Big Lies in a Small Town Read online

  I kept my gaze riveted on the brake lights of the car in front of us.

  “You have to meet with the parole officer within three days,” Lisa added.

  “I know.” My responsibilities had been drilled into my head. “Is it possible … I can get an advance on my pay?”

  Lisa looked at me sharply.

  “I need clothes for the outside,” I said. “I mean, for … I just need clothes. I don’t have any with me except what I have on. And I’ll need a phone.”

  “Could your family send you your clothes?”

  “My parents and I aren’t talking.”

  “Do they know you’re out? Would that make a difference?” Lisa’s phone rang and she looked at it. Pressed a button to stop the call. “I mean, would they talk to you now?” she continued.

  I hadn’t called them. What was the point? If I’d learned anything at all those AA meetings I’d attended this past year, it was that I needed to cut toxic people out of my life.

  “No, it wouldn’t make a difference,” I said.

  Lisa didn’t respond and we drove in silence for a few more minutes. Then she made a call using the speaker on her phone. Something about a house. A contract. She was a real estate agent, I realized, and the little house pin on her lapel suddenly made sense. As she spoke into the phone, Lisa’s voice was higher, friendlier, more upbeat. A completely different person. When she hung up, she glanced at me. “Yes, you can have an advance,” she said. “You are going to need a phone. We need to be in touch all the time, and you’re going to need a laptop computer for restoration research, I’m sure. So I’ll advance you four thousand. Get what you need.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We were on Route 64 now and I watched the speedometer creep past eighty. I tried to shift my thinking to the absolute insanity that I was now out of prison because of Jesse Jameson Williams. Just the idea of him having known my name sent a thrill through me, though I still couldn’t help but feel he’d had me confused with another Morgan Christopher. Yet what was the likelihood there was another young artist—some young black artist, maybe—with my name in North Carolina? I wished I knew how he’d learned about me. It wasn’t like I’d been a top student. If my lifelong passion for art had been enough, I would have been a star, but my desire to create hadn’t been enough. One of my not-so-tactful professors told me I was in the top of the pack when it came to effort, but the “bottom of the middle of the pack” when it came to talent. “Talent can’t be taught,” he told me. He’d crushed me with those words. I’d thought of dropping out then, but art was all I’d ever cared about. Trey told me to tough it out. “He’s an asshole,” he said about my professor. “Your work is awesome.” Trey always had a way of building me up when I was down, but he wasn’t an artist, so what did he know? And then the accident happened and I’d landed in prison, and that pretty much made the “drop out/don’t drop out” decision for me.

  “What did you mean about the artist going crazy?” I asked Lisa. “What does that mean, exactly? Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Things were different back then. Maybe she’d just been depressed and was never able to get treatment for it.” I thought I knew something about going crazy. Sometimes in the past year, I’d felt insanity creeping in. Paranoia in my case, but that had been based in reality. There’d been women in the prison out to get me.

  Lisa kept her eyes on the road and shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know,” she said. “My father told me that about her one time and I didn’t think to ask him anything more. I’d never seen the mural, so I didn’t really care, but I think he was obsessed with it.” She looked in her rearview mirror and put on her blinker to change lanes. “Whatever was wrong with the artist, it was enough to prevent her from turning the mural over to the post office and getting paid, so it must have been pretty serious.”

  “What’s the subject of the mural?” I asked, trying to focus on conversation to keep my mind off the road.

  “I think just things related to the town,” Lisa said. “To Edenton. Most of the old murals were like that. We’ll see it soon enough, anyway.” She didn’t sound all that invested in the mural, and I guessed it was just a means to an end for her. Something she had to take care of to get the gallery up and running.

  “So … you said there would be other artists’ work displayed in the gallery?” I asked.

  Lisa nodded. “There’ll be a permanent collection of my father’s work, then a room for a few other well-known artists he had in his collection, many of them his good friends. That will change every few months. Then a rotating display of the work of the young artists he’s helped over the years and that work will be for sale.” Her voice had grown tight. “There’s just too much to be done before we can open the doors.”

