Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  “You know as much as I do now,” he told me. I knew that was a lie, but it pleased me nevertheless.

  Still, there were only three weeks left before the gallery was to open, and I figured I had five weeks’ worth of work left to do. Adam and most of the other workers were now gone, having taken other jobs, but Wyatt stayed behind to hammer molding into place and help Oliver frame any artwork that was coming in unframed.

  Late that morning, Lisa blew into the gallery carrying a large flat package wrapped in brown paper and taped together with crisp, yellowed, ancient-looking tape.

  “Wait till you see what I stumbled across in my father’s studio closet!” she said, motioning Oliver and me to come close to her at the folding table.

  I set down my brush and stood next to Oliver as Lisa untaped the brown paper to reveal a plain white board about three feet by one and a half. She turned the board over and I gasped. In front of us was a full color sketch of the mural.

  “Too cool!” Oliver said, grinning. “What a find! You know what this is, Morgan?”

  “Other than the obvious?” I asked.

  “This is what Anna Dale would have turned in to the Section of Fine Arts to get her commission to move forward with the mural,” he said. “This would have been her first interpretation of what the mural would look like.”

  I quickly scanned the sketch, looking for the aberrations that were so apparent in the mural. “Look.” I pointed to the circle of women at the mural’s heart. “No motorcycle.”

  Lisa looked from the sketch to the mural. “No knife in the peanut lady’s teeth,” she said.

  “And no hammer,” Oliver added.

  “No skull,” I said. “No little man in the compact mirror.” The list went on and on. Anna Dale had created the sketch, it seemed, before she’d lost her mind.

  “We have to frame this,” Oliver said. I could tell he was excited. It made me smile to see how enthusiastic he became about all things artistic. “We’ll hang it here in the foyer along with the mural.”

  Once Lisa left, Oliver and I shared a container of pad Thai for lunch, sitting across from one another at his table, both of us eating quickly so we could get back to work. Oliver could have returned to his office now that I didn’t need his help all that much, but he seemed content to continue working in the foyer and I was glad. We worked mostly in silence, listening to our wildly different music, but occasionally we pulled out our earbuds to talk. That afternoon, Oliver talked about Nathan, telling me all sorts of funny and touching anecdotes about the son he loved. It warmed me, listening to him.

  I worked until five thirty, then took an Uber to the library. Seeing Anna’s sketch made me want to dig deeper into her time in Edenton, and I hoped I could find more articles about her in the old Chowan Herald. I had to know how she came to fall off the face of the earth. If only the newspapers were indexed! Then I would know in two seconds if there was any other information about her.

  I was soon back in that cramped atticlike space in the library, fighting with the microfilm machine as I worked my way through the blurry print of the newspapers from early 1940.

  I nearly missed the article in the February 22 edition, since it had no picture with it and Anna’s name was buried in the text. Mural Artist’s Warehouse Defaced, the headline read.

  Policeman Karl Maguire stated that the former Blayton Company warehouse, where New Jersey artist Anna Dale is painting the government-sponsored mural that will hang in the Edenton Post Office, was reportedly defaced with a racial epithet over the weekend. Maguire learned of the event only after the offending words had been painted over. The identity of the culprit remains unknown.

  I read the article a few times, trying to imagine what the racial epithet might have been. I remembered the picture of Anna standing in front of the canvas with the young white boy Peter somebody and the boy-who-could-pass-as-a-man, Jesse Williams, and I thought I could guess. Had there been more between Anna and Jesse than a work relationship? There was only one person alive who might know. I thought of how Mama Nelle pressed a finger to her lips when I talked to her about Anna. “You know you got to be quiet about her, right?” she’d asked me. Was this why? Were Anna and Jesse closer than artist and apprentice? I would invite Mama Nelle to the gallery, I decided. I’d show her the mural up close and personal, and pick her brain at the same time.

