Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  Seeing her sketch in the magazine gave her the confidence to call the art supply store in Norfolk and order the paper she would need for the cartoon. Her new sketch was coming along beautifully. She’d barely slept for the work—which was more like pleasure to her—and she was almost ready to begin adding color.

  She was reading in the living room shortly after making the call when Miss Myrtle walked into the room. The older woman sat down in the armchair she seemed to fancy and studied Anna’s face.

  “You have bags under your eyes for one so young,” she said.

  Anna only laughed. The insult didn’t bother her a whit. She was too excited to have her mood brought down by Miss Myrtle or anyone else today.

  “It’s just that I love what I’m doing, Miss Myrtle,” she said. “I’m very happy.”

  “Yes, but I’m a little concerned about you.” Miss Myrtle frowned. “Freda wrote me a note saying you didn’t eat breakfast or lunch today. You’re already thin as a rail. Promise me you’ll have a snack, all right, dear?”

  Anna felt her smile falter. She’d skipped both meals? She hadn’t even thought about eating, and it was nearly two o’clock. She remembered chastising her mother for not eating during her “lively spells,” and the memory shook her.

  “I’ll have that snack right now,” she promised Miss Myrtle as she got to her feet, forcing a smile, and as she walked toward the kitchen, she wondered if this was how her mother had felt during those manic episodes, so full of energy and joy that she forgot to take care of herself. Ridiculous to compare what she was feeling to her mother’s situation. Ridiculous!

  She found a package of Nabs in the pantry and sat at the kitchen table to eat them under Freda’s silent, approving smile. The maid poured her a glass of milk to go with the crackers, and Anna dutifully chewed and swallowed, but she was anxious to get back to work and annoyed with herself for letting paranoid thoughts about her mother disturb her newfound happiness. She would make sure she ate her three meals a day from now on, but she wouldn’t let anything get in the way of the joy she felt as she worked on the mural for the intriguing little town of Edenton, North Carolina.

  Chapter 15

  MORGAN

  June 15, 2018

  Following Oliver through the gallery, I was overwhelmed by how much there was left to do before the building opened to the public. The three good-sized exhibition rooms still lacked drywall, much less paint, and I spotted an electrician working with a tangle of wires inside one of the open walls. The space was definitely intriguing, though.

  “The walls are curved,” I said, stating the obvious. I ran my fingers along the wall as I followed Oliver down the hallway.

  “Jesse’s design,” he said.

  “What was he like?” I asked. “Jesse?”

  “Brilliant artist, but you already know that.”

  “I’ve loved his work forever,” I said.

  “And a generous guy, obviously,” he said over his shoulder. “Very passionate about the people he cared for. But demanding. And fussy. He knows–knew—what he wanted and he always found a way to get it. Like the windows in the gallery. He wanted a special type of glass that took the architect months to track down. And the tile in the restroom had to be special-ordered from Italy. He could be hard on people if they didn’t measure up to his standards.”

  I felt a stab of sympathy for Lisa, who was apparently still trying to measure up to her father’s standards.

  I followed Oliver into a small office, made to feel a bit bigger by the fact that one wall was almost entirely glass. The tall window overlooked a green lawn and a hedge, the only visible buildings a good distance away. The walls hadn’t yet been painted and there were no switch-plate covers in place yet. Oliver sat down at his desk, which consisted of a board spanning two sawhorses. The makeshift desk supported a computer, half a dozen towering stacks of paper, the framed photograph of a cute, dark-haired boy of eleven or twelve, and a small speaker, from which Bob Dylan’s crotchety old voice tried to sing.

  “Dylan?” I raised my eyebrows.

  He smiled. “Not your taste?”

  “Not hardly.”

  He motioned toward a wooden stool at the side of the desk and I sat down. “I like old folk music,” he said. “Dylan, Baez, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul, and Mary. As a matter of fact, when you first showed up in the gallery, I thought you were Mary Travers walking in the door.”

  “Who’s Mary Travers?”

  “Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “You lost me after Dylan.”

  “‘Puff the Magic Dragon’?”

  I made an “I have no idea what you’re talking about” face. “That might be vaguely familiar, I think,” I said. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Not as ancient as you’re making me feel.” He smiled. “I just turned thirty. What music do you like?”

  “Mostly rap. Some pop.”

  “Oh, man.” He cringed. “I don’t think we can be friends.”

  I laughed and he smiled. Then I pointed to the photograph of the boy. “Is that your son?” I asked as he began looking through one of the stacks of paper on his desk.

  “Nathan. Yes. And he shares your musical taste, I’m afraid. He’s completely into it.”

  “He’s very cute. He has your blue eyes, doesn’t he. Does he like art?”

  “Not in the least.” Oliver laughed. “His stepfather is a computer guru and that’s become his thing. And yeah, I’m jealous.” He smiled at me. He had one of those faces that lit up entirely when he smiled. His eyebrows were expressive, and his eyes crinkled behind his glasses. “But mostly I’m happy he ended up with a decent stepdad,” he said.