  “Is this your background, too?” I asked. “Art?” Lisa didn’t strike me as an artist. She looked more like the patron of an artist, if anything. Someone who could afford the awesomely tailored suit she was wearing and the diamond tennis bracelet that glittered at her wrist.

  “I’m a Realtor,” she said. “I have no artistic talent … or interest … whatsoever, except with regard to the historical architecture of the houses I sell.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Why did Jesse Williams—I mean, your father—put you in charge of the gallery, then?”

  Lisa didn’t answer right away and I thought I might have stepped over a line with the question. But she finally spoke. “I’m his only child, so I’m it.” She let out a sigh. “I knew the gallery was in the works when he died, of course, but I had no idea he was going to dump it all in my lap.” She glanced at me. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I loved my father—I adored him—and I want to do this for him, but he gave me an impossible deadline and threw you into the mix…” She shook her head. “I still have my real estate business to run. I have clients to deal with. This is a busy time of year for me.”

  “He must’ve thought you could pull it off,” I said.

  Lisa sighed again. Then she reached for the radio, pressed a few buttons, and a podcast began to play. Something about mortgages, and I guessed we were done with our conversation, such as it was.

  * * *

  If anyone had asked me to guess what sort of house Jesse Jameson Williams had lived in, I would have pictured a Frank Lloyd Wright contemporary hugging a hillside. And I would have been wrong. Lisa pulled into the long driveway of a huge, two-story Victorian with double-tiered porches decorated with elaborate white railings. The whole front of the house looked like it was covered in white lace, and a garden, alive with color, stretched the entire width of the house.

  “This was Jesse’s house?” I asked, surprised.

  “The De Claire house,” Lisa said as we got out of her car. “A man named Byron De Claire was the first owner when it was built in 1880. My parents bought it in 1980.”

  I followed Lisa to the front door and into the house, which showed its age only in the Victorian architecture. As Lisa turned off the elaborate-looking security system, I peered into the rooms I could see from where I stood. The foyer, living room, and parlor were painted in muted pastels: seafoam, and lavender, and blue-tinged gray. Artwork adorned every wall, and while Lisa talked on her phone inside the front door, I moved from painting to painting in the huge foyer, almost afraid to breathe near them. I recalled reading somewhere that one of Jesse Williams’s paintings went for ten million dollars at an auction, and here I was, surrounded by several of them at one time. Most of the work was his, but I spotted two of Romare Bearden’s collages and a huge painting by Judith Shipley of young girls sitting in a field of daisies. I quickly searched the Shipley for the iris the artist always hid in her paintings, a tribute to her mother by the same name, but with all those daisies, I soon gave up and turned my attention to one of the Bearden collages instead. It was full of African-American musicians, mainly guitarists, standing against a vivid red background. I felt a thrill of excitement that I was close enough to these original paintings to touch. Maybe I was
n’t much of an artist, but I would always love art itself.

  “Come in the kitchen,” Lisa said, getting off her call.

  I followed her into the spacious white-and-stainless-steel kitchen.

  “Didn’t Jesse Williams—didn’t your father—live in New York most of his life?” I asked.

  “Not most, but for many years.” Lisa opened the wide, double-door refrigerator and handed me a bottle of water, then unscrewed the cap of another for herself. “And he lived in France before that,” she said, leaning against the white-and-gray marble-topped counter. “He was in France during the war and just stayed. He met his first wife there. That lasted fifteen years or so, and after his divorce, he moved to New York and married my mother. She was much younger. It looked like they weren’t going to have children, but then I came along.” Lisa took a long drink from her water bottle. “She was thirty-nine and he was nearly fifty. He felt the family pull then and wanted to move back to Edenton. Back to his roots. I was seven. He had a name by then, and Edenton wanted to claim him.” She set her bottle down and began rifling through a manila file folder on the island. “Even so,” she continued, “they had to buy this place for cash. No one would have given a black man a loan for a house in this neighborhood back then. It’s hard enough now,” she added under her breath in a mutter. She pulled a sheaf of paper from the folder. “I want to read you this part of his will,” she said, holding up the paper.