  Chapter 46

  ANNA

  March 21, 1940

  Anna awakened in the darkness of the warehouse, confused. Was she in Pauline’s bedroom? No. Her hand felt the rough fabric of the cot beneath her. She squeezed her eyes closed, concentrating, trying to remember. She’d eaten a bowl of cold leftover stew she’d brought with her from Miss Myrtle’s. Yes. And then she’d gone back to the mural. So close to being done, yet as driven as ever. She’d painted the fine lines of the netting on the fishing vessel. Made a mistake. Painted them over. And over. She’d pulled the lamp closer. Stood on the third rung of the ladder to reach the upper left corner of the mural. She hadn’t been able to space the lines of the netting evenly. No one would notice, but she would know. She’d been working too long. She’d had no nap today and she’d noticed that her hand had a little tremor. She’d decided to lie down for a few minutes. Yes, it was all coming back to her. She’d stretched out on the cot. Pulled the quilt over her. Now she had no idea what time it was.

  She should get up. Work on the ship’s netting some more, or better yet, go back to Miss Myrtle’s for a good night’s sleep and return in the morning when her mind would be fresh.

  She heard the sound. Was that what had awakened her? A scuffling sound. She lay still, listening. Scuff. Scuff. Suddenly the floor lamp clicked on and she sat up, the cot creaking beneath her.

  Martin. Walking toward her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. She didn’t feel fear. Not exactly. Not yet. She was more angry over his brazenness. The lamplight caught the greasy tangles of his red hair. His eyes were circled by darkness. “Martin?” She lifted the edge of the quilt to her chest, as if she’d forgotten she was still fully dressed in blouse and slacks. “Why are you here?” she asked again.

  She could smell his whiskey breath as he moved closer, yet she still didn’t feel afraid. Not until she saw what he was doing: unbuckling his pants. Oh God.

  Suddenly, before she had a chance to get to her feet, he was on her. She screamed. She felt the cot give way and heard the splintering of one of the legs echo through the building. She was tilted toward the ground, headfirst, Martin’s weight on her. He smelled of sweat and booze and dirty hair. Anna tried to scramble out from under him, but he held her pinned beneath him. He was a thousand times stronger than she was.

  She clutched his arms. Dug her fingernails into the skin through his shirt. “Think of your wife,” she pleaded. “Think of your daughters.” Please don’t do this. Please don’t hurt me. Was she begging him out loud? What did it matter? Her words were useless. The smell of him was all over her. Up inside her head. She felt the hardness of him press against her. He got to his knees and started yanking off her pants, and she took that chance to fight him. She tried to kick him, but by then, her pants were halfway down her legs, trapping her. “Stop it stop it stop it!” she screamed. She clawed his face and he slapped her, hard, harder than he’d slapped his wife.

  “Shut the hell up!” he shouted. “You fucking wrecked my life! Shut up!” He yanked off her pants. She yelped, trying to sit up, trying to grab his hands, but he pushed her down again, his own hand at her throat, tight, pressing, making her struggle for air. His strength overwhelmed her, his body no longer flesh and blood but concrete and steel, and she knew he was going to kill her.

  “Think you’re so special ’cause you won a fucking contest!” His spit sprayed against her cheeks. “A fucking imbecilic painting of old ladies and trite crap! It’s gone to your head, you bitch!” He kneed her in the belly, making her cry out. “You wrecked my career!” he shouted. “
You wrecked my marriage!”

  Both his hands were around her throat now, tightening as she struggled against him. She stopped fighting. She would let him do what he was there to do while she thought how to save herself. How to survive. He tore into her. Plowed into her. She felt herself split open and she gasped. Too numb. Her mind was too numb to think of a way to save herself. A way to live. She lay there limp and weak, her head turned away from his face and his stench, while he ruined her.

  And then she saw, lying on the floor only inches from the broken cot, the hammer. She focused on it. Forgot about what he was doing. Forgot he was ruining her.

  She was going to ruin him.

