Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Uh-huh,” she said, scrambling to think of an excuse that would let her turn down the offer of the warehouse. The windows were so filthy that the light was indeed hazy and wan as she’d predicted, although she could imagine how, once clean, they could let in enough light to work by on sunny days. Not in the morning or evening, though.

  “I’m afraid I’ll need more light,” she said.

  “I’ll have some lamps brought over, along with those space heaters I promised,” Mayor Sykes said.

  A mouse suddenly skittered past their feet and Anna let out an involuntary screech.

  “You have some company,” Mayor Sykes laughed, taking her arm, as if protecting her. “That bother you?”

  “Not at all,” she lied, gently extracting her arm from his grasp. “It just surprised me.” What else was living behind the old crates and concrete blocks in this building? There was no sign of people having used it as a place to sleep or squat. No cigarette wrappers or beer bottles. Nothing like that. Whatever was giving her the chills in the warehouse, it wasn’t human.

  “I’ll have Benny, the custodian from my office, come sweep this out for you,” Mayor Sykes said. He was standing very close to her. Although they weren’t touching, she could feel the nearness of him, the heat of his body. She took a step away as if examining the grimy windows.

  “Perhaps I can wash the windows,” she offered, “if I can get a ladder.”

  “Oh, Benny’ll take care of that.”

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. She couldn’t look this gift horse in the mouth. She knew the space could be made workable, as long as she could get over her discomfort about it. “Please have him—Benny—leave the tables and chairs,” she said. “And I’ll also need a stepladder. Where can I buy one?”

  “Benny’ll have to bring one for washing the windows,” Mayor Sykes said, “and I’ll just tell him to leave it.”

  They walked to the far end of the warehouse where they discovered a toilet and small sink tucked into an alcove. The mayor turned the squeaky faucet and brown water sputtered, then streamed into the sink and gradually turned clear. “Well, what do you know?” he said. “Water hasn’t been turned off. You’re in luck. Now we just need to get your electric back on and you’re in business.”

  “Wonderful,” she said, forcing the word past the unease in her throat. She was beginning to see the good points in the space. The shorter wall nearest the entrance was a blank slate. No door. No window. She ran her hand over the wall; it was smooth and made of wood. “This will be the perfect place to hang the stretched canvas,” she said, more to herself than to Mr. Sykes.

  “I would think so,” he agreed.

  She looked over at him. “You’re very kind, thank you.” She smiled at him, but found she couldn’t hold his gaze for long. “I’m going to need some help,” she said, turning toward the blank wall again. “Perhaps I could hire some high school students to work with me after school?”

  “Want me to speak to the art teacher at Edenton High for you?”

  “That would be wonderful.” She was beginning to feel better about this man. He was so accommodating and generous. “Thank you for being so helpful,” she said.

  “We want you to enjoy your stay here in Edenton, Miss Dale,” he said, and she wondered if the men she’d had lunch with had put their heads together and decided to quit talking about the artist they wished they had for the post office mural—Martin Drapple—and embrace the artist they were stuck with instead.

  She was tired by the time she returned to Miss Myrtle’s. Freda silently gave her a coconut cookie and a smile, along with a note from Miss Myrtle, telling Anna she was at her garden club, which apparently met all year long. Anna went up to her spacious room with its pink bed and sachet-scented air to write in her journal.

  Tomorrow, she wrote, Mr. Toby Fiering will take me on a tour of the cotton mill.

  She tried to imagine what that would be like, but every time her mind drifted from her writing, she was back in that shadowy warehouse once again.