  I thought I detected pain in his voice over sharing his son with another man. There was something about Oliver that truly touched me. I felt as though I could tell him my whole miserable life story and he wouldn’t flinch. It made me want to lift the little bit of sadness I saw in his face just then.

  “You’ll have him all to yourself at that lake in a couple of months,” I said, and I was happy to see the spark return to his eyes.

  “Smith Mountain Lake, yeah,” he said, rifling through the stack of paper. “I’ve already bought us some new fishing gear. It’ll be a full week of him groaning at me and saying, “Daaaad, you’re such a dork.” He laughed, though quickly sobered. “He’s the light of my life,” he said.

  I smiled at him. He was so sweet. I wished I’d had a father who’d felt that way about his kid.

  Adam suddenly appeared in the doorway of the office. He was taller than I’d realized. Taller and broader and half naked. He pulled his T-shirt on over the glistening skin of his chest, messing up his bun.

  “We’re ready to start stretching the mural,” he said to Oliver. “You said you wanted to help?” I wondered if he’d intentionally waited to put on his shirt until he was in front of me because when he caught my eye, he was grinning at me. I looked away. I wasn’t here to find a man, especially one who reminded me of Trey.

  “Be out in a sec,” Oliver said, and Adam disappeared down the hallway. Oliver pulled a yellowed piece of newspaper from the pile he’d been sorting through. “So,” he said, “here’s what I wanted to show you. Lisa gave me a big folder of Jesse’s plans for the gallery and I found this in it.”

  He handed me the yellowed article, folded in half. I unfolded it carefully and laid it flat on the edge of the makeshift desk. Leaning forward, I read the date at the top of the page: December 14, 1939. The headline: New Jersey Artist to Paint Mural for Edenton Post Office.

  “It’s your Anna Dale,” Oliver said.

  My Anna Dale. The words made me feel instantly closer to the artist. There was a photograph of a girl about my age standing a distance in front of what looked like a warehouse. She wore a light-colored, neatly tailored coat and gloves, but no hat. Her hair looked very dark—maybe even black—and it was cut in a striking chin-length bob with thick straight bangs that just grazed her eyebr
ows. The overall look was very dramatic and, at the same time, almost impish. She wore an engaging smile. A confident smile. She didn’t look the least bit deranged.

  “Wow,” I said. “So this is our talented and possibly nutso Anna Dale?”

  “Read it,” Oliver said.

  I read the article to myself.

  Miss Anna Dale, 22, of Plainfield, New Jersey, is the Edenton winner of the 48-States Mural Contest sponsored by the United States Treasury Department. Upon completion, the 12 × 6 mural will be mounted on the post office wall above the door to the postmaster’s office. Miss Dale did not get specific in discussing the subject of the mural. “Edenton has a rich history and a rich present,” she said. “I hope to capture both in the mural.” When asked about the concern some Edenton residents have expressed about an artist from New Jersey painting a mural for a Southern town, she replied, “It’s an honor to get to live in Edenton while I work on the mural so I can get to know the residents and hopefully give them a painting they can enjoy for many years to come. I’m very excited about the opportunity. I’ve already begun creating the proposed sketch for the mural,” Miss Dale said, “and will soon submit it to the Section of Fine Arts. Once I get approval from them, I can begin working in earnest. At that time, the public will be most welcome to come to the warehouse to watch me work. I hope I can create something that will make Edenton proud.” Miss Dale believes she will hear from the Section of Fine Arts sometime after the New Year.

  I was transfixed. By the words. By the photograph. I gently touched the old paper, soft as felt beneath my fingertips, and was surprised to feel my eyes sting.

  “What happened?” I asked the air as much as Oliver. “Why did she just disappear and leave the mural behind? She sounds perfectly sane, but if she did go crazy, like Jesse told Lisa, do you think they locked her up, or…” My voice trailed off as I studied the photograph of the smiling young artist.

  “Something clearly went wrong,” Oliver said.

  “How did Jesse Williams end up with the mural?” I looked at the date of the article again. December 14, 1939. “He would only have been a kid then.”

  Oliver shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll ever know,” he said.

  “She looks and sounds perfectly sane,” I said again.

  “She does.”

  I sat back, my gaze resting on the photograph. I touched Anna Dale’s smiling face and felt something shift inside me. All I had wanted to do when I got out of bed that morning was come up with the quickest way possible through this job to get my fifty thousand dollars and stay out of prison. Lisa didn’t care as long as I could hang the mural on the wall by August 5.

  Anna Dale, though … She’d been excited about the mural. She’d wanted to do a perfect job. Her heart had been in it and then something happened. It must have been something truly terrible to turn this pretty girl into … what? A mentally ill artist who mysteriously vanished from the art world? I shuddered. I wanted to do right by her. This girl who was my own age. I wanted to give life to the mural that Anna Dale never had the chance to give it.

