Always Time To Die

Chapter 29

QUINTRELL RANCH

WEDNESDAY EVENING

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.

She had the strength to do what must be done. She wouldn't accept anything less.

All the years of hate would be repaid.

After several minutes of forcing herself to breathe steadily, evenly, Winifred felt stronger. She took a wrapped syringe and a small clay bottle from her bedside drawer. Slowly, using the backs of chairs and then the doorframe, she worked her way to Sylvia's room.

Her sister was facing the window, watching the pool or the silvery moonlight or perhaps nothing at all. For the first time Winifred saw Sylvia as she really was, a husk of the past, a transparent mockery of life, a spirit chained when it should be free, a creature kept alive for a vengeance that never came.

"Never enough time to live," Winifred said to her sister. "Always time to die. Forgive me, querida."

Whether the forgiveness was for the past or the present, Winifred didn't say and Sylvia didn't care. With trembling fingers, Winifred opened the syringe she'd brought from her bedroom, took the stopper out of the small clay bottle, and filled the syringe. She closed her eyes, crossed herself, and injected the fluid into the IV that dripped slowly down to Sylvia's wasted vein.

When the syringe was empty, Winifred went to the fireplace, added several more chunks of wood, and sat in her familiar chair next to the bed. Gently she took Sylvia's hand and held it, cool and frail, between her own. Together the two sisters looked out the window.

Moonlight shifted and slid across the land, ghostly and beautiful and untouchable. Sylvia's breathing slowed, then slowed even more, until it sighed out one last time and she became like the moonlight, beyond the reach of man.

Only then did Winifred stand. She threw the little pot into the fireplace with enough force to shatter the clay and heaped more wood on top. With the fire blazing behind her, she went to her own room, buried the hypodermic in a pot of lemongrass, washed her hands, and went to bed.

She fell asleep certain that she would see the Senator's son in hell.