“Have a seat,” the black woman said. “We’ll bring it.”
I poured myself coffee, added cream and sugar, and took it with me to an empty seat. The white woman came around the counter with a startling number of plates and put them down in front of the ample women. I could see how they got ample.
I sipped some coffee. It was too hot. I swallowed the small sip with difficulty and blew on the cup for a while. Around the room there were pictures pasted up on the cinder-block wall, most of them horse racing pictures, jockeys and owners in winning circles with horses. The horses were always the least excited. They were old pictures, black-and-white blowups that had faded, the corners bent and torn from being repeatedly Scotch-taped to the uncooperative cinder block. The only thing recent was a big calendar for the current year, decorated with pictures of dogs playing poker. There was a picture, not recent, of Olivia Nelson, a cheap head shot in color that looked like the kind of school picture they take every year and send home in a cardboard frame and the parents buy it and put it on the mantel. I got up and went to the wall and looked more closely. Clearly it was Olivia Nelson. She looked like her yearbook picture, and she looked not too different from the picture of her at forty-two that I’d seen in her living room on Beacon Hill. My coffee had cooled a little and I drank some while I looked at her picture. The white woman came out of the kitchen and lumbered toward me with breakfast.
“Where you sitting?” she said.
I nodded at the table and she went ahead of me and set the tray down.
“Excuse me,” I said. “May I ask you why you have a picture of Olivia Nelson on the wall.”
The woman’s gray hair was badly done up and had unraveled over her forehead like a frayed sock. She tightened her chin and her lower lip pushed out a little.
“Got no pictures of Olivia Nelson.”
“Then who is this young woman?” I said, pointing to the girl in the school photo.
Her jaw got tighter and her lower lip came out a little further.
“That’s Cheryl Anne Rankin,” the woman said.
“She looks remarkably like Olivia Nelson, you sure it’s not?”
“Guess I ought to know my own daughter,” she said. Her voice was barely audible and she spoke straight down as if she were talking to her feet.
“Your daughter? Cheryl Anne Rankin, who looks just like Olivia Nelson, is your daughter?”
“She don’t look like Olivia Nelson,” the woman said to her feet.
I nodded and smiled engagingly. It was hard to be charming to someone who was staring at the ground.
“Do you know Olivia Nelson?”
“Used to.”
“Could you tell me about her?”
“No.”
“Where is your daughter now?” I said.
She shook her head doggedly, staring down.
“Got to work. Can’t stand here talking the damned day away,” she said.
She turned and lumbered back into the kitchen and began to break eggs into a bowl. The black woman looked at her and then glared at me. I thought about it and decided that she was reluctant to discuss it further, that her associate thought I was worse than roach turd, and that if they came at me together, I might get badly trampled.
I went back to my table and ate my grits and toast and finished my coffee and looked at the picture of Cheryl Anne Rankin, who looked just like Olivia Nelson.
I was confused.
chapter nineteen
JUMPER JACK NELSON’S house was beyond the training track, on a hill with a lawn that rolled down maybe half a mile to the roadway. The drive was crushed oyster shells, and it curved in a white arc slowly up through the putting green lawn to a porte cochere, supported on gleaming white pillars. The house too was white and looked as if it had been built before the Civil War and kept up. It was three stories, vaguely like a European country house, buoyed by foundation plantings of shrubs and flowers I didn’t recognize, so that, stark white, it seemed to float atop its hill on a wave of color. The house was silent. The windows were blank, the mid-morning sun reflecting off them without meaning. At the edges of the property, on either side, tall southern pines stood, their branchless trunks like palisades containing the estate. In their branches birds fluttered. I could hear them singing. As I got closer to the house, I could see the bees hovering over the foundation plantings, moving from flower to flower. My feet seemed intrusive as I crunched up the oyster shell drive.
When I rang the bell, it chimed deep inside the house. A number of dogs barked at the sound, though not as if they meant much. I waited. The dogs continued to bark without enthusiasm, as if they were merely doing their job, and didn’t really care if the doorbell rang.
A small breeze moved across the tops of the taller flowers along the front of the house and made them sway gently. The bees swayed with them, unconcerned with the breeze, focused on the nectar.
I didn’t hear footsteps. The door simply opened. Slowly. A huge hallway beyond the door was dark. A slow old Southern male black voice said slowly, “Yessir.”
“My name is Spenser,” I said and handed a card into the darkness. “I’m here to see Mr. Nelson.”
I smiled into the dark hallway. Friendly as a guy selling sewing machines. A black hand, nearly invisible in the dark hallway, took my card.
“Step in,” the old voice said.
Inside the hallway, my eyes began to adjust. There was an odd fresh smell in the house. It was a smell I knew, but I couldn’t place it. I felt something brush against my leg and looked down at an old hunting dog that was leaning against my knee. It was too dark to see him clearly, but the way he held his head, and the way his back swayed, was enough to know he was old. I reached down and let him smell the back of my hand. As my pupils continued to dilate I could see that there were three or four other dogs standing around, none of them hostile. They were all hunting dogs.
The black man said, “You wait here, sir. I’ll see Mr. Nelson, can he see you.”
His voice was soft, and he was very old. As tall as I was, but narrow; and stooped as if he were embarrassed to be tall and wanted to conceal it. He had on a worn black suit of some kind and a white shirt with one collar point bent upward, and a narrow ratty black bow tie, like a movie gambler, tied with the ends hanging long. The hand that held my card was surprisingly thick, with strong fingers. His hands were graceful, like he might play the harp, or deal cards.
“Sure,” I said.
“Don’t pay the dogs no mind, sir,” he said. “They won’t harm you.”
“I know,” I said. “I like dogs.”
“Yessir,” he said and moved away, his feet a whisper on the dark oak floor. He was wearing slippers.
The room was entirely dark oak, panels on the walls, panels and beams on the ceiling. There were no windows in the hall. The stairwell curved up toward the back half of the entry hall, and must have been windowed, because some light wafted dimly down from beyond the turn.
The fresh smell I’d noticed when I came in had lessened when the black man left, and as I heard his soft, whispering shuffle coming back from somewhere under the stairs it got strong again. I realized what I was sniffing. The house smelled of booze, and the black man smelled of it more so. No wonder it was familiar.
“Mr. Nelson say why you want to see him, sir?”
“It’s about his daughter,” I said.
“Yessir.”
He shuffled away, and this time he was gone awhile. I scratched the old hound behind his ear and he leaned his head a little harder against me. The other dogs sat, respectfully, nearby, in a semicircle that probably had some dog order to it. The old one was obviously in charge: I could see well enough now to see how gray the dog’s muzzle was. And around his eyes, sort of like a raccoon. His front paws turned in slightly, the way they did on a bear, and he moved stiffly.