Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  “It’s different here than where you came from.” Pauline’s voice was quiet but earnest. Her dark blue eyes held such grave concern that Anna felt taken aback. She could tell that her friend was sincerely worried about her.

  She let out a long sigh. “People keep telling me that,” she said. “But I can’t change who I am, and I think you’re silly to worry. I’m five years older than Jesse, for heaven’s sake. I adore him like a little brother. He may not look like a kid, but he is a kid and he acts like one.” She sat up very straight. “I plan to continue ignoring such catty talk.”

  “Your intentions may be pure,” Pauline said, “and his may be pure. But it doesn’t matter. People still believe what they want to believe and you’re only inviting their criticism.” She cut a corner of her slice of cheese and lifted it to her lips without taking a bite. “And it can get worse, dear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s against the law. Colored and white … you know.”

  Anna laughed. “You have nothing to worry about there,” she said. “I have no interest in—”

  “That may be the truth.” Pauline set down her fork without eating the cheese. “But it’s not what people believe, and that’s what matters.”

  “No, Pauline, what matters is the reality,” Anna said, getting angry now. At the sound of her raised voice, a few people turned to look at them. “I don’t care what people think.” She leaned closer. “Can we close this subject please? Let’s talk about your baby again. Have you thought about names?”

  Baby names were definitely the topic of conversation over dinner that evening. Even Karl seemed to have an excited glow about him, only letting go of Pauline’s hand when he needed his own to eat the chicken and dumplings Freda had made. They talked about names for most of an hour before Karl politely changed the subject, asking Anna how the mural was coming along.

  “It’s all I think about,” she admitted. “I even got up in the middle of the night last night and went over there to paint.” She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she should have kept her nighttime foray to herself. She was too tired to think clearly, and the three of them stared at her as if they’d misheard.

  “You did?” Miss Myrtle said finally. “When was this?”

  “Oh, around three this morning.” She shrugged as though it had been nothing. “I was just itching to paint.”

  “Women can’t stay out all night unchaperoned like that,” Miss Myrtle said. “Maybe up north they do, but it’s not the way we do things here, dear.”

  Anna was so tired of hearing that sentiment. “It wasn’t ‘all night,’” she said, carefully holding on to her smile. “Think of it as early morning.”

  “People will talk if they know you’re out at all hours like that,” Pauline said.

  Pauline and her talkative people, Anna thought. But even Freda disapproved. The maid had brought another basket of her biscuits into the room, and she caught Anna’s eye as she set them on the table and shook her head. Her silent two cents.

  “Seriously, Anna,” Karl said. “You could have an accident driving late at night and no one would know. It’s not a good idea. At the very least, you need to let folks know your whereabouts.”

  “All right.” Anna gave in with a sigh. She was sorry she’d brought it up. “It probably was silly of me, anyway. I ended up so tired this afternoon I fell asleep with my head on my worktable. I often wish I had a little settee or something like it at the warehouse. All I needed was half an hour’s shut-eye and I was ready to go again.”

  “You artistic types are so intense!” Pauline said. “I wish I had some of your drive.”

  Karl rested his hand on hers. “You’re perfect just the way you are, dear,” he said.

  Pauline glowed at the compliment and Anna felt that niggling bit of envy again. Pauline was so lucky to have him.

  “You know, we actually have a cot you could borrow,” Pauline said. “You could keep it at the warehouse and take a catnap in the afternoon any time you like.”

  “It’s hardly a settee.” Karl chuckled at his wife’s suggestion.

  “True,” Pauline said, “but better than your worktable.”

  “I suppose,” Karl said. He looked at Anna. “It’s just an old army cot,” he said. “It was my father’s and we use it for camping, though I doubt I’ll be able to get this one camping again any time soon.” He smiled at his wife.

  Anna imagined having the cot in the warehouse. She could take a little snooze whenever she liked, then get up and go back to work. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “Thank you for the offer.”

  “What about William?” Miss Myrtle said, and it took them all a moment to realize she was returning the conversation to baby names. Miss Myrtle looked at her daughter. “That’s a good strong name, don’t you think?”

