Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  The next room was filled entirely with Jesse’s paintings, some of them familiar to me. I glanced at my phone. My half-hour break was nearly up. I would look at Jesse’s work more closely later.

  I walked into the third room, this one displaying paintings from Jesse’s personal collection, much but not all of it from North Carolina artists. This was where I would really have liked to spend the time that I didn’t have today. I stood in the center of the room and turned in a slow circle, taking in all the work from a distance. There was a wintry landscape by Francis Speight. One of Ernie Barnes’s distinctive paintings, probably my favorite in the room, displayed a group of black men and women, their elongated bodies dancing against a peach-colored background. There was one of Kenneth Noland’s bull’s-eye paintings, and an intriguing black-and-white contemporary piece by Barbara Fisher. But the huge painting that anchored the room was Judith Shipley’s Daisy Chain, taken from the foyer of Jesse’s house. Although I’d passed by that realistic painting of four little girls sitting in a field of daisies nearly every day since my arrival in Edenton, I’d still never found the iconic iris Shipley would have hidden in it as a tribute to her mother. Here in the gallery, the painting had a perfectly lit wall all to itself, and I spotted the purple flower almost instantly. It was off to one side in the endless field of daisies, jutting above the yellow flowers, small and delicate. It made me smile. How nice to have a mother you wanted to honor that way.

  Back in the foyer, I found Oliver in my place on the floor, carefully inpainting the weedy grass of the Mill Village. I held out my hand for the brush.

  “I’ll keep helping,” he said, holding the brush away from me. “You know you can’t make the deadline on your own, right?”

  I looked at the abraded grass, the disintegrating signature. He was right. Adam and Wyatt would have to stretch and hang the mural in the morning with the right-hand corner unfinished or poorly restored. How savvy was Andrea Fuller about art? Would she notice slipshod work in one tiny bit of the mural? Probably not, and yet it pained me to think of making a mess of that corner when I’d been so meticulous all along.

  I motioned once more for him to give me the brush. “It’s my job,” I said, but he didn’t hand the brush to me.

  “My work is pretty well finished,” he said. “Let me help you. I can work on the grass here.” He pointed. “You can work on the signature.”

  Reluctantly, I sat down next to him and picked up my own brush. We worked together until five, when we stopped to order and devour Hunan chicken and egg rolls. Then we were back at it, and I began to feel hopeful. I thought Oliver’s brushstrokes were not quite as clean as mine, but I kept my mouth shut. No one was going to notice, and we were getting the work done.

  Oliver was talkative as we painted after dinner. “So, were you really in love with Trey?” he asked.

  I was surprised by the question, and I had to think about it. “I was in love with the Trey I wanted him to be,” I said. “Not the Trey he really was. And he didn’t love me, either. He said he did, but he doesn’t have a clue what it means to love. You don’t treat someone you love the way he treated me.” I touched my brush to the paint on my palette. “Same with my parents.”

  “Do you really believe they didn’t love you?”

  “I’m certain of it.” I didn’t look at him. “I think it’s hard for you to imagine, because you probably had great parents and you’re a great parent yourself. But mine didn’t give a shit about me. And I don’t give a shit about them.” I’d reached the top of the D in “Dale,” and held the brush away from the canvas. I was getting upset. The last thing I wanted to do was screw up Anna’s golden-hued signature. I looked at Oliver. “It’s a pretty crappy feeling, knowing that no one in the world has ever loved you,” I said. “It makes you feel worthless.” I turned back to the mural, touching my brush carefully to the abraded top of the D. For a moment, neither of us spoke.

  Finally, Oliver broke the silence. “You deserved a lot better,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry you didn’t get it.”

  “Let’s put on some music,” I said. I wanted to get the conversation off myself.

  “Good idea.” Oliver set down his brush. “I’ll get my speaker. We’ll have to fight over whose music we play, though.”

  I smiled to myself as he left the foyer. We would listen to his music; I owed him that. He could be home resting up for the opening tomorrow. Instead he was here, helping me. I wanted to make him happy. He was one of the best people I’d ever known.

  I went back to work on Anna’s signature while he was gone. There was something wrong with the D in “Dale.” The top of the rounded portion of the letter was discolored and I guessed I hadn’t cleaned it well enough. I’d probably gotten pretty sloppy by the time I’d reached that section of the mural as I cleaned. I still had a bowl of distilled water and a cotton-tipped dowel on the floor near the mural. I picked up the dowel, then began to gingerly touch it to the top of the D. The letter would not come clean, the gold paint blocked not by some sort of grime that wouldn’t budge, but by something else. Paint? Frowning, I leaned back from the mural for a better view. Only then did I understand what I was looking at, and a chill ran up my spine.

  Oh my God, I thought to myself, scrambling to my feet. Oh. My. God.

  Chapter 62

  I raced from the room, down the curved hallway, and into Oliver’s office where he was unplugging his speaker from the wall. I took the speaker from him and put it back on his desk. “Come with me!” I said, grabbing his hand.

  “What are you doing?” He laughed, letting me nearly drag him out of the office and down the hall. In the foyer, I pointed to Anna’s signature.