  Chapter 11

  MORGAN

  June 15, 2018

  My new laptop was delivered at eleven that morning. I felt nervous as I set it up on the dining room table and connected to my e-mail address. I scrolled through ancient e-mail until the pain was too much for me. That mail was from another time, another world, before everything had gone to hell. There was a glut of e-mail from my former classmates at UNC about assignments and parties. Not a lot of e-mail from Trey. He’d mostly texted and all my texts were long gone with my old phone number. Just as well. The last e-mail from him read simply, Chill, babe, and I had no idea what it was regarding, since it had been sent before the accident, when I’d had nothing in my life I needed to chill about. I stared at his e-mail address, filling with a mixture of hurt and venom. He’d ruined my life and saved his own. Even after he realized how much trouble I was in, he did nothing to help me. Instead, he dug my grave deeper. I was tempted to e-mail him. Tell him exactly what I thought of him now. But it would be a mistake. E-mailing him—contacting any of my friends from my old life—would be a mistake I couldn’t afford to make. In a moment of supreme willpower, I erased my mail. All of it. I wasn’t going to live in the past. I needed to be in the here and now, and it felt good to see the empty mail box. The blank slate.

  I left my e-mail account and began researching “art restoration,” quickly learning that I was in even more trouble than I’d thought. I had absolutely no business going near that mural. Restoration was no job for a novice, let alone for one person. Page after page on the restoration sites showed groups of people wearing protective gear as they worked together on a mural. Was Jesse Williams setting me up for failure for some unknown reason? Or maybe this was his approach to dealing with the kids he tried to save. Maybe he set each of them up with an impossible task and then goaded them to complete it to boost their self-esteem. Again I wondered if he had the wrong Morgan Christopher. I Googled my name on the computer, not for the first time of course, but this time I added the word “artist” to my search. Mine was the only name that showed up. It was on Instagram, my old preprison account, when I still looked fresh faced and innocent, rather than the haunted-looking girl I saw in the mirror these days. Staring at my Instagram page, I felt myself caving. Tentatively, knowing how much it was going to hurt, I clicked on a picture of myself with my parents. I’d posted it a few years ago, why I wasn’t sure. Maybe I’d wanted to pretend I had a normal life. A normal family. We’d been at the state fair, and to an outsider, we probably looked like a handsome threesome. Nice-looking father. Attractive, golden-haired mother. Blond daughter, pretty despite wearing no makeup. No one could tell the warped history of the family from this photograph, or that a short time later, the pretty daughter would be locked up. Now I saw the picture differently and it startled me. The three of us stood in front of the Ferris wheel. My father had his arm around my mother. Although it was morning, I knew he was already hammered. I could tell by the sloppy grin, by the way his hand grazed my mother’s breast. My mother was probably three sheets to the wind herself, her prescription sunglasses askew. They didn’t look like lowlifes, my parents. They’d both somehow managed to hang on to their computer programming jobs. High-functioning alcoholics. I’d learned that term in AA. I hated the way my very presence in the photograph seemed to give them credibility. Made them look like worthy parents. “You were a mistake,” my mother told me once when she was blotto. “We never wanted to have kids.” That had already been pretty clear to me. They’d never been there for me.

  This ruminating was doing me no good.

  I looked up some of my old friends’ Instagram accounts, but what did I have in common with any of them now? Most of them had recently graduated, and if I hadn’t screwed up, I would have graduated with them. I winced as I scrolled through their pictures. There they were, partying, laughing, without a care in the world. In bikinis at somebody’s pool, bottles of beer in their hands. I’d never fit i
n with them again. I didn’t want to. Even my best friend Robin looked like she was toasted. They’d learned zip from my experience. They probably thought that what happened to me was just shitty bad luck. I felt so alone, looking at the pictures. My boyfriend of two years—Trey—was gone. My girlfriends would no longer have a thing in common with me. My parents were worthless. I had no one.

  I thrummed my fingers lightly on the keyboard. Did I dare look up Trey? In for a penny, in for a pound. Before I could stop myself, I clicked on his Instagram profile. Oh damn. I knew right away I shouldn’t have done it. Trey stood beneath a sign that read GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER. The last year had only increased his physical beauty. That tousled blond hair. The eyes that were sometimes hazel, often green. The smile that was always there and that could melt me in two seconds. He looked so happy. So secure in his future. I realized in that moment, staring at his beautiful face, that I hated him. It was a good feeling. Almost healing, that hatred. Did Trey ever think about Emily Maxwell? Did he even know her name? I doubted it. I had the feeling only one of us had a conscience.

