Elizabeth Lowell: Always Time To Die

NEAR TAOS, NEW MEXICO JANUARY

TUESDAY, 3:00 a.m.

THE CUTTING EDGE OF A WINTER STORM MADE THE OLD HOUSE SIGH AND MOAN AS if someone was dying.

Someone is. Soon.

The ghostly smile, the laughter, and the words were silent.

No one saw the intruder glide across the ancient Persian carpet on soundless feet. No one heard the door to the library open.

The hospital bed and oxygen bottle looked bizarre among the ranks of leather-bound books and gilt-framed portraits of Andrew Jackson Quintrell I and his wife, Isobel Mercedes Archuleta y Castillo. The ambition that had created one of New Mexico's biggest ranches and launched the national political careers of future Quintrells blazed out of A. J. Quintrell's Yankee blue eyes. The matching ambition of one of New Mexico's oldest families smoldered in Isobel's hazel green eyes.

The old man lying motionless on the hospital bed was their grandson. The fires of ambition had almost burned out in him. He would end his life as he had begun it, on the Quintrell ranch. No hospitals, no nurses, no doctors. No muttering and fussing and false smiles of hope.

There wasn't any hope.

For nearly a century the Senator had enjoyed the wealth and prestige and power of the Quintrell family. For eighty years he had run the family with the closed fist of absolute power. Now he was slowly succumbing to congestive heart failure. At the moment, oxygen made him rest easier. In time it wouldn't help. Then he would drown.

Die, old man. Why can't you just die and save us all a lot of trouble?

No answer came but the slow, shallow, damnably steady breathing of Andrew Jackson Quintrell III.

You lived like a pagan king. Why couldn't you just die that way? But no, you had to have it all - pagan life and Christian afterlife .

Father Roybal would be visiting again this morning, urging former Senator Quintrell to purge his soul of all evil and reach out for God's forgiveness. Forgiveness would be there, waiting for him.

It always was for prodigal sons.

Confession might be good for the soul, but it's hell on the living. I don't want to live in hell, old man.

It's your turn to do that.

Finally.

Gloved hands removed the oxygen tube from the Senator's nose. Gloved hands took a pillow from the bed and pressed it gently, firmly, relentlessly over the old man's face. Breathing slowed, then stopped. He stirred just a little at first and then urgently, almost violently, but he was no match for the deadly gentleness that shut off his air. A minute, two minutes, and it was over, breath and heart stopped, death where life had been.

It took less time than that for the murderer to tidy up the bed, reinsert the oxygen tube, replace the pillow, and walk out into the bitter caress of night.

NEAR TAOS

SUNDAY MORNING

TWO MEN SQUINTED AGAINST THE WIND AND STARED DOWN AT THE QUINTRELL family graveyard. It lay a few hundred yards below and six hundred feet away from the base of the long, ragged ridge where they stood. A white wrought-iron fence enclosed the graveyard, as though death could be kept away from the living by such a simple thing.

At the edge of the valley, pinons grew black against a thin veneer of snow. Cottonwood branches along the valley creek had been stripped by winter to their thin, pale skin. In the black-and-white landscape, a ragged rectangle and a nearby tarp-covered mound of loose red dirt looked out of place. Three ravens squatted on the tarp like guests waiting to be served. A polished casket hovered astride the newly dug grave, ready to be lowered at a signal from the minister.

The first of the funeral procession drove up and stopped outside the ornate white fence. There wouldn't be many cars, because the graveside service was limited to clergy and immediate members of the Senator's family. The public service had been yesterday, in Santa Fe, complete with a media circus where the famous and the merely notorious exchanged Cheshire cat grins and firm handshakes and careful lies while the smell of dying flowers overwhelmed the stately cathedral.

Automatically Daniel Duran looked over his shoulder, checking that his silhouette was still invisible from below, lost against a tall pine. It was. So was his father's.

He and John weren't famous or notorious. They hadn't been invited to either the memorial or funeral service for the dead man everyone called the Senator. The lack of invitations didn't matter to Dan. He wouldn't have gone anyway.

So why am I here?

It was a good question. He didn't have an answer. He wasn't even sure he wanted one.

The wind rushing down from the harsh peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains tasted of snow and distance and the kind of time that made most people uncomfortable. Deep time. Unimaginable time. Time so great it reduced humanity to an amusing footnote in Earth's four-billion-year history.

Dan liked that kind of time. Humans were amusing. Laughable. It was the only way to stay sane.

And that was something he'd promised himself he wouldn't think about for a few months. Staying sane.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, chances are you don Y understand the situation. Why else would ignorance be called bliss ?

With a grim smile he turned so that his injured leg didn't take the force of the brutal wind.

"You should have stayed home," John Duran said.

Dan gave his father a sidelong look. "The exercise is good for my leg."

"That old man never acknowledged you or your mother as kin. Hell, he barely acknowledged his own legitimate daughter."

Dan shrugged and let the wind comb dark hair he hadn't bothered to have cut in months. "I don't take it personally. He never acknowledged any of his bastards."

"So why bother hiking here for the Senator's funeral? And don't waste your breath on the exercise excuse. You could do laps around the Taos town square with a lot less trouble."

For a time there was only the sound of the ice-tipped wind scouring the ridge. Finally Dan said, "I don't know."

John grunted. He doubted that his fiercely bright son didn't know why they were freezing their nuts off on Castillo Ridge watching one of New Mexico's most famous womanizers get buried. Then again, maybe Dan truly didn't know.

"You sure?" John asked.

"Yeah."

"Well, that's the most hopeful thing that's happened since you turned up three months ago."

Once, Dan would have smiled, but that was before pain had etched his face and cynicism had eroded his soul. "How so?"

"You cared about something enough to walk three miles in the snow."

Dan's dark brown eyebrows lifted. "Have I been that bad?"

"No," his father said slowly. "But you're different. Much less smile. Too much steel. Less laughter. More silence. Too old to be thirty-four."

Dan didn't argue. It was the truth.

"It's more than the injury," John said, waving at his son's right leg, where metal and pain had exploded through flesh. "Muscle and bone heals. Emotions…" He sighed. "Well, they take longer. And sometimes they just don't heal at all."

"You're thinking of Mom and whatever happened with her mother."

John nodded. "She still doesn't talk about it."

"Good for her." I hope .

"You didn't feel that way a few years ago."

"A few years ago I didn't understand about sleeping dogs and land mines. Now I do."

And that's what was bothering Dan. The Senator's sister-in-law Winifred was running around kicking sleeping dogs right and left. Sooner or later she would step on a land mine and wake up something so brutal that his own mother had never once spoken of it, even to the man she loved.