  “Look!” I said. “Look closely at the D in ‘Dale.’ What do you see?”

  Oliver squatted next to the mural. “Is it a flower? A purple…” He looked up at me, eyes wide behind his glasses. “It’s got to be a coincidence,” he said.

  “It’s not a coincidence!” I said, excited. “Look at Anna’s signature. Then come in the other room.”

  Getting to his feet, Oliver followed me into the gallery where the Shipley painting hung. Standing next to him, I pointed out the iris in the sea of daisies, then watched his face as he took in the distinctive loopy handwriting in Judith Shipley’s signature. It wasn’t just the unusual shape of the script. “Look,” I said, pointing to the name. “The small l and e in ‘Shipley’ are nearly identical to the same letters in ‘Dale.’”

  “Holy effing shit,” he said.

  It was the first time I’d heard him even come close to swearing, and I laughed. “Anna was never caught!” I said happily, pressing my hands together in front of me. “She went on to find fame, and somewhere along the way, she and Jesse must have reconnected and some of Anna’s work came to be in his collection. She changed her name, Oliver! She reinvented herself.”

  “Okay, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Oliver said, his voice calm now. “Let’s take a closer look at everything.”

  For the next thirty minutes—precious minutes when I knew I should be working on the mural—we hurried back and forth between the foyer and the room where Daisy Chain was displayed, comparing the shapes of eyes, the way fingers and nails were painted, the distinctive length and depth of the artist’s brushstrokes, the thinness of the paint layer.

  “This is definitely Anna’s,” I said with certainty as we stood once more in front of Daisy Chain. “I’ve spent the last month getting to know these brushstrokes.”

  Grinning to himself, Oliver put his arm around my shoulders, almost absentmindedly, I thought. “I’m not sure I would have noticed this on my own.” He tightened his arm around me, and my body went soft, leaning against him. “Good sleuthing, Christopher,” he said.

  “It just…” I lost my train of thought, distracted by the weight of his arm. Distracted by the leathery scent of his aftershave. By his nearness. “It was the iris,” I said weakly, because I could think of nothing else to say. My brain had sudd
enly turned to mush. But then I noticed the wall text Oliver had written and hung next to the painting.

  “Oh, no,” I said, feeling the keen sting of disappointment.

  “Oh no, what?” He lowered his arm from my shoulders.

  I pointed to the wall text. “Judith Shipley is still alive, but look at her birthdate. June seventh, 1922. Anna Dale was twenty-two when she painted the mural, so she was born in 1918.”

  Oliver laughed. “If she changed her name, she probably changed her birthdate as well, don’t you think?” he said. “Took the opportunity to shave a few years off her age?”

  I bit my lip, hopeful that he was right. “What do we do?” I asked, nodding toward the painting.

  “I’m going to call an art authenticator I know at the museum in Greenville to see if he can take a drive up here to give us his take on this,” Oliver said. “We don’t dare go public with this without knowing for sure.”

  “Do you have any doubt?”

  “I’ll be shocked if it isn’t,” he said, “but I’m not an authenticator.”

  “Is there any chance Judith Shipley’s coming to the opening?” I asked. My heart was in my throat at the thought of meeting her, but she was ninety-six—or one hundred—years old, and she lived in New York. Very unlikely.

  “I don’t think so,” Oliver said. “Lisa said only a couple of the artists in Jesse’s collection can make it. The majority are dead, and a lot of the others are elderly or live too far away.”

  I stared at the painting. “We have to get her here.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  “I’ll call her … Try to see if there’s any chance … But I can’t ask her outright if she’s Anna, can I? That might scare her into a heart attack.”

  “And she might not be Anna, Morgan,” Oliver said. “Let’s not get our hopes up too high.” He nodded toward Daisy Chain again. “We may just be seeing what we want to see.”

  Chapter 63

  From the wall text next to Judith Shipley’s painting Daisy Chain:

  Daisy Chain (mid-80s) oil

  Judith Shipley

  June 7, 1922–

  Little is known about Judith Shipley’s early life or formal art education. Her birthplace is also unknown. Although she spent her early adulthood in New York City, Shipley was never part of the New York school of experimental artists, preferring the dramatic realism of other New York painters of the era such as that of her contemporary, Jesse Jameson Williams. Shipley found her own acclaim in the late fifties to the late eighties, and many of her vibrant paintings from that period are displayed in museums and galleries around the world. Her work can be a puzzle for the curious viewer, as she always hides an iris somewhere in her paintings in honor of her late mother, Iris.

  Daisy Chain was a gift from the artist to Jesse Jameson Williams in 1988.

  Private life: In 1952, Shipley married her agent Max Enterhoff (1921–1999). They had one daughter, Debra, who died in 2014. Shipley lives in New York City, where she and her granddaughter maintain an atelier, training new artists.

  Chapter 64

  “First of all,” Lisa said from her seat at Oliver’s folding table. “No one utters a word about this possible link between the two artists outside this room until we have more information from the … authenticator guy from the museum. We don’t want to look like idiots.”

