Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  It was nearly closing time in the library. I found the librarian, who helped me get a copy of the photograph from the obstinate microfilm reader, then gathered up my things and headed to an AA meeting, where the main topic was making amends for however we screwed up while drinking. I found my palms sweating during the discussion. If I could manage to track down Emily Maxwell, would I ever have the courage to actually speak to her? The thought absolutely terrified me. I wanted to know how she was. I wanted to find her through the impersonal vehicle of my computer. But communicate with her? I didn’t think I had the guts.

  She was still on my mind when I crawled into bed that night. I stared at the dark ceiling, wondering if Emily might be awake as well, and if she was, was she in terrible pain? Was she cursing my name?

  I was free, my biggest physical complaint my aching shoulders from my fifty-thousand-dollar job. I doubted that Emily Maxwell would ever again know such physical freedom.

  I curled up in a ball on my bed, remembering how I’d gotten into my car with Trey. We’d been laughing hard, at what, I couldn’t remember. I’d been so drunk I’d caught my scarf in the door and had trouble remembering how to open the door to free it. I didn’t deserve to be out of prison. I didn’t deserve fifty thousand dollars. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself for what we’d done to that innocent girl.

  Chapter 24

  ANNA

  January 10, 1940

  Anna arrived alone and nervous at the warehouse that morning. She hadn’t been there since her initial visit with Mayor Sykes a month ago, and she was stunned by what she found. The floor—concrete—had been swept clean and sun gleamed through the tall, sparkling windows. Two space heaters sat in front of one of the closed garage doors along with two tall floor lamps, two stepladders, and several extension cords. The three long tables and four wooden chairs were still in place, and a few of the crates remained, piled up beneath one of the windows on the side wall. She truly owed the mayor for his help. Or, at least, she owed Benny, his custodian. She would have to bake them something.

  She carried the rolls of cartoon paper into the warehouse along with a big metal bucket filled with most of the tools she’d need for the creation of the cartoon. She wouldn’t be able to do much with her supplies until her helpers arrived from Edenton High School that afternoon, but she felt a sense of satisfaction as she began to fill her new workspace. She was wearing her beloved slacks once again, and the freedom of them felt wonderful, although Miss Myrtle had gasped when she saw Anna in them that morning.

  “You can’t go out of the house in those!” she’d said, pointing to the slacks.

  “Well, I can’t wear a dress in the warehouse,” Anna’d responded. “Impossible to work in.”

  Miss Myrtle had shaken her head, a look of worry on her face. “Well, don’t go anywhere else in them,” she’d said. It had sounded like a warning. Anna thought she and Miss Myrtle saw eye to eye on most things in life, but every once in a while, it was clear they were a hefty generation apart.

  Anna plugged in the space heaters, setting them on either side of the area in front of the windowless wall at the front end of the building, nearest the door. They didn’t exactly make the space toasty, but the temperature was quite tolerable. Tolerable enough that she could take off her coat. Her heavy sweater beneath her smock was plenty warm enough.

  Around noon, she ate the ham sandwich Freda had made for her, and as she was cleaning up after herself, the lumber arrived for the stretcher. She’d never seen so much wood in an art studio and felt instantly intimidated at the thought of putting the massive stretcher together. She eyed the man who stacked the wood in the center of the warehouse for her. He was a rugged, Nordic-looking blue-eyed blond who would be perfect for the lumberman in the mural.

  “How would you feel about being the model for the lumberman in the mural I’m painting for the post office?” she asked as she stood near the growing stack of wood

  He looked up at her with those crystal-blue eyes and laughed.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “You want me on the post office wall?”

  “Absolutely! You’d make a perfect lumberjack.”

  He offered a good-natured shrug. “Sure,” he said. “What would I have to do?”

  “You’d just be standing with an ax in your hands, facing forward, I think.” She tried to picture the scene. She would paint trees behind him. A forest.

