QUINTRELL RANCH
FRIDAY NIGHT
CARLY SMACKED HER HANDS TOGETHER. EVEN INSIDE LINED GLOVES, HER FINGERS were getting cold.
"I can't figure out any rhyme or reason for the placement of graves," Dan said.
"Usually, the closer to the founder's grave, the higher the rank," Carly said. "But Liza's grave isn't with her brother's or her sister's."
Dan dusted snow off the last headstone. "Nope. This one is a memorial stone to a Quintrell who died in the Civil War."
"Really?" Carly came over, took a digital photo, and shoved the camera back in her pocket. "Samuel Quintrell. Wonder if he was a brother or a father or an uncle or-"
"Doesn't matter," Dan cut in. "Winifred only wants-"
"Castillos," Carly finished in disgust.
"Let's try the lower half of the graveyard."
Carly looked toward the section of the graveyard reserved for ranch workers. "Are you saying that some of the employees had higher 'rank' than the Senator's daughter?"
"If we're talking about my grandmother, yes," Dan said as he walked the length of the ghostly white fence. "I'm guessing that Liza was lucky to be buried here at all. Probably wouldn't have been, but the Quintrells didn't want to make any fuss that would attract more attention to Liza's sorry life."
Carly moved the flashlight over the modest gravestones that paralleled the fence. "These are all Isobel's cousins or retainers or whatever."
"Same difference. Back then, the whole family-distant cousins, in-laws of cousins, in-laws of in-laws-followed the money. Isobel had it and Andrew Quintrell made it grow. Once the Senator got into politics and increased his connection to the Sandovals through Sylvia, he kept the money growing."
"You're so cynical."
"It's my middle name."
"Really?" she asked.
"It's better than Warden."
"Warden?"
"My middle name."
Bright as moonlight, Carly's laughter floated up into the darkness until the wind caught it and swept it away.
After poking around the fence, Dan knelt near it and rubbed wind-driven snow off a headstone. The grave that had been set apart from even the distant family who worked on the ranch.
"Here we go." His voice was matter-of-fact. He could have been talking about the weather. "Elizabeth Isobel Quintrell, 1936 to 1968."
"Thirty-two years old," Carly said. "What a waste."
"She must have liked her life well enough."
"How can you say that?"
"She didn't do anything to change it."
Carly looked at the silver and darkness of the grave. "Maybe she couldn't."
"Such a tender soul." Gently he touched Carly's face with a cold gloved fingertip. "She never tried, Carolina May. Not even once."
"She didn't deserve to be murdered."
"No one does, but it happens just the same. You want a picture of this headstone?"
Carly knelt and waited for the autofocus to wake up and get its job done. Light flashed once. She viewed the image, approved it, and turned the camera off again.
"Do you suppose Susan Mullins was buried here? She was a longtime employee, after all."
"And her daughter was probably the Senator's bastard."
"That, too."
Dan and Carly continued down the fence, searching for depressions in the snow cover that would indicate earth sagging into a grave when the coffin gave way to a combination of time and water. Other than an occasional Sandoval and two Sneads, Dan and Carly didn't find any names they recognized.
The wind flexed, stretched, ran cold between the white metal bars of the fence.
Carly stood and looked at the moon-silvered ridgeline that loomed a few hundred yards away.
"What were you doing up there?" she asked. "It was you, wasn't it, the day the Senator was buried?"
Dan followed her glance to Castillo Ridge. "Me, my dad, and one of the Sneads. Jim probably. Blaine isn't that good on the stalk."
"I don't understand."
"Dad and I parked off the highway and climbed up the back side of the ridge. There's an old trail there. Hunters use it a lot. So does their prey. Anyway, Dad and I watched the whole thing from up there. Neither of us noticed anyone, but when we started walking out, I saw where there were some tracks. Someone else had been up on the ridge with a dog, watching the burial."
"And you think it was Jim Snead?"
"He's the only one I know of who can get close to me without giving himself away. I have good senses."
"Is that why you keep looking up toward the ridge?" she asked. "You think he's up there now?"
"I've felt watched a few times since we left the house. Then it goes away. Probably just the wind making branches move."
"Or Jim Snead looking down from the ridge?"
"Maybe," Dan said.
"Why?"
"I don't know."
And as soon as Dan had Carly in a warm, safe place, he was going to climb the ridge and backtrack, assuming the wind and shifting snow didn't cover everything before he got back here from Taos.
If he was alone, he'd have climbed that ridge the first time his neck started itching. But he wasn't alone.
"Can the ridge be climbed from this side?" Carly asked.
"Sure."
"Is it hard?"
"Not if you have good boots."
"Let's go."
"What?" Dan said, not believing what he was hearing.
"I want to climb the ridge and look out over the valley and see the ranch in moonlight and darkness, the way it must have looked a hundred years ago."
He listened to his inner senses, found nothing that was worth arguing over, and gave in. "I'll break trail."