Paper Doll

chapter forty

THE WEATHER IN Alton was still warm and it didn’t seem like fall. But at quarter to seven in the evening it was dark on the Batesburg Road. And empty, as if no one wanted to go to Batesburg, even to have their hair done. On the other hand, maybe no one wanted to leave Batesburg and go to Alton. I would have preferred neither.

I passed the gravel pit and turned right onto the dirt road and bumped slowly down to the end of it. My headlights hit on a cinder-block shack with a corrugated metal roof that looked like it might once have been used to house tractors. Someone had filled in the big garagetype doors with odd pieces of unpainted plywood, and cut a person-sized door in the middle of one of them. The door hung on badly nailed galvanized strap hinges, and opened with a rope pull. There was the rusted hulk of what might have once been a 1959 Plymouth in the yard, and several old tires. A dirty white sow lying behind one of the tires raised her head and stared into my headlights. I got out and knocked on the front door and the woman from the track kitchen opened it. She peered at me, trying to see into the darkness.

“My name is Spenser,” I said. “We met once at the track kitchen.”

She flinched back as if I had pushed her and glanced over her shoulder.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“Yeah, you do. And I know you. You’re Bertha Rankin, formerly Bertha Voss. You have a daughter Cheryl. Where’s your husband?”

“He’s asleep,” she said, and glanced back into the room again.

I could smell bacon grease and kerosene and a strong reek of whiskey.

“We need to talk about Jack Nelson,” I said. “If you’d like to step outside.”

She hesitated, and then stepped out of the house and pulled the makeshift door closed behind her. She was wearing some sort of shapeless dress, over some sort of shapeless body. Her gray hair was down and lank, and her face was red. There was sweat on her forehead and I could smell whiskey on her too.

“What you want?”

“I know that Jack Nelson is the father of your daughter, Cheryl Anne Rankin. I have no need to tell other people about that, right now. But I need to talk with you about it.”

“How you know that?” she said.

“Doesn’t matter. Tell me when Cheryl Anne was born.”

“1948.”

“Same year as Olivia Nelson,” I said.

Bertha Rankin didn’t speak.

“Did she look like Olivia Nelson?”

Bertha Rankin nodded.

“Where did she go to school?” I said.

“Batesburg.”

“Her father know about her?”

“Yes.”

“He give you money?”

We were standing in my headlights. As if on stage. She looked at me and then back at the house and then at the ground.

“Just you and me,” I said. “Did Jack Nelson give you money?”

“He give me a hundred dollars every month.”

“And told you to shut up,” I said.

“Didn’t have to. Hilly knew, it’d kill him. Hilly drinks some, but he loves me. I been faithful to him forty-three years. I wouldn’t never want him to know.”

There were tears now in her squinty eyes. Her face was puffy with booze and fat and age and tiredness.

“Did Cheryl Anne know who her father was?” I said.

The tears blossomed, and ran down her face. Her heavy shoulders sagged, and her breath began to come hard. She lowered her face suddenly and stared at the ground.

“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.