  He laughed again, and his eyes nearly disappeared into the planes of his face with his amusement. “I’ve never used an ax in my job,” he admitted. “I’m actually just a grader. All day long, I grade the quality of the wood. It’s about time I got to hold an ax in my hands.”

  After he left, Anna sat down near one of the heaters and breathed in the clean scent of the wood. Now she had all five of her models lined up. Miss Myrtle, Madge Sykes—the mayor’s jolly and agreeable wife, who did not at all strike Anna as a woman who suffered at the mercy of a brutish, cheating husband—and Ellen Harper, the salesgirl from the Patsy store, would be the Tea Party ladies. Freda, who finally nodded her assent after Anna talked her into it, would be the peanut factory worker. And now handsome Frank from the lumber mill would be the lumberman. Anna was disappointed that Pauline had turned her down. “Karl doesn’t like the idea of me being up there on the post office wall,” she’d said. Anna had wanted to ask why, but decided to just accept her—or his—decision. Maybe it had to do with him being a policeman with a reputation to protect, or maybe he didn’t want his wife participating in something that seemed so frivolous. Whatever the reason for his decision, Pauline seemed content to go along with it.

  Anna’s two helpers, Theresa Wayman and Peter Thomas, arrived at two fifteen.

  “You have on pants!” Theresa exclaimed before even saying hello.

  “I do,” Anna said, “and you should also bring some pants to wear because you’ll be climbing ladders and doing some messy work.”

  “My parents would never let me,” she said.

  Anna fought the urge to roll her eyes. Theresa struck her as a very feminine girl, her pretty, shoulder-length blond hair held away from her face with tortoiseshell barrettes and her lips painted with coral lipstick. She wore a blue plaid A-line skirt and ruffled white blouse. Anna considered suggesting that she keep a pair of pants in the warehouse to change into and out of when she worked. Her parents would never need to know. But the rigid look of the girl told her to hold her words. She didn’t know her well enough yet to make such a suggestion.

  Peter was a slight, affable boy, small and thin but wiry, and in quite good shape. He, too, was very blond. In fact, he and Theresa looked quite alike.

  “Are the two of you related?” Anna asked.

  They both laughed. “Heck, no!” Peter said, taking a step away from the girl. Then he looked at the stack of lumber in the middle of the floor. “So what are you doin’ here, ma’am?” he asked. He actually rubbed his hands together as if anxious to get started. “How’re we gonna help you?”

  The three of them sat down at one of the tables and Anna showed them her sketch as she described her plans for the cartoon and mural. They’d never heard of a cartoon and both of them asked intelligent questions about the process of creating it, but it was clear to Anna that Peter was the more invested of the two.

  “I want to be a serious artist someday, ma’am,” he said.

  “Peter is really good,” Theresa said, rather begrudgingly. “He drew a picture of a tractor and it looked almost like a photograph.”

  “How about you, Theresa?” Anna asked. “Do you hope to be an artist?”

  Theresa shrugged. “I hope to get out of school and get married and have five children,” she admitted.

  Anna laughed, thinking that marriage and motherhood were probably more realistic goals for this girl.

  “Well, you only have, what? A year and a half till graduation?”

  “We graduate this spring, ma’am,” Peter said.

  “You do? Are
n’t you eleventh graders?”

  “That’s the last year of high school, ma’am,” Theresa said. “Thank the Lord for that.”

  “Really?” Anna asked. “Schools where I’m from go to the twelfth grade.”

  “Not here,” said Peter.

  “Thank heavens we don’t,” Theresa said.

  “Well, I tell you what,” Anna said. “I’m going to be asking some hard work of you two that might not feel as though it has much to do with actual drawing or painting, so to be fair, why don’t you bring in some projects you’re working on and I can give you my critique and perhaps help you make them better.”

  “That sounds good, ma’am,” Peter said. He had a good-natured glow about him. A sunniness that drew Anna to him. She was curious to see his work.