  The mural had been cut from its former stretcher so sloppily that it was a challenge to get it square on the new stretcher. It took a couple of hours for Adam, Wyatt, Oliver, and me, along with a few of the other construction workers, to stretch the mural into place and secure it with dozens of thumbtacks. I watched from a distance as the men attached the mural very low on the wall, helping them get it straight and square, ready for me to work on. Done with their job, the men returned to their work inside the gallery, but I stayed in the foyer a while longer. Now that the mural was on the wall, facing me head-on, the bare spots and the filth that seemed to coat every inch of the painting were more apparent, and yet the art behind the grime seemed to pop out at me. Those women and their broken teapot. They looked angry, didn’t they? The black woman in the upper right-hand corner seemed to grin around the stick she held in her teeth. The motorcycle looked ready to race from the mural into the foyer.

  I thought of the newspaper article again and its photograph of the optimistic young woman with her short black bob. I shuddered. It was like seeing the photograph of someone in an obituary. You could see the ignorance in their faces. Their blindness to what was coming. Anna Dale had looked that way in the photograph. She’d been at the beginning of her adventure—the beginning that had somehow become an ending.

  For the first time, I noticed the artist’s signature in the lower right corner of the mural and I walked forward to crouch in front of it. Anna Dale. Gently, I touched the filthy letters, but drew my fingers away quickly, startled by the roughness of the painting’s surface. Anna’s writing was vertical and round, painted in a grime-covered gold. I stared at the signature a while longer, wondering how a life that had started with so much promise could now be shrouded in such mystery.

  Chapter 16

  ANNA

  December 25, 1939

  “You must be Anna!” Pauline Maguire handed the grocery bag she was carrying to her husband and reached for Anna’s hands. “Mama’s told me so much about you!”

  “You, too,” Anna said, pleased by the woman’s friendliness. Anna had met no one so close to her age in Edenton, and she felt an instant bond with the young woman whose room she was inhabiting.

  “This is my husband, Karl,” Pauline said.

  Karl, his arms weighed down with bags and a large rectangular wrapped gift, only nodded with a smile. He looked quite a bit older than Pauline. A few gray strands silvered his brown hair.

  “So happy to meet you,” Anna said, taking one of the bags from his arms. “Miss Myrtle is in the kitchen.”

  Miss Myrtle had given Freda the day off to be with her own family for the holiday, so the three women set about cooking. They made a turkey, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, and butter beans, which Anna had never heard of but which were the same as the lima beans she’d grown up with in New Jersey. Karl donned an apron and made some of the best biscuits Anna had ever tasted. She’d never known a man to willingly cook.

  “I only like baking,” Karl said with a wink. Anna liked him right away. He was so easygoing and friendly and it was clear that he adored Pauline. She remembered Miss Myrtle telling her that he was a policeman and so he’d been able to keep a good steady job all through the Depression when so many men went without work. He was also undeniably handsome, with blue eyes and that silver-laced hair that kept falling across his forehead in a way that Anna found winsome. She imagined he would look like heaven in his police uniform and she thought he and Pauline made a striking couple, despite the age difference.

  Pauline exuded warmth. Anna remembered that she worked part-time as a nurse in a doctor’s office. Her patients probably adored her. Anna could see Pauline’s resemblance to Miss Myrtle in her full lips, large bosom, and dark blue eyes, but Pauline was probably half her mother’s weight and the hair that spilled in waves around her shoulders was light brown instead of Miss Myrtle’s dull gray. Watching mother and daughter work together and chat together and laugh together set up a dull ache in Anna’s chest that she was determined to keep at bay for the afternoon. This was her first Christmas without her mother. If she thought about it, she would break down in tears, and she didn’t want to put her hosts—or herself—through that. She focused on her tasks and the conversation and the Christmas carols spilling from the radio on the counter. She would get through this day, one way or another.

  All afternoon, as the four of them moved around the kitchen, and later, as they ate in the dining room, Anna watched the way Pauline and Karl smiled at each other. The way they lightly touched one another’s hands as they passed a plate of turkey or the gravy boat. They were such a lovely couple, and Anna worked hard not to be jealous of the clear adoration they shared. Someday, she told herself, she would find a man who cared as much for her as Karl seemed to care for Pauline. So far, most of her potential beaus had turned out to be little more than friends. Anna’s mother used to tell her that friends were more impor
tant than boyfriends, but watching Pauline and Karl together set up a longing inside her for something more.

  Over dinner, the three of them told Anna more about everyone she’d met in town, cutting through outside appearances to the real people inside. Mr. Arndt was as good and kind as he appeared, they said. Mr. Fiering at the cotton mill liked to dress in ladies’ undies, Pauline added.

  “How on earth would you know that?” Anna laughed.

  “Just a nasty rumor,” Karl said, with a grin that belied his words.

  “Mayor Sykes is a blustering fool, but he gets the job done,” Miss Myrtle said. Pauline made a disparaging sound with her tongue. “His wife covers up bruises and everyone knows he has a lady friend on the side.”

  “Pauline!” scolded her mother. “No one knows that for sure at all.”

  Anna thought she might have been right to feel uncomfortable with the mayor in the warehouse. She would keep her distance from him from now on.