  I nodded, and Lisa began to read.

  “‘My plans for the foyer of the gallery: In the closet of my studio’—his studio is back there, and it’s a mess.” Lisa pointed through the kitchen window, and I could see a good-size white cottage in the rear of the yard. “‘In the closet of my studio,’” Lisa continued, “‘you will find a large rolled canvas. This was painted in 1940 as part of a government-sponsored competition for post office murals by a young woman named Anna Dale. Anna completed the mural but became unwell before it could be installed in the post office, and it has been in my possession in one way or another since that time. The mural is to be the focal point of the foyer in the new gallery. Of course, it needs to be restored and that work is to be done by a young lady named Morgan Christopher, who has completed nearly three years as a fine arts major at UNC in Chapel Hill but is currently serving time in the women’s prison in Raleigh.’”

  I felt my stomach flip. He definitely had the right Morgan Christopher.

  “‘She has a one-year-minimum prison sentence,’” Lisa continued, “‘and when that is up in June of 2018, Lisa will hire legal counsel to free Ms. Christopher to have her restore the mural. The work will be done in the gallery itself. At no time will the mural leave Edenton, so Lisa will make arrangements for Ms. Christopher to live in town while she works. I will leave a sum of fifty thousand dollars as compensation for the work, along with another ten thousand for any supplies and expert advice Ms. Christopher might need.’” Lisa looked up from the page. “He goes on to say how the mural should be displayed, the lighting, et cetera.” She began reading again. “He says, ‘To the best of my memory, there are no tears in the mural nor is there adhesive on the back that will need to be removed, since it never made it to the post office wall. I am confident, therefore, that despite Morgan Christopher’s lack of restoration experience, she will complete this project in time for the gallery opening on August 5, 2018. That opening date, with the fully restored mural in place, is firm, and my other bequests are contingent on the restored mural being in the gallery on that date.’”

  Upon reading that last sentence, Lisa shook her head with what looked like a mixture of exhaustion and annoyance. “Unbelievable,” she said, more to herself than to me.

  “Wow,” I said, overwhelmed. “What does he mean by the other bequests?”

  Lisa waved the question away. “They have nothing to do with you.” Her phone rang and she checked the screen, rolled her eyes, and hit a button to stop the ringing. “Follow me,” she said, setting the papers back on the island.

  I followed her out of the kitchen and through the lavender dining room and into a large, brightly lit sunroom. A full-size bed was at one end of the room, a recliner and dresser at the other.

  “My father had this sunroom converted into his bedroom so he wouldn’t have to use the stairs, and I haven’t gotten around to converting it back, so it’ll be your room while you’re here. His things have been cleared out and I got rid of the hospital bed and had this full-sized brought in.”

  The space was so sun-filled, so unlike what I’d experienced in the last year that I felt my throat tighten with gratitude at the thought of making this room my own.

  “The upstairs is mine,” Lisa said, “so off-limits to you. We’ll share the kitchen, but I don’t expect either of us to be here much except to sleep. You’re going to be practically living in the gallery, and I have more than enough work to keep me busy. We’ll take care of our own meals. The housekeeper comes on Wednesdays and she’s here most of the day.” She gave me a stern look. “Absolutely no drugs in this house,” she said. “I know you had a problem and I—”

  “Not with drugs.” I felt defensive. “I never—”

  “I keep wine in the kitchen,” Lisa interrupted me. “Is that going to be an issue for you?”

  “No. I don’t drink. Not anymore. And I never drank wine, anyway. Only beer.”

  Lisa gave a laugh that sank my spirits. “Hard to drink in prison, I suppose,” she said.

  “I’m done,” I insisted. I would never drink again. Not ever.

  Lisa looked at me as though unsure whether to believe me or not. “Fine,” she said finally. “If it becomes a problem for you, let me know and I’ll keep the wine in my room. I can move a minifridge in—”

  “It won’t be a problem.” I felt my cheeks burning. I wished she’d stop talking about it.