  “Right,” I said. I sat on the floor in front of the mural, facing her and Oliver, who stood, arms folded, by the end of the table. We’d called Lisa to come back to the gallery as soon as she could, and while she was intrigued by the similarities between the paintings, she remained unconvinced. Oliver had been able to reach the authenticator from the Greenville museum, but he couldn’t come to Edenton until late next week. We’d have to keep the secret of the mural to ourselves for now.

  “Look,” Lisa added. “I met Judith Shipley on numerous occasions. Like so many other artists, she floated in and out of our house over the years. She—”

  “What was she like?” I interrupted.

  Lisa shrugged. “You must know by now that art was my father’s world, not mine. He always had his fellow artists around. I paid no attention. I just know she stayed with us a few times. I couldn’t even describe what she looked like.”

  I pictured the short black bob, but remembered Anna had let her hair grow long before leaving Edenton. And all of that had been so long ago.

  “What did she—Judith Shipley—say about the invitation to the gallery opening?” Oliver asked. “Is it certain she’s not coming?”

  “She sent back the response card with ‘not attending’ circled, which I have to say, is more than many people bothered to do,” Lisa said. “Why people aren’t considerate enough to return those stamped response cards is beyond me.”

  I wrinkled my nose at the thought of the response card with “not attending” circled. But what had I expected? A long letter from Judith, describing her secret past, her long-ago friendship with Jesse?

  “Can I call her?” I asked. “Do you have her number?”

  “What would you say?” Oliver asked.

  “You can’t come right out and ask her if she’s Anna Dale,” Lisa said, a warning in her voice. “If she is, she’s kept that secret for a long, long time and I certainly don’t want to put her on the spot.”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I just want to … could I mention that we have an old post office mural here? Maybe I could learn something from her reaction.”

  They were both quiet, looking off into space as though thinking about my proposal.

  “I don’t see why that would hurt,” Oliver said finally.

  “I have no idea if the number I have for her from my father’s records is still good,” Lisa said. “She’s probably in a nursing home by now.”

  “Though her biography says she still has a studio,” I said. “An atelier.”

  Lisa got to her feet. “All right,” she said. “I think Oliver should call her, though. You need to keep painting. And Oliver, remember you’re a representative of this gallery.”

  “Got it,” Oliver said, but he was looking at me where I sat with my paintbrush in hand, distressed that I’d just had the opportunity to speak with … Anna? Judith?… snatched away from me.

  “You’re going to fix that corner of the mural, Morgan, aren’t you?” Lisa asked from behind me, and I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “You know Andrea Fuller will be here when we open in the morning to make sure my father’s conditions have been—”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be finished by tomorrow morning, no problem.” How I was going to make that happen, I didn’t know.

  Five minutes after Lisa left, I was sitting at Oliver’s table as he read a New York phone number aloud to me and I punched the numbers on my cell phone. “You should be the one to make the call, not me,” he’d told me once Lisa was gone. “She’s your artist.”

  The number rang for a very long time, and I pictured Judith Shipley hobbling into her kitchen to pick up the receiver of an old-fashioned wall phone. Or maybe she used a wheelchair. Or maybe she was in a nursing home and no one was going to answer this call at all.

  Finally, though, I heard a click, and a moment later a curt female voice—decidedly not elderly—said, “Shipley residence.”

  “Hello!” I said, quickly putting my phone on speaker so Oliver could hear. “My name is Morgan Christopher. May I speak to Ms. Shipley?”

  The woman didn’t respond and I had a terrible feeling that “Ms. Shipley” might be dead. Finally, she spoke.

  “Ms. Shipley is unable to come to the phone,” she said.

  “Oh, well, I’m calling from the new Jesse Jameson Williams gallery in Edenton, North Carolina, and we’d invited her to be an honored guest at our opening tomorrow, since we have a couple of her paintings here, but—”

  “I already sent our regrets,” the woman said coolly.

  “Yes, we received them but I was hoping I could change her
mind. Could I talk to her, please?”

  “Ms. Shipley no longer travels,” the woman said, and I heard the click as she hung up the phone.

  I made a face at Oliver. “Did I screw that up?” I asked, wondering if Oliver should have made the call. If he might have had some magical way of getting a different answer.

  Oliver shook his head. “There was no way that icicle of a woman was going to come around,” he said. “Maybe when we get a definitive answer from the authenticator, we can try writing to Judith personally.”

  Oliver and I returned to work on the mural. I kept looking over my shoulder, afraid Lisa would show up again and find him helping me.

  “Do you really think she’ll care at this point?” he asked, and I shook my head. I’d done ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the work on the mural myself. I thought that would be enough to satisfy anyone.

  It was nearly three A.M. by the time we finished. I was dead tired, but I couldn’t stop looking at the golden-hued signature in the lower right-hand corner of the mural and the delicate iris curled around the D. Oliver nearly had to drag me out of the gallery to his van.

  He drove through the dark, deserted streets to Lisa’s house. We were both quiet. Utterly depleted. But when he pulled into Lisa’s driveway and I reached for the door handle, he said, “Morgan?”

  I turned to look at him, waiting. The streetlight picked up the perfect line of his nose. His lips.