  Chapter 47

  MORGAN

  July 18, 2018

  Looking from Anna’s sketch to the mural was making me crazy. Several times that morning, I took a break from my work to stand at a distance with the sketch in my hands, studying the differences between it and the mural. Oliver shared my fascination. He got close to the mural with a magnifying glass, hunting for pounce marks beneath the hammer or the knife in the black woman’s teeth, but he could find none.

  “It’s got to be one of two explanations,” he said, coming to stand next to me as we gazed at the painting. “Either she always knew she was going to add the unusual objects, but she guessed the Section of Fine Arts would never approve her sketch if she included them, so she left them off. Or, she truly did lose her mind while she was painting it.”

  “Or she just had a bizarre sense of humor,” I suggested. I looked toward the front door of the foyer and he followed my gaze.

  “What time do you expect her?” he asked.

  “Any minute.” Saundra had promised to bring Mama Nelle to the gallery before noon, and it was now after eleven. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure they would show. Saundra had been reluctant.

  “She’s frailer every day,” she’d said to me on the phone. “But I suppose at this point it can’t hurt and she’d enjoy the visit. She likes you. She can’t remember your name but she calls you ‘the girl with the yellow hair.’”

  I heard the slamming of a car door and walked to the foyer entrance where I could see Mama Nelle struggling to get out of the car. Saundra nearly had to lift her from the front seat, and I suddenly felt guilty for asking them to come. But as soon as the two of them reached the front of the gallery and I opened the door, Mama Nelle’s eyes lit up behind her glasses. “The girl with the yella hair,” she said, smiling.

  “I’m so glad you could come,” I said, trying to figure out if I’d be more help or hindrance if I took Mama Nelle’s free arm to lead her into the foyer. I opted to hold her arm lightly by the elbow while Saundra guided her into the room.

  Oliver had pulled the two chairs a few yards from the mural, and I nodded toward them. “Come sit down,” I said, but before the words were out of my mouth, Mama Nelle had stopped in her tracks, her gaze fixed on the mural.

  “Is she here?” she whispered to me. “Is Miss Anna here?”

  “No, she’s not,” I said, glancing at Saundra, “but her mural is here and I wanted you to see it.”

  “Please sit down.” Oliver sounded as worried as I felt. The old woman had lost her smile. Her body felt limp where I held her arm.

  “Yes, come sit,” I said. “This is Oliver. He’s the curator of the gallery.”

  “Mama, this is Uncle Jesse’s gallery,” Saundra said loudly as she helped her mother onto the chair, then sat down next to her. “He planned it before he passed.”

  Mama Nelle didn’t hear a word her daughter said, I was sure. Her gaze was riveted on the mural, and now that I had her in the gallery, I wasn’t quite sure what to say to her.

  I glanced at Oliver, who gave me a nod that said, You brought her here, now ask her your questions.

  “Does the mural look like you remember it?” I began, thinking that was a safer question than the one I really wanted to ask: Had Miss Anna and Jesse been lovers?

  Mama Nelle lifted one tremulous hand to her lips, then shook her head. “Where you get this?” she asked, nodding toward the mural.

  “Jesse had it in his studio for many, many years,” I said. “I’m restoring it. Cleaning it up. Fixing the paint.”

  “Is Jesse the one what ruint it?” she asked.

  “Ruined it?”

  She pointed, her arm trembling. It looked like she was pointing to the peanut lady, the woman with the knife between her teeth. “What’d he do to it?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that in all the years the mural had been in Jesse’s possession, he might have been the one to tamper with it. That didn’t fit the story, though. The “Anna Dale lost her mind” story.

  “There are strange things about the mural that we don’t understand,” I said, moving to stand in front of the painting. “The knife in her teeth. The motorcycle.” I pointed out the other oddities. “But we think Anna … Miss Anna painted them. Not Jesse. But … Mama Nelle.” I took a deep breath. “I was wondering if Jesse and Miss Anna were more than friends.”

  Saundra turned her head from the mural to me. “You think they were lovers?” she asked.

  Mama Nelle didn’t seem to hear either of us, her gaze still on the mural.