  The following day, Anna stopped by Pauline’s to pick up the cot where they’d left it for her on their front porch, since neither Pauline nor Karl were at home. The cot was compactly folded and Anna set it on the backseat of the Ford, then turned the car around in the wide driveway. She’d nearly reached the street again when one of those red Indian motorcycles sped around the corner and whizzed past the front of her car at breakneck speed. Startled, Anna pressed hard on the brake, the cot whacking into the back of her seat, sending her heart into her throat. Her leg trembled on the brake as she stared after the motorcycle and its rider: Martin Drapple, his red hair far too long and wild from the wind, speeding down the road like a maniac on a mission. She’d heard rumors that his wife had kicked him out of the house, so perhaps Mrs. Drapple had kept the car and this was Martin’s new transportation. Anna didn’t know. All she knew was that she was glad he no longer came around the warehouse. That slap he’d given his wife still rang in her ears.

  Chapter 43

  MORGAN

  July 12, 2018

  Rebecca’s gaze dropped to my walking boot as I limped into her office that morning.

  “I already heard about this,” she said, gesturing toward the boot.

  I dropped into the chair next to her desk, my guard suddenly up. “How could you have already heard about it?” I asked.

  “Your supervisor-slash-landlady called me.”

  I groaned. Lisa had been angry that morning when I told her how I ended up with the sprained ankle. I hadn’t expected sympathy from her, exactly, but I didn’t expect her to go ballistic.

  “I’m not paying you to hang out in a bar,” she’d said, her brown eyes blazing. “I would have thought you’d learned your lesson about that sort of thing.”

  “I was only there to get dinner,” I’d argued back. I should have backed down, but I’d been exhausted after so little sleep, plus my ankle was killing me and my patience was thin. “And as soon as the fight broke out, I left. At least, I tried to leave. But that’s when my foot got caught in the rungs of the barstool.”

  Lisa had only stared. “You’re scaring me,” she said finally. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  Now I looked at Rebecca. “Does she have a right to do that?” I asked. “Is she allowed to talk to you about me?”

  “She can tell me anything she likes,” Rebecca said. “But I won’t share anything about you in response, so you don’t need to be concerned about that. I’d like to hear your side of the story, though. What happened last night?”

  I shut my eyes, remembering back to the night before. It was all still very, very sharp in my mind. This is what happens when you don’t drink, I thought. Things stayed sharp and crisp. Not like after the accident, when everything had been a cloud of blood and fear in my memory. I told Rebecca the whole story. The only thing I left out was that I was falling in love with Oliver. At least, I was pretty sure I was. I didn’t completely trust myself when it came to love. Did I even know what it was? I didn’t think I’d ever felt love from another human being. Not the real thing, anyway. Not from Trey, no matter how many times he’d said those words to me. Certainly not from m
y parents. Sitting there, I could actually picture the huge empty space in my heart where love was supposed to be. The only person I could see in that space was Oliver—a little image of him tucked down in a corner.

  “That was very risky for you, going there.” Rebecca brought my mind back to her office.

  My eyes suddenly burned, surprising me. I was so tired after last night, and so tried of feeling criticized. “Everyone from the gallery was going,” I said. “I knew I could go and not drink. I didn’t think it was a big deal. I still don’t.”

  Rebecca looked down at my ankle in its walking boot. “What did they say at the ER?” she asked.

  “A mild sprain, though it doesn’t feel very mild. They said to ice it. Elevate it. But I have to work.”

  “Lisa is worried you might backslide.”

  I was angry, but tried not to show it. “I’m not going to backslide,” I said.

  “And she’s worried about how your ankle will affect your work,” Rebecca said. “She told me that if you can’t work, she’ll have to fire you and hire someone else, though she sounded so—”

  “What?” Fear rose in my chest. “No! I have to do it. I will do it!” The thought of returning to prison was only part of my sudden panic. The mural was mine. The sudden sense of ownership I felt over it stunned me. It was my handsome lumberjack and my old Tea Party ladies and my little skull in the window and my bloody hammer and motorcycle fender. I wasn’t letting anyone else work on it.

