“She did, didn’t she?” I said.
Bertha nodded.
“Be hard not to tell her,” I said.
“I told her when she a seventeen-year-old girl,” Bertha said. “I wanted her to be proud of where she come from. To know that she wasn’t just like us.”
“And a little after that,” I said, “she left town.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t hear from her anymore.”
Bertha was crying full out now, her head down, her arms at her sides. She shook her head. I didn’t have it in me to tell her that her daughter was dead. She’d have to know sometime. But it didn’t have to be me who told her.
I put my hand out and patted her shoulder. She pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And turned and got back in my car and drove away.
When I thought about it, on the dark road back to Alton, I figured that she probably sort of knew that her daughter was dead. Which didn’t make me feel any better.
chapter forty-one
IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY at night and starting to rain when Jefferson let me into the big white house on the rise where Jack Nelson lived. As I stepped into the dim front hall, there was the quiet movement of dogs about me, and the old alpha dog put his nose against the back of my hand.
“Evening, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said.
“I need to talk to Mr. Nelson,” I said. “He in?”
I could hear the smile in Jefferson’s voice although the hallway was too dim to see it. “Mr. Jack always in, sir. What is it you need to see him about?”
“Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.
We stood silent in the dim, dog-smelling hallway. Jefferson still had a hand on the open door. The old alpha dog sat next to me waiting for me to pat him. I patted him. The silence dragged on. Then Jefferson closed the door softly behind me.
“This way, Mr. Spenser,” he said and we went back through the house the same way we had gone last time into the vast glass room where Jack Nelson kept his whiskey.
The last time I’d come, the room had been flooded with light. Now it was dark except for the eccentric glow of the television set. The raindrops flattened against the glass roof, and ran together, and ran off in convoluted streaks. The sound of the rain hitting was a kind of steady rattle in the dark.
Nelson was propped in his chair by the television. The water and the bourbon were at hand. The silent dogs were there. The air-conditioning was still turned up and the chilled room felt like a meat locker.
Nelson looked at me without reaction as I walked toward him. Jefferson held back a little, among the dogs, silent at the periphery.
I said, “Mr. Nelson, remember me?”
Nelson stared at me and shook his head. He seemed to have become more inert since I’d seen him last. Three hundred nearly motionless pounds of booze and suet. The sound was low on the television, where two guys were pretending to wrestle. Nelson’s breath wheezed in the quiet room.
“My name is Spenser. I’m a detective from Boston, Mass. I came a while back and talked with you about your daughter.”
“No daughter,” he rasped.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Nelson, but that’s not true. In fact, there’s two daughters.”
At the dark rim of the glass room Jefferson made a sound like a sigh.
“Nigger lover,” Nelson said. He drank some bourbon. His eyes went back to rest on the television set.
“Your daughter Olivia married an African,” l said. “Your daughter Cheryl Anne married a rich guy from Boston.”
Nelson’s eyes never moved from the television. He seemed to settle more deeply into his own mass. The rain streamed off the black glass of the conservatory roof.
“She was murdered a little while ago,” I said. “In Boston. I’m trying to find out why.”
Nelson drank some more bourbon, and fumbled for the bottle and poured another drink and muddled water into it from the pitcher. While he did this he never took his eyes from the television tube. He spilled some of the bourbon and some of the water. He didn’t bother with ice. I stepped in front of the television set.
“You have an illegitimate daughter named Cheryl Anne Rankin,” I said.
Nelson bent his head to the side trying to see past me to the screen. I seemed to have no meaning to him. He seemed to know only that I was an object between him and the picture.
“He ain’t going to talk, Mr. Spenser,” Jefferson said. “He don’t talk much anymore.”
“Then you’ll have to talk, Jefferson,” I said. “One way or another, I’m going to find out about Cheryl Anne Rankin. And if that includes getting an extradition warrant on Jumper Jack, then I’ll do it.”
