Big Lies in a Small Town Read online

  I turned to Lisa. “Did you have any idea it was this bad, or that it had…” I pointed to the motorcycle. “Was that what your father meant when he told you the artist had gone crazy? Maybe he’d been referring to the motorcycle?”

  Lisa slowly shook her head, her gaze riveted on the mural. “My father certainly didn’t prepare me for this,” she said. “I swear, that old man … if he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him.”

  “You sure you want this hanging in here?” Adam asked Lisa. “Right here in the front room where everybody starts out?”

  Lisa let out a long breath. “Oh, shit, I’m not sure of anything,” she said, “but my father was as clearheaded as an old man could be and his instructions couldn’t have been more explicit. So it will hang in here. Once Morgan whips it into shape, that is.”

  I steadfastly avoided her eyes.

  “I think it’s sick,” Wyatt said, and I knew he was using the word as a compliment. “Without the bike, it’d just be another old painting. This way, it’ll be a jump-start for conversation.”

  “It’s definitely fascinating,” said Oliver. “It’ll be an amazing piece of art once it’s cleaned up. It’ll tell some of Edenton’s history, which is just what you want from one of these old post office murals. These little houses, for example.” He pointed to the lower right corner. “They’re the Cotton Mill Village, aren’t they?” He looked at Lisa who slowly nodded.

  “I guess,” Lisa said, as though she hadn’t yet made that connection. I wondered what the Cotton Mill Village was.

  Oliver leaned as far forward as he could without stepping on the canvas. He brushed his dark hair off his forehead and squinted, as if he could summon up X-ray vision to see beneath the grime. “Look at the detail in the women’s faces,” he said, pointing to a less soiled area around one of the women’s eyes. “Anna Dale was an excellent artist.”

  “If you say so,” Lisa said.

  “No wonder they never hung this thing in the post office,” Adam said.

  “That motorcycle makes absolutely no sense.” Lisa shook her head.

  “I’m guessing it made perfect sense to the artist,” Oliver said.

  Adam looked at me. “Maybe you could just paint out the Indian,” he suggested.

  “Are you kidding?” Oliver’s eyebrows rose high above his glasses. He gestured toward the canvas. “This is obviously what the artist wanted to create. It should be restored exactly as she intended.” He looked at me. “Right?” he asked.

  I nodded as though I did this sort of work every day, but I couldn’t quite meet Oliver’s eyes. I could already tell that the curator was perceptive. I was afraid my face would give away the fact that I didn’t have a clue how to fix what ailed this mural.

  “There’s a story here,” Oliver continued. “I only wish we could know what it is.” He bent over to lift one of the edges of the canvas. “Look at how ragged the edges of the canvas are,” he said. “It looks like someone just hacked it from the stretcher. Why would anyone do that?”

  It was only one of a hundred unanswerable questions about the mural, I thought. I tried to look beyond the damaged images to the work expected of me. The canvas reeked of mold or mildew, the scent strong enough to fill the whole room. It stung my nostrils and made my lungs burn. Filth coated the painting except for the areas where friction had simply worn the paint from the surface. There were dozens of scraped sections where there was no paint left at all. I felt Lisa turn her gaze on me.

  “You’ll have to finish this by August fifth,” she said, quietly, so that only I could hear her. There was unmistakable worry in her voice. “Can you do it?”

  Deadline or not, I didn’t know how to begin. If I had a year to learn about art restoration, a year to study and practice, then maybe I stood a chance. But I couldn’t let Lisa doubt me. I couldn’t let her see my weakness. I wouldn’t give her any reason to turn this job over to someone else and send me back to hell. I’d have to figure out how to restore this weird piece of art, and I’d have to do it quickly.

  “Yes,” I said, looking directly into her eyes. “Absolutely.”

  Chapter 8

  ANNA

  December 9, 1939

  Anna’s very full Saturday began with moving into Myrtle Simms’s large and charming old home, and she felt as though she suddenly had a grandmother. She’d never known her own grandparents, so spending time with an older, overly attentive woman was unfamiliar to her, and rather a comfort.