  “I was going to say she—Lisa Williams—sounded…” She seemed to hunt for a word. “She sounded frantic about you not being able to work on the mural. Something about going against her father’s will, and—”

  “I love it, Rebecca,” I interrupted her. “I love what I’m doing with the mural. Restoring it. It’s challenging, and when you see what you’ve done, and you see a bit of the picture go back to the way Anna—the artist—intended … It’s so rewarding.”

  “How will you be able to work with your ankle like this?” Rebecca pointed toward the walking boot.

  “I don’t know, but I’ll find a way,” I said. “Seriously, I will. My ankle is going to heal one way or another. Maybe it’ll take a week longer if I don’t keep it elevated every minute, but I don’t care. It’ll heal eventually. I cannot lose this job!”

  Rebecca hesitated, looking at the papers on her desk. “I believe you,” she said. “I guess you just need to convince Lisa you can keep at it.” She looked up at me. “And how about an AA meeting tonight?”

  “Fine,” I said, shoulders slumping. I felt overwhelmed. I needed sleep tonight more than I needed a meeting, but I would agree to anything at that moment to be able to get back to work and keep Lisa happy. “Can I go now?” I asked, wincing as I got to my feet.

  She nodded. Gave me a half smile. “No more bars, all right?”

  “No more bars,” I agreed, and I half hopped, half walked out of the room.

  I’d taken an Uber to Rebecca’s office and now I called another to drive me to the gallery. I wouldn’t be walking anywhere for a while. When I arrived at the gallery, Oliver, Adam, and Wyatt were in the foyer, crouched on the floor as they examined a cracked tile near the folding table, and it was clear to me that Adam and Wyatt knew what had happened. The smell of the white wall paint that was being used throughout the gallery seared my nostrils.

  “Here she is!” Adam looked up from the floor. “How’re you doin’? Oliver said you spent the night in the ER.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, as I hobbled over to the mural. Damn, my ankle hurt! I could barely read the labels on my paint bottles for the pain.

  “Looks like you haven’t slept in a week,” Wyatt said.

  Great, I thought.

  “How’re you going to climb the ladder with that boot on?” Adam asked.

  “Leave her alone, guys.” Oliver got to his feet with the broken tile in his hands. “Let’s focus on replacing this tile, all right?” He handed the pieces to Wyatt, then walked over to me and spoke to me in a whisper. “How’re you doing?”

  I nodded. “All right,” I said, whispering back. “Lisa’s angry with me, though. She called my PO. Even talked about firing me.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said. “None of it was your fault. And we’ll find a way for you to keep working. I’ll talk to her.”

  “No, don’t,” I said, my hand on his arm. I loved having an excuse to touch him. “Might make things worse.”

  He hesitated, then nodded. He gestured toward the mural. “Why don’t you focus on everything that’s at chair level for a while,” he said. “It might be awkward, but maybe you can keep your ankle elevated that way. There’s a stool in my other office … my real office down the hall … It should be the right height for you to rest your foot on. What do you think?”

  I looked at the mural. The lumberjack’s perfect arm I’d created—or at least, the perfect arm Anna Dale had created and I’d re-created—gave me enormous pleasure, so much so that it nearly erased the misery of the night before. Lisa would consider replacing me? I couldn’t imagine losing this. This work. This joy. And if I lost my work on the mural, I’d also lose my freedom.

  “Good idea,” I said to Oliver. “Thanks.”

  Oliver disappeared into the interior of the building and returned a moment later with a short stool I recognized from his makeshift office. He set it down for me, then gave me a quick, gentle hug I wished would last longer.

  “I would have missed you if Lisa let you go,” he said, and that tiny image of him grew a little bigger in the empty space of my heart.