  There was a picture of Trey with his family. The four of them stood in front of a broad, glittering Christmas tree. I remembered how they’d hunt and hunt for the perfect tree to fill the corner of their huge living room each year. Seeing his parents’ smiling faces, seeing his younger sister Becky with her arm around Trey’s waist, her head against his shoulder, was almost more than I could bear. I’d thought of his family as mine. The normal, happy, healthy family I’d yearned for. I’d called his mother “Mom.” I’d embraced Becky as the sister I’d never had. I’d lost them when I lost everything else.

  There was one more person I still wanted to search for, though the thought of actually finding her scared me: Emily Maxwell. But Google turned up only a couple of hits, all of them related to the old news articles about the accident. Maxwell was taken to Rex Hospital, where she remains in a coma. The driver, twenty-one-year-old Morgan Christopher, was charged with driving while intoxicated.

  I pressed my fist against my mouth as I read the article. Only two people knew the truth about what happened that night. Only one of us tried to tell it.

  Emily’s coma lasted two months, and when she woke up, she was paralyzed. That was all I knew. All I’d been told. I was terrified to know more, and yet I needed to. I needed to know that somehow, in spite of what happened to her, she was okay. I was the sort of person who winced when I killed a fly. Who carried spiders outside instead of squashing them. I would never get over what happened to Emily Maxwell. But I could find no other information on her. No Facebook or Instagram or Twitter accounts—at least not accounts that were open to the public.

  I finally left Google and returned with a vengeance to the restoration site I’d been studying. I could find no “lesson,” no Web site that told me step-by-step, “this is how you restore a mural.” And every site I found seemed to describe different restoration methods or offer contradictory information. Restoration was not something you learned how to do on the Internet. I read until my eyes blurred and my stomach growled with hunger. By the time I shut the computer, I was more confused than ever about where to begin on the mural.

  In the kitchen pantry, I found a box of Cheerios and was lifting it from the shelf when I noticed pencil markings on the pantry’s doorjamb. I stepped closer. The markings were a height chart, and I bent over to see the lowest line. “Lisa, age 7.” There was another mark for every age, up until she hit nineteen when I assumed she had stopped growing. I remembered seeing a similar height chart in a friend’s house when I was a teenager and I felt the same envy now as I had then. This was a family that cared enough to record a child’s height, a child’s life passages. I was willing to bet this pantry had been painted numerous times over the last four decades, but the doorjamb with the pencil markings had been preserved. Treasured by Jesse Williams and his wife. Maybe by Lisa herself. The house suddenly felt like someone’s home to me. I’d been thinking of it as more of a museum, clean and a bit sterile, filled with incredibly valuable artwork. The height chart, like the handprints in the front sidewalk, told me something different. A family had lived and loved here.

  I was eating the Cheerios at the kitchen table when Lisa came in the back door. She was dressed in white capris and a button-down blue chambray shirt rather than her usual polished Realtor clothing. She looked like a different woman.

  “Why aren’t you at the gallery?” she asked. “You need to get cracking on the mural.”

  Nope, I thought. Same woman.

  “Soon,” I said. “I got my computer and I’m reading about restoration and … do you realize that artists really aren’t the people who do it? It’s a whole different set of skills, and—”

  “What are you saying?” She frowned at me.

  “That you need to be patient with me. I’ll do it, but I don’t even know how to start and—”

  “You’ll have to figure that out quickly,” she said. “We have a deadline to meet.”

  I set down my spoon, annoyed. “Lisa, what’s the big deal with the opening date of the gallery? So what if it opens a week late or even a month late?”

  She stared at me. It was unnerving, that stare.

  “Don’t you want this done right?” I asked.