  “I don’t really have nothin’ I’m working on,” Theresa said.

  “Well, then, you can come up with something new to work on during any free time you have here,” Anna said. “I won’t need you to help me every single minute.”

  A short time later, the three of them got down to business. They unrolled the cartoon paper on the floor, cut it into twelve-foot lengths, and taped enough of it together to form a twelve-by-six-foot rectangle. Theresa refused to climb the ladder because of her skirt, so Peter climbed one and Anna the other and they nailed the paper to the wall, laughing the whole time because the paper wanted to slip back into its tight little roll and they had quite a time getting it to lie flat. By the time they’d won the war against the paper, two hours were up and Theresa and Peter were ready to go home for their dinners. Anna was disappointed to realize she wouldn’t be able to add the grid lines to the cartoon until tomorrow.

  After her student helpers left, she sat down at one of the tables under the floor lamp and began to measure out the grid on her sketch, but daylight was beginning to fade outside the warehouse windows, and she felt that creepy sensation come over her again as the big space filled with shadows and silence. The sheer breadth of the warehouse, the impenetrable dark spaces around the creepy beams high above, made her shudder. She couldn’t look up at those beams, afraid of what she might see. Something other than lights and fans hanging from them, maybe. She didn’t dare look.

  Putting on her coat, she packed up her sketch and pencils and straight-edge, and was about to turn out the lights when she heard the slam of a car door outside. She froze, for what reason she couldn’t say except that the darkening warehouse had simply unnerved her. A knock came at the door and she hesitated, then opened it to find a colored woman standing in the dusky light. She was dressed in a black wool coat and a smart white wool hat and Anna knew she was no one’s servant.

  “Oh, it looks like you’re getting ready to leave,” the woman said, motioning to Anna’s own coat.

  “Yes, in a moment, but can I help you?” Anna stepped back to let the woman walk into the warehouse.

  “Oh, my,” the woman said, looking around at the dimly lit space. “You’ve got quite the studio.”

  “Yes, I’m very fortunate,” Anna said, thinking of how terrified she’d been of her “studio” only moments earlier. “My name is Anna Dale,” she added, prompting her visitor to identify herself.

  “Oh, I know who you are,” the woman said. “Everyone does. I’m Tilda Furman.” The woman studied the cartoon paper tacked to the wall. “You’ll be sketching the mural on this paper, then transferring it to canvas?” she asked.

  “Exactly.” Anna smiled. “Are you an artist?”

  Tilda Furman nodded. “Though I’ve never done a mural the likes of which you’re proposing.”

  “Well, feel free to stop in anytime to watch,” Anna said.

  “Actually, I’m here for another reason.” The woman suddenly sounded almost shy. “I teach art and music at the colored high school,” she said. “I heard you were taking on students to help you, and I have a talented boy in my eleventh-grade class who is so good an artist that he needs more than I can give him. He could use this exposure.” She gestured toward the cartoon paper. “He’s smart, but a terrible student because he spends every class drawing instead of working on his history or English or what have you. Recess comes, he sits by himself with his sketch pad. All he cares about is art. He’d drop out if it didn’t mean losing his art class.”

  Anna nodded. She could relate well to what the woman was telling her. She recalled her own high school years when she’d doodle all over the sides of her paper instead of taking notes in class.

  “Would you consider taking him on to help you?” the woman asked.

  Anna hesitated. “I’m not sure I’ll have enough for three students to do,” she said.

  “Even if he just watches you, it would be a help,” she said. “He should see what a real-world artist does.”

  “And I’m not paying the students,” Anna said. “They’re getting credit for—”

  “Yes, I already spoke to the principal about that,” she said. “We could work that out for him, too. Might help him graduate, because if he keeps going the way he is, he won’t make it.”

  “All right,” Anna said. “Have him come tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, miss,” she said. “You might be saving this boy’s life.”

