anything you want.”

“Oh, the temptation.”

“The kiss or the name-calling?”

“Yes.”

He pulled her close with startling speed, kissed her lazily, thoroughly, and released her with a slow smile. “Let the name-calling begin.”

Carly couldn’t catch her breath, much less use it to yell at the man who had just showed her that when it came to kissing, she had a few things left to learn. The thought was dizzying.

“No comment?” he asked.

“Does ‘Whew’ count?”

His hand snaked around her nape. “Want to go for ‘Wow’?”

Her body said yes.

Her mind said not yet.

Dan read her well. He released her with a slow caress along her jawline. “What comes after the daguerreotypes?”

“The what?” Abruptly she looked away so that she wouldn’t get lost in the hothouse green of his eyes. “Ambrotypes.” She let out a long breath. “You’re a very disturbing man.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Sure it was. When you’re concentrating, it would take dynamite to break through. Therefore, I’m dynamite.”

She laughed almost helplessly. Then she just laughed. It had been a long time since she’d enjoyed a man as much as Daniel Duran. In truth, it had been forever.

“If I’m going to earn Winifred’s bonus for finishing early, I have to stay focused,” Carly said. The slow trailing of her fingertips down his stubble-rough cheek said focus wasn’t easy right now. “Help me out, okay?”

He nodded, brushed a kiss over her fingertips, and turned back to the computer. “Ambrotypes.”

She sighed. “Right. Ambrotypes.” Very gently she picked up the first one in her cotton-clad fingers. “Eighth image. Size, quarter plate. Case is probably mid-1850s. The collodion is very badly damaged and curling away from the glass in fragments. I doubt that restoration is possible. In any case, Winifred doesn’t want to pay for it. The best I can do is photograph the ruined image and play with it digitally.”

Dan typed while Carly photographed and mourned the ambrotypes that hadn’t survived the passage of time. Sometimes cheaper and faster wasn’t good in the long run; daguerreotypes survived intact while ambrotypes were reduced to little more than black flakes and glass.

“How long were ambrotypes popular?” he asked when she paused.

“Less than a decade, thank God. Tintypes are a lot more durable.” She shook her head. “It’s almost not worth the hard drive space, but you never know. Some bright tech type might eventually figure out a way to resurrect the images.”

When Carly reached for the first tintype, she glanced sideways at Dan. From the way he was acting, the kiss had never happened. Even as she told herself that she couldn’t complain, that he was doing exactly what she’d asked, she looked at his mouth. Soft and hungry over hers, hard to forget, impossible not to want again.

“You’re distracting me,” Dan said without turning from the computer.

“Work on your concentration.”

He snickered.

“Image twenty-one,” she said briskly. “Tintype, half plate, brown tint, very probably Isobel Quintrell or a close relative based on the line of the chin, the space between the eyes, and the cheekbones. This woman is in full mourning clothes holding what appears to be a stillborn baby wrapped in baptismal white.”

Dan’s fingers paused over the computer keyboard. “You’re joking.”

“No.”

He glanced up at her in disbelief.

“It’s true,” Carly said. “Women often were photographed with their dead children and the image sent to distant family members as a kind of memorial for the dead child. With multiple camera lenses, multiple photos could be taken at the same time, so you could send out as many memorial photos as you had the money and patience for.”

He raised his dark eyebrows. “A lot of cultures make offerings to the dead, but this is a new one to me.”

“The nineteenth century had a much greater understanding of the inevitability of death and the importance of death rituals than we do in the twenty-first. They lived a lot closer to the bone then.”