Always Time To Die by Elizabeth Lowell

Author:Elizabeth Lowell [Elizabeth Lowell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061739194
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-11-28T23:00:00+00:00

QUINTRELL RANCH

WEDNESDAY EVENING

29

JEANETTE DYKSTRA’S LIPS MOVED BUT NO SOUND CAME FROM THE TV SCREEN. Celebrity images flashed, promoting her next show. The picture cut to an improbably sparkling toilet and a dancing toilet brush that threw glittering stuff everywhere.

Winifred ignored the TV until all the commercials and station promos were finished. Only then did she pick up the remote control from her bedside table and take off the mute.

A man in a blue shirt, multicolored tie, and gray-blue suit leaned earnestly toward the camera. His eyes were the same pale color as his shirt. The size of his ears gave him away as a man approaching seventy, but his hair was pure blond and his cheeks didn’t sag. His hand had more wrinkles than his entire face. He held the obligatory yellow tablet and blunt pencil in camera view, suggesting that he’d had actually been out doing some old-fashioned reporting a few minutes ago instead of being powdered and primped for the camera.

“Good evening. In five minutes we will interrupt our normal programming to bring you breaking news from the governor’s mansion, where it’s rumored that Governor Quintrell will announce his candidacy for president of the United States.”

Winifred’s hand clenched around the remote control. Despite the pallor of illness, color burned high on her cheekbones. She’d been busy today, taking swabs of Sylvia’s cheek and her own, packing them for mailing, pushing Blaine Snead until he drove the package to town and returned with her mailing receipt. Small things, really, but everything took so much energy now.

She watched without moving while the usual scenes of international war, famine, and shouting heads marched in tightly edited procession across the TV. Politicians and pundits mouthed ten-second sound bites.

“He wouldn’t dare,” she said hoarsely.

Yet she knew he would.

He’d dared a lot more and he’d won. The Senator’s death had changed many things, but it wouldn’t change that. Josh Quintrell was as clever and ruthless as anyone the Senator ever spawned.

Tears of rage and regret shimmered in Winifred’s eyes. Even when Josh appeared on the screen, she didn’t blink the tears away. She didn’t have to. She knew what Josh looked like. The Senator’s eyes and arrogance and meanness. None of Sylvia’s sweetness. None of her kindness. Nothing of her at all. Just the Senator, a man who had raped his own daughter at thirteen, sending her careening down the road to hell, taking Sylvia with her. One daughter lost to polio. One daughter lost to the drunken lecher who couldn’t keep his hands off any female, even blood kin.

And that was just the beginning of his sins.

Long after Josh vanished from the TV in a flurry of applause and American flags, Winifred lay staring at the screen. There was a lot to do, and none of it good.

But it would be done.

Ignoring the dizziness that had begun to plague her, she sat up and put her feet on the floor. The cool tile beneath her feet helped to focus her. She stood slowly, waiting for her heart to settle.

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