Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,24

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