  Lisa leaned against the counter, her body slumped, and she suddenly looked exhausted. “I have bigger fish to fry than to argue with you about this,” she said. “I not only have the gallery to deal with, I have clients selling, clients buying, clients pretending to want to buy. The mural is all you have to deal with. That’s it. Your only responsibility. Just seven or eight weeks of your life, and then you’re a free woman with fifty thousand dollars in the bank. If it weren’t for the mural and my father you’d still be in prison, all right? So get things in perspective.”

  “They have these big companies who do restoration,” I argued, unwilling to let this topic slide. “Not one lone person who has never done anything like it before. I just don’t want you to expect a perfect job when I’m working by myself, doing it for the first time, learning as I go.”

  “Then do an imperfect job,” she said. “My father had to know your limitations and he still wanted you to do it. Just make it good enough to hang in the foyer. No one’s going to examine it with a fine-tooth comb. It’s not the Mona Lisa. All right?”

  I worried that “imperfect” would be the kindest word anyone could find to describe my work on the mural. “Fine,” I said.

  Lisa glanced at her phone. “I want you at the gallery now,” she said. “This afternoon. The guys are building a stretcher and you need to supervise them. You have to figure out what supplies you need so we can get them ASAP.”

  “Seriously, Lisa, I need to do more research before I can—”

  “Research is always never-ending,” she said, “and I’m not paying you to sit on your computer here in my house.”

  Wow, she was tough. I didn’t speak, at least not out loud. Inside, I was thinking, First of all, it’s not your money. Second of all, I have no idea what I’m doing.

  “Fine,” I said again. Money and freedom. That was why I was here. The mural was bizarre and my curiosity was piqued by its strangeness, but I certainly felt no attachment to it. I just wanted to figure out how to restore it well enough to be paid and stay out of prison. I’d view the mural as nothing more than a means to an end.

  I carried my bowl to the sink, then picked up my purse and the laptop. “I’m on my way,” I said, and I headed for the door.

  Chapter 12

  ANNA

  December 12, 1939

  In the morning, Mr. Fiering gave Anna a tour of the cotton mill and the diminutive Mill Village, which consisted of neat rows of little houses for the mill workers and their families. There were a lot of children in the streets playing catch and chasing one another around. The Mill Village had a very separate feeling from the rest of Edenton, and from a few things Mr. Fiering said, Anna had the sense that the people who live
d in its tiny houses were not viewed in a very welcoming light by the rest of the town.

  The mill itself was quite an impressive sight. The long brick building was filled with workers and machinery and noise, and Anna felt overwhelmed by it all as she walked through it, Toby Fiering at her side. Ironically, though, it was the outside of the mill that she found most intriguing. Wisps of cotton were caught in the branches of the trees closest to the mill windows and Anna found the sight of them fascinating—a stunning visual she decided then and there would be in her mural along with some of the small Mill Village homes that lined the nearby streets.

  After they toured the mill, Mr. Fiering dropped her off at the peanut factory, where she watched women, most of them colored, doing monotonous work on the belts that moved the peanuts from one part of the tall brick building to another. Anna liked the idea of including colored workers in the mural. She mentioned that to Miss Myrtle when she returned home from her busy day.

  “Oh, honey,” Miss Myrtle said, “this town couldn’t survive without our colored folk! Between the housekeepers and the nannies and the fishermen and the people working the fields—why, they’re the glue that holds us together. Of course they’ve got to be in the mural!”

  Anna couldn’t help but wonder why, if Miss Myrtle felt that way about Edenton’s colored citizens, she made Freda go outside to use her own separate bathroom, rain or shine. She wasn’t sure she would ever truly understand the people in the South.

  “And listen, dear,” Miss Myrtle said, “I nearly forgot. A reporter stopped by to talk to you. He’ll be coming back tomorrow afternoon. Said he wants to talk to the lady who’s making a painting for the post office.”

  “A reporter!” Anna said. The word alone made her nervous. “I don’t have anything to say to a reporter. At least not yet.”

  “Oh, sure you do,” Miss Myrtle said. “Tell him you’re going to paint something that will make Edenton proud.”