  The Simms house stood in a row of similar good-sized homes, some of which appeared to have fallen on hard times. Myrtle Simms seemed to have managed to keep the outside of her home and yard up, even if there were some signs of wear and tear inside. A bit of peeling paint here and torn wallpaper there. But all in all it was a charming home, and Anna was grateful to the men of the town for arranging her stay there.

  Myrtle Simms was a compact little lady, quite short, and she greeted Anna at her front door in a yellow flowered housedress.

  “Call me Miss Myrtle, dear,” she said, leading Anna into a neat and clean living room with comfortable furniture and carefully displayed knickknacks on every level surface. They sat down to a snack of tea and squares of pineapple upside-down cake baked by Miss Myrtle’s maid, Freda, who offered Anna a warm smile but didn’t speak. Once Freda left the room, Miss Myrtle confided that the maid was mute.

  “She hears fine,” Miss Myrtle said, “but she’s never uttered a word to me in the thirty years she’s worked for me. I love her, though. She was a second mother to my daughter, growing up. We couldn’t have held this house together without her.”

  They chatted for a while about the competition that had brought Anna to Edenton, and once they’d finished their cake, Miss Myrtle got to her feet.

  “Let me show you around,” she said. They headed toward the stairs, the older woman chatting the whole time. “My daughter Pauline recently got married and her husband Karl is a saint,” she said. “He helps me with dripping faucets and leaky pipes. Pauline’s a nurse in a doctor’s office a couple of days a week, and Karl’s a policeman. They live about a mile away. You’ll be moving into Pauline’s bedroom.” They’d reached the landing and turned right. “There are two other spare bedrooms up here, but neither one has a bed.” She chuckled. “One is my sewing room and the other already has a crib in it. No baby on the horizon yet, but I’m an optimist!”

  They walked into a spacious bedroom, and even though it appeared that Miss Myrtle’s daughter had cleared any personal possessions from the room, the wallpaper with its big magnolia flowers and the white feminine furniture made Anna feel as if she were trespassing.

  “Won’t Pauline mind having a stranger staying in her room?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” Miss Myrtle said. “I spoke to her about it yesterday evening and she was right pleased to know I’d have someone else here with me for when Freda goes home at night.” She smoothed a wrinkle from the pink chenille bedspread. “I had Pauline late in life. I was forty when she was born. I’d given up on ever having a child, and then suddenly, there she was! So now I’m sixty-two years old—an old lady with rheumatism to boot—and she worries I’m going to fall or whatever and rot on the floor.” She chuckled again. “When I told her about you, she came right over and packed up the last of her things to clear the room for you.”

  “Well, please thank her for me,” Anna said

  “Oh, you’ll have a chance to thank her yourself,” she said. “She stops over all the time. Still a mama’s girl, that one.”

  Anna forced a smile. People had called her a “mama’s girl,” too. She guessed she’d never hear those words in reference to herself again.

  Miss Myrtle gave her some pink sachets she’d made herself to put in the dresser drawers for when Anna’s clothes arrived. Aunt Alice had responded with worry when Anna called to ask her to send her some of her clothes and art supplies.

  “I don’t like the idea of you being so far from home for so long,” she’d said. “
You’re too young and you’ve just been through such a terrible loss.” Her words made Anna wince. Aunt Alice had never come right out and said she blamed Anna for her mother’s death, but how could she not? Anna certainly blamed herself.

  “I’ll be fine,” Anna had promised her aunt, her voice filled with more certainty than she’d felt at that moment. The unknown stretched ahead of her, but she had a job and a place to stay. What more could she need? She told Aunt Alice which dresses to pack, which pants, which blouses, which shoes and stockings, which underthings, which jewelry, and finally, which art supplies, including her easel. She knew she was creating a good deal of work for her aunt, packing all that up, but Aunt Alice didn’t utter a single complaint.

  “As long as you’re safe, Anna,” she said. “That’s all that matters. Do you have enough money?” As if her aunt had money to spare.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said. At least she was fine for the time being. She didn’t know what she would do if her sketch wasn’t accepted—how humiliating that would be—but she’d worry about that when and if it happened.

