Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,105

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