Paper Doll by Robert B. Parker Page A

dim, and bore the lingering scent of kerosene, though I couldn’t find any source for it. A mild patina of dust covered every surface. The old Blue Tick hound I’d met in the front hall followed us down to the kitchen and settled heavily onto the floor near the stove. Jefferson indicated a white metal table with folding extenders on either end, and we sat on opposite sides of it.
    “Mr. Nelson has got old,” Jefferson said.
    “Lot of that going around,” I said. Jefferson smiled.
    “Yessir,” he said, “there is.”
    He gazed absently at the old hound lying by the stove.
    “He something to see, when he younger,” Jefferson said. “Ride a horse. Shoot. Handle dogs. Not afraid of any man. People step aside when he come.”
    Jefferson smiled softly.
    “He like the ladies all right,” he said.
    I waited. It was a skill I was perfecting down here.
    “Always took care of family,” Jefferson said.
    The old refrigerator in the far corner lumbered noisily into life. Nobody paid it any mind.
    “Been with him all my life,” Jefferson said. “He always took care of me too.”
    “Now you take care of him.”
    “All there is,” Jefferson said. “Mrs. Nelson gone. Miss Olivia gone.”
    “Tell me about Olivia,” I said.
    His voice was barely more than a whisper. His eyes were remote, his hands inert on the table looked sadly frail.
    “She broke his heart,” he said.
    “Married a black man?” Jefferson nodded.
    “She shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Broke his heart.”
    “Doesn’t break everyone’s heart,” I said.
    “He couldn’t change, he too old, he too…” Jefferson thought a minute. “He too much Mr. Jack. Wasn’t even one of our Nigras. Peace Corps. She marry an African Nigra.”
    “Did you ever meet him?” I said.
    “No, sir. They never come here. Mr. Jack say he never want to see her again. Say she dead, so far as he concerned.”
    “And now she is,” I said.
    Jefferson raised his head and stared at me. “No, sir,” he said.
    “Yeah. I’m sorry, Jefferson. That’s why I’m looking into her past. I’ll let you decide how to tell him, or if.”
    “When she die, sir?”
    I counted in my head for a moment. “Ten weeks ago,” I said. “In Boston.”
    Jefferson stared at me.
    “No, sir,” he said.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “I always kept in touch with her,” Jefferson said. “Mr. Jack pretends she’s dead, but she writes me letter and I write her. In Nairobi-that’s in Africa where she live.”
    I nodded. The Blue Tick hound stretched, all four legs taut for a long moment on the floor, and then lapped his muzzle once and relaxed back into sleep.
    “I got a letter from her yesterday,” Jefferson said.
    His voice was still as ashes.
    “She wrote it last week,” he said. “She ain’t dead, Mr. Spenser.”
    Nothing moved. Anywhere. It was so still I could hear the old dog breathing gently as he slept.
    “You have that letter?” I said.
    “Yessir.”
    Jefferson got up and went into a pantry and came back in a moment with a letter. It was written on that thin blue airmail stationery that folds into its own envelope and has to be slit the right way or you can’t keep track of the pages.
    “May I read it?” I said.
    “Yessir.”
    The letter, addressed to Jefferson, Dear, was a compendium of recent activities at the medical clinic, which I gathered she and her husband operated in a Nairobi slum. AIDS was the leading killer of both men and women, she said. There were several references to Jefferson’s last letter. It was dated five days previous, and signed Love as always, Livvie. There was no reason to doubt it.
    “You’d recognize her handwriting,” I said.
    “Yessir. When she a little girl I help her with her homework. When she go away to college she write me every week. She been writing me every week ever since. More than twenty-five years. I know her handwriting, sir.”
    I nodded. “I’m glad it wasn’t her, Jefferson.”
    “Yessir.”
    “But it was