  So dramatic, Anna thought, but she smiled. “What’s his name?” she asked as she walked the woman to the door.

  “Jesse Williams,” the woman said. “And I don’t think you’ll regret this.”

  Chapter 25

  MORGAN

  June 27, 2018

  “You look like you could use a massage,” Adam said, as he walked into the foyer from the rear of the building. I stood on the lowest rung of the ladder as I cleaned the image of the broken teapot one of the Tea Party women was holding. I supposed Adam had caught me rubbing my shoulder. “I’m a pretty awesome masseur,” he added.

  I held on to the ladder and looked at him. He was almost too much, this guy, trying too hard, with the snake on his arm and the bun in his hair, yet I couldn’t help that my stomach occasionally flipped when he was around. It was only that he reminded me of Trey—the old Trey. The Trey I thought was so phenomenal. I was not the least bit interested in Adam, and I decided against any clever comeback that could be perceived as flirtatious.

  “Thanks.” I smiled. “I’m fine.”

  “Wise answer.” Oliver was crouched on the floor near the front door, uncrating a large painting, and he didn’t even look up from the task when he spoke.

  Adam grinned. “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me,” he said, and he continued walking through the foyer and out the front door of the gallery.

  Oliver and I were quiet for a moment as I worked on the mural and he pulled the well-padded painting from the box. Finally, he spoke. “Adam’s got a girlfriend,” he said.

  I smiled to myself. “Like I care.”

  He chuckled. “Just sayin’…”

  “I think I’ve just been without for too long.” I felt embarrassed that any attraction I felt for Adam might be obvious.

  “No guy in your life?” Oliver asked.

  It took me a minute to answer. “I think it’s best if I just focus on myself for a while,” I said, meaning it. I stopped cleaning for a moment, resting my hands on a rung of the ladder as I thought about Trey. “I had a boyfriend,” I said. “I thought he was really pretty awesome, but it turned out he wasn’t.”

  “Ah,” Oliver said, his focus still on freeing the painting from the thick padding that surrounded it. “You got a wake-up call, huh?”

  That was one way to put it. “It’s complicated,” I said, not wanting to get into everything about the accident. “So how about you?” I asked. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “I lived with a woman for five years. Till last year,” he said. He held the painting—sunflowers on a blue background—upright in front of him to study. I knew it was one of the student pieces. The more valuable art would be brought in by escorts and packed in heavy wooden crates. We would see none of it until
the gallery’s security system was in place. “She wanted to move to California, pretty desperately,” Oliver continued. “And I wanted to stay close to my son, also desperately.”

  “Are you sad you couldn’t make it work?”

  “There were other problems, more minor, but taken all together, it was time to end it.”

  “Her loss,” I said, and I meant it.

  He smiled across the room at me. “Thank you,” he said. He leaned the painting against the wall near some of the other student work that had come in.

  I returned his smile, then popped in my earbuds and went back to cleaning the mural. The spot I’d just worked on revealed drops of tea flying through the air. They were perfect, glistening, a catch light in each one. Not for the first time, I admired Anna Dale’s exquisite work.

  “Come look at this, Oliver,” I said, taking my earbuds out again.

  Oliver was opening another package, which he set down on the floor before crossing the foyer to the mural.

  I pointed to the droplets. “Can you see this?” I asked. “She was so detailed. A huge painting like this and she still paid attention to every little thing. Even the catch lights in the drops of tea.”

  I looked down at Oliver to see him craning his neck, studying the image hard, eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “Better tea drops than blood, right?” I smiled.

  “Move the ladder for a sec,” he said.

  I climbed down to the floor and pulled the ladder aside as Oliver stepped closer to the mural. “I think you spoke too soon,” he said, reaching up to touch one of the drops I hadn’t yet cleaned. “Hand me the dowel.”

  I gave him the dowel and watched as he carefully smoothed the cotton tip over the spot.