  “Now tell me all about you,” Miss Myrtle said once they were back in her living room, sipping tea again and eating more slivers of the pineapple upside-down cake. Anna watched Miss Myrtle put teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar in her tea until she thought the teaspoon would stand upright on its own in the cup.

  She told Miss Myrtle about losing her father to pneumonia even before she’d had a chance to know him, and that she’d recently lost her mother after a brief illness. The “brief illness” was a lie, but she wasn’t ready to go into detail about her mother with anyone.

  “Why, you’re all alone in the world!” Miss Myrtle exclaimed, her graying eyebrows pinched together above her kind eyes. “No gentleman in your life yet? You’re so lovely.”

  Anna shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I do have an aunt. And a couple of cousins. But I’m twenty-two, and it’s time for me to make my own way.”

  “You must be very strong,” Miss Myrtle said.

  “Thank you,” Anna said. She didn’t feel very strong, but she was trying. She responded to more of Miss Myrtle’s questions, letting the story of her life trickle from her. She talked about her mother’s work as a seamstress—making the occupation sound grander and more lucrative than it had been. She described her happy childhood in Plainfield and how much she’d adored going to art school. She talked about how amazing it had been to grow up a short bus ride from New York City, and how she and her friends would spend Saturday afternoons in museums. She talked for so long that she began to feel embarrassed. Did she simply need to recite her life story out loud or was Miss Myrtle one of those people who magically drew the words from you? The term “Southern hospitality” began to make sense. Anna felt happy and content sitting there with her new landlady. Perhaps things were beginning to go her way.

  They decided on rent of five dollars a month, and that would include most of her meals. They’d share the upstairs bathroom, and for ten cents, Anna could use Miss Myrtle’s wringer-washer once a week.

  “Now I do have some rules,” Miss Myrtle said.

  “Of course.” Anna smiled.

  “You may have lady friends over to visit in your room or the parlor, but no gentlemen in the house without my permission,” she said.

  “I’m not here to socialize,” Anna said, “so you don’t need to worry about that.”

  “No drinking,” Miss Myrtle said. “Are you a smoker?”

  Anna nodded. “Occasionally.”

  The older woman sighed. “So is Pauline. I find it very nasty, but you may smoke in her—in your—room if you like. Just not downstairs and certainly not in the kitchen. Freda will have your head!”

  “That’s fine.”

  She told Anna about the idiosyncrasies of the plumbing and the light switches, then asked her about the mural.

  “I haven’t decided what to paint yet,” Anna said. “It has to be something that truly represents Edenton, so I’m looking into—”

  “The Tea Party, of course,” Miss Myrtle said.

  Anna laughed. “Well, that’s what I thought, but the men I had lunch with didn’t like the idea at all.”

  “That’s because they’re men, and women were behind the Tea Party,” Miss Myrtle said. “I really think you must have it in any representation of Edenton. It’s what we’re known for.” She stood up and crossed the room to a tall narrow bookcase. Pulling down a slim volume, she sat next to Anna on the settee. She paged through the book until she found a political cartoon from England that mocked the “tea party” protest, precisely because it was a movement led by women. The women looked hideous and foolish in the sketch. “And men are still mocking it,” Miss Myrtle said. “We haven’t come very far in some ways, I’m afraid. But it was important. It started a whole movement throughout the colonies.”

  Miss Myrtle’s passion for the subject made Anna like her even more, but she did wish she hadn’t shown her the cartoon. Now it was stuck in her head and she wasn’t sure how to illustrate the Tea Party with the image of those hideous-looking women in her mind.

  Miss Myrtle had a large library full of books and Anna learned that she was a college graduate. Her accent wasn’t at all off-putting, although Anna wondered how her own accent sounded to her new landlady. “You don’t have to tell people where you’re from now, do you?” Miss Myrtle had teased after Anna’s first few sentences. “All you have to do is open your mouth.” But Anna liked the soft charm of Miss Myrtle’s accent. Her grammar was quite perfect, and she told her how taken aback she had been while meeting with the men at lunch the day before.