  Chapter 44

  ANNA

  March 14, 1940

  Although there were still some very nippy days, spring definitely began early in Edenton. Quite suddenly, the little town felt like a different place. The waterfront was alive with fishing boats that glittered with herring, and the air near the wharf reeked quite nauseatingly of fish.

  “You won’t even notice the smell in a couple of days,” Miss Myrtle assured Anna, who found that impossible to imagine.

  Away from the water, gardens bloomed with color, and only then did Anna realize how badly she needed spring and growing things and all those vibrant colors surrounding her. The more color there was in her world, the happier she was, and she thought she now understood her mother’s passion for photographing flowers, preserving them in pictures she could enjoy when the cold weather set in.

  Yet Anna wasn’t getting to see—or smell—too much of Edenton’s springtime: she was practically living in the warehouse these days.

  Her borrowed cot seemed to worry everyone. Now that she had the cot, she painted well into the evening, refreshed from the nap she often took after Jesse went home to help on the farm. She’d hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, turn out the lights, and sleep deeply for twenty or thirty minutes in the shadowy light that slipped in through the big windows. She’d bring a sandwich with her for dinner, and Miss Myrtle complained that she was staying out after dark, which wasn’t “fitting for a single girl.”

  The cot was just a simple old khaki-colored thing. It was low to the ground and more comfortable than it looked. Anna covered it with a thin quilt she’d borrowed from her bedroom closet at Miss Myrtle’s house, and she’d nap on a small pillow she’d picked up from Holmes Department Store. The funny thing was, a couple of months ago she never would have considered taking a nap in the warehouse. The creepiness of the place had been too much for her then, even when she was wide awake with her eyes open. She still didn’t like the long walk from her comfortable “studio” end where she had her work and lights and heaters, to the dark and dismal end when she needed to use the lavatory, but she no longer felt afraid. The warehouse was her home away from home now.

  Mayor Sykes stopped by one evening after leaving his office and he, too, seemed concerned at realizing how late she was working in spite of the fact that he was the person who told her she didn’t need a lock on the warehouse door in the first place. Even Jesse gave her a
talking-to about it.

  “You shouldn’t stay here after dark,” he said. “Remember them words on the side of the warehouse? You don’t wanna be here at night when someone’s out there paintin’ on your buildin’, do you?”

  No, she certainly did not, but a full month had passed since hooligans defaced the warehouse and nothing had happened since. The only reminder of the deed was that the paint Mr. Arndt and Peter used to cover up the words was much brighter and whiter than the old paint on the warehouse exterior. Anna didn’t look at the paint when she walked from her car to the door. That was the way she dealt with it.

  “You know,” Jesse said one afternoon, “you sound like your mama.” He kept his eyes on his work at the easel as he spoke, as if he knew he was treading into dangerous territory.

  Anna looked at him sharply, her guard up at the mention of her mother. “What are you talking about?”

  He glanced at her. “You said how she had all that energy sometime,” he said. “That’s how you sound now.”

  Anna bristled. “This is completely different,” she said, although his words shook her, ever so slightly. She thought of her mother’s “lively spells,” remembering how she would scour the house from top to bottom or race through the neighborhood with her camera, trotting up strangers’ driveways to take pictures of their gardens. “Really, Jesse. You didn’t know her. I’m nothing like her.”

  It annoyed her—perhaps even angered her—that he would mention her mother at all and particularly in that context. Her mother’s manic spells had been like a living, breathing thing, a third being in the house with them. Jesse was completely wrong. Yet as Anna returned to her own work after their conversation, she was aware that her heart was thudding like a drum in her chest.

  Chapter 45

  MORGAN

  July 16, 2018

  Five days had passed since I sprained my ankle, and although I still couldn’t walk more than half a block without grinding pain, I barely felt a twinge when I focused on the mural. I was working faster and more confidently now. I understood what I was doing. I knew exactly how to mix the conservation paints with silica to match the sheen in Anna’s oils. I knew how much pressure to apply to my brush to match Anna’s strokes. Only when I came to an unusual abrasion in a delicate area did I need to turn to Oliver for advice.