Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,10

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 wasn’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