  “A couple of them have such poor grammar,” she said. “Even the editor of the paper.”

  Miss Myrtle chortled at that. “Oh, honey,” she said. “They know proper English. They just don’t want to sound like they’re above their raisin’.”

  “Above their raisin?” Anna frowned.

  “Their raisin’,” she said, and she spelled it out for her. “They don’t want to sound hoity-toity. They want to fit in with their people. You should read one of Billy Calhoun’s columns in the Herald. He’s sharp as a tack, that one, and probably knows more big words than you and me put together.”

  She handed Anna a copy of the Chowan Herald and pointed to an article by Billy Calhoun about a tragic house fire that had taken place the week before. Anna read every word of the beautifully written piece and saw that Miss Myrtle was right. It was hard to believe the article was written by the same man she’d met at lunch. She was going to have to put her preconceived notions of the world aside while she was living in Edenton. The South was nothing like New Jersey, where what you saw was what you got, whether you wanted it or not.

  That night, she went to bed in a strange room under the soft pink chenille bedspread, surrounded by magnolia wallpaper that almost seemed to glow in the dark. She felt thousands of miles from home, and the feeling wasn’t bad at all. Home had felt haunted to her lately. She needed this newness. The comfort of this bed, this lovely old house, this small, sweet town. And for the first night since her mother’s death, she fell asleep quickly, undisturbed by dreams.

  Chapter 9

  MORGAN

  June 14, 2018

  I barely slept during my first night in Lisa’s house. Nothing echoed here and I had grown so used to echoing. No footsteps outside my cell. No clanking doors. No flushing of toilets. Although the sunroom windows were closed to keep in the air-conditioning, I could still hear the hum of cicadas in the backyard. It felt like ten years since I’d heard cicadas, the sound so beautiful to me that I felt tears roll from my eyes into my hair.

  I woke up in the middle of the night after one of my miserable dreams about the accident, and it took me a few minutes to get my bearings. Those dreams were always the same: Emily Maxwell’s terrified face was caught in the headlights of my car just before the horrid crunching sound of the crash. I had to turn on the night table lamp to remind myself that I wa
s safe. My weird, silent cellmate wasn’t a few feet away from me. There were no bars keeping me in the room. I was free. Sort of.

  When I next opened my eyes, lemon-yellow sunlight filled the room. I stared at the ceiling, thinking of old Jesse Jameson Williams opening his eyes to the same ceiling, morning after morning after morning. Had he lain right here in this sunny room, staring at the ceiling, when he thought to himself, How can I help that art student Morgan Christopher? The one who so thoroughly screwed up her life? I know! I’ll ask her to do the impossible, that’s how!

  Oh my God. This was so ridiculous. The image of that soiled and strange mural came back to me. Filthy, stinky, bizarre, scratched up and battered and nearly bare of paint in some spots. I needed to quickly get a computer to try to figure out what to do with that thing. Setting me loose on it was so wrong. I didn’t understand why Lisa was so gung-ho on following her father’s deranged instructions, but whatever. It got me out of prison and if I could somehow do what needed to be done to the mural, it would keep me out.

  Lisa was already gone when I walked into the kitchen half an hour later. She’d left a key to the front door and a card telling me how to disarm the security system, as well as a note to help myself to “whatever” and giving me directions to the Verizon store, a mile and a half away, as well as to the parole office, where I had a one forty-five appointment. She’d also left a check for two thousand dollars. I called the bank to tell them you’d be cashing it, she wrote. When you get your phone, figure out what laptop you want, call me, and I’ll order it for you using my credit card. She also suggested I take an Uber to the Verizon store, but I wanted the freedom of the walk.

  I locked the front door and began walking down the sidewalk from the house, stopping halfway to the street when my gaze was drawn to the concrete beneath my feet. One of the blocks of concrete contained three sets of handprints, clearly those of a man, a woman, and a child. Beneath each, a name had been carved: Jesse, Bernice, and Lisa. Sweet and whimsical. Lisa could have been no older than ten when the handprints were made. I tried to imagine my own parents taking the time or interest to create such a lasting memento of our family. Impossible.