  “I saw an article in the paper from back then,” I said to Saundra. “It said there’d been a racial slur written on the outside wall of the warehouse where Anna painted and where Jesse was her … apprentice, or helper, or … I wondered if there was something more between them.”

  “Ah,” Saundra said, understanding. “Well, if there was, it’s certainly ancient history now. It hardly matters, does it?”

  It didn’t matter at all, actually, but it was more than prurient interest driving me. “You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. It’s just that I’ve come to feel … close to Anna Dale, working on this thing.” I gestured toward the mural. “She created a perfectly nice sketch for this mural and then when she actually painted it she added all these … horrific details to it, and…” I seemed to run out of words.

  “We’d just like to understand her better.” Oliver stood next to me and he surprised me by cupping my elbow in his hand. The touch didn’t last nearly as long as I would have liked. “And of course there are very few people alive now who were alive then,” he continued, dropping his hand to his side, “and Morgan thought maybe your mother might have some—”

  “They wasn’t anythin’ of the kind,” Mama Nelle said suddenly. She looked across the room at me. “Ain’t you never had a friend that was a boy but not a boyfriend?”

  I felt Oliver next to me. Until recently, he’d fit that description perfectly. Was it my imagination that there was something more between us? Something growing? Something I wanted to grow.

  “Yes,” I said to Mama Nelle. “I know what you mean. Are you saying that’s all there was between Anna and Jesse? Friendship?”

  “That’s ’xactly right.”

  I tipped my head, curious. “How do you know that for sure?”

  She looked at me in silence for so long I began to wonder if she was having some sort of spell.

  “Mama?” Saundra prodded.

  “We ain’t talkin’ ’bout Miss Anna no more,” Mama Nelle said in a near whisper. “Come here.” She motioned me to come closer. I walked the five or six steps to her chair and she reached out to take my hand. I bent low until her lips were next to my ear. “You’ll keep her secrets, right?” she whispered to me. “Me ’n’ you? We the only ones that know.”

  Know what? I wanted to ask her. Her cool dry fingers grasped mine in a plea or a promise. I wasn’t sure which, but I knew it wasn’t the time to press for more. That would have to wait. “Yes,” I whispered back. “I’ll keep her secrets.”

  Chapter 48

  ANNA

  March 22, 1940

  Jesse arrived before dawn. Anna sat, half naked, on the broken cot. All the way broken now, its legs splayed and splintered on the concrete. She followed Jesse’s gaze to where Martin lay on the floor.
She followed his gaze to the bloody hammer. His eyes grew wide. He raised a trembling hand to his mouth.

  Anna thought of how the hammer actually belonged to Miss Myrtle, who’d said she could keep it as long as she needed it. She’d liked the feel of the smooth wood in her hand when she pounded nails into the walls of the warehouse. She’d liked the solid head of it.

  At midnight, though, she’d liked the claw end.

  “What happened?” Jesse lowered his hand from his mouth, his voice a husky whisper.

  Anna couldn’t speak. It would have taken effort she didn’t have.

  Jesse walked toward her. He pried the journal from her fingers where she held it on her bare thighs and read what she’d written earlier that morning when she was sick to her stomach. So, so sick. She didn’t even remember what words she’d used.

  “Oh, shit, Anna,” Jesse said. He stood above her, reading. It was the first time she’d heard him swear. The first time he’d said her name without “Miss” in front of it.

  She started to cry. Again. She’d thought she was out of tears.

  Jesse made her stand up. She started to fall, but he caught her. He helped her put on her underwear. Her pants. She felt no modesty. She didn’t care. Then he helped her walk around the other side of the cot so she wouldn’t step through the blood. So much of it! It had soaked into the concrete floor. Already dark, ruby red for all time. She thought she would get sick again, but the feeling passed. Jesse had her sit in the chair by his easel.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, though it would be clear to anyone that she was not all right. Not in the least. She couldn’t speak, but she didn’t need to explain what had happened. He’d read it all. She watched him look around the room—the broken cot, the bloodstained hammer, the red concrete, Martin’s skull split open like a bloody egg.