  “No smoking in the house.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “All right, then.” Lisa gestured toward the hall. “The bathroom’s right down the hall by the kitchen. Freshen up and let’s go see your mural.”

  Chapter 4

  ANNA

  December 5, 1939

  Anna wondered if it was rude to write in her journal while eating breakfast in the big hotel restaurant but decided not to worry about it. The hotel guests were not the people she needed to impress. So, in between bites of soft-boiled eggs and sausage—which came in a flat patty instead of the links she was accustomed to—she jotted down her thoughts. Grits were also on the menu. She’d heard of them but had no idea what they were, and after seeing them on another diner’s plate, she decided to pass. The accents flowed around her like syrup, easy and affable and unfamiliar. She supposed she would sound just as strange to her fellow diners.

  Most of the people in the restaurant were men, and she felt their eyes on her. Was it the journal? Her hair? Maybe she should have gotten a more suitable hairdo before heading here to Edenton, but she’d been wearing her nearly black hair in a bob with bangs for so long that she wouldn’t recognize herself without it. Perhaps she wouldn’t fit in with this style here, but she was her mother’s daughter: when had she ever cared about fitting in?

  She had given in to the realization that she’d best wear a dress on this trip. After spending the last three years in pants while attending art school, she’d nearly forgotten what stockings and garter belts felt like, so getting dressed in her hotel room this morning had been an ordeal. But she needed to make a good impression in Edenton, so she’d left her pants at home. Her mother probably would have told her, Oh for heaven’s sake, Anna, wear the pants! Just be yourself! But her mother was no longer around to advise her one way or another, and Anna decided on playing it safe.

  Looking up from her journal, she saw a man staring at her from a nearby table, making her feel both attractive and vulnerable. When she accidentally caught his eye, he nodded at her, not unkindly, but his scrutiny made her nervous and she shut and locked her journal and focused on her food for the rest of her m
eal.

  * * *

  She decided to walk rather than drive through Edenton as she explored the town. The sky was a brilliant blue that belied the cold air and the slivers of ice still on the road from some recent storm. She left the hotel bundled up in the long beige woolen coat that had been her mother’s, along with her favorite red velvet halo hat and gloves. She had a target in mind—the post office where her mural would hang—but she thought she should see a bit more of Edenton before heading there.

  Next door to the hotel stood a redbrick courthouse that she thought might look stunning in a mural. She was drawn to red, always. She snapped a couple of pictures of it before crossing a long expanse of grassy parkland, walking toward the waterfront. Near the water’s edge stood three Revolutionary War cannons, all pointing out to sea. The nearby houses were enormous and looked well cared for, despite the financial difficulties most people had faced during the last decade. She took a few more pictures, then turned in the direction of Broad Street and was disappointed by the unsightly waterfront. Winter-barren fish shacks, along with an ice plant, a blacksmith shop, and sheds filled with lumber nearly blocked the view of the rough gray water. The buzz of saws filled the air, and she suddenly felt the weight of the sadness that had dogged her since her mother’s death. She needed to get away from the depressing waterfront. Quickly, she turned around and headed back toward downtown. There was nothing on the waterfront she could use in a painting. Maybe the Tea Party ladies would have to carry the entire weight of her mural. Which was the real Edenton? she wondered. The gritty-looking harbor or the elegant houses? How could she capture the true feeling of a place so unfamiliar to her?

  She drew the collar of her coat closer to her throat as she walked the few blocks to the post office, passing dozens of businesses along Broad Street: department stores, barbershops, drugstores, a hardware store, a grocery store, a filling station, a bank. The street bustled with people. The town was not as quiet as she’d first thought, and every single person she passed—every single one of them, man, woman, and child—nodded a greeting to her as she walked by, which made her forget about the unappealing waterfront and lifted her mood. That would not happen if a stranger walked down Front Street in Plainfield, she thought.