Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,47

finding Adam and Wyatt. I imagined having a couple of beers with them to wipe out the horror. Dangerous thinking. I was going to have to find a way to live, sober, with the memories of all that had happened. You are alive, I thought to myself. Healthy and whole. Emily never would be. I had to appreciate my second chance. That’s what I had to remember.

Chapter 18

ANNA

January 2, 1940

Anna had thought of Plainfield as a small town, but she’d had no idea what a real small town was like until now. She’d barely been in Edenton for a month and people already knew who she was, no matter where she went. She discovered that could be both good and bad.

When she walked into Michener’s Drug Store that early January morning, the man behind the counter said, “Why, you’re that mural gal, ain’t you?” Then when she stopped for a sandwich in the Albemarle Restaurant, the white-uniformed waitress asked, “Aren’t you that post office artist?” And when she visited the library after lunch to get something to read while waiting to hear from the Section, the librarian said, “You must be that artist from up north!” It seemed that just about everyone in town had read that little article about her in the Herald. And everyone treated her with kindness and an open sort of friendliness she was coming to love.

But all that came to an end late that afternoon as she was leaving the library.

She’d walked out the front door and was heading down the steps just as a woman began climbing them. The woman’s hair was blond beneath a blue scarf and she was flanked by sullen identical twin daughters. The girls were about eleven or twelve years old with curly strawberry-blond hair. Anna smiled at the threesome, but the woman suddenly grabbed her arm.

“You’re that artist from New Jersey, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Anna said, still smiling, though the woman wasn’t smiling back and her fingers dug into the woolen sleeve of Anna’s coat.

“I’m Mrs. Drapple,” the woman said. “My husband should be the one paintin’ that mural!”

“Oh!” Anna said, taken aback.

“You’re nothing but an amateur,” Mrs. Drapple went on. “Your drawin’ in that Life magazine looks like a ten-year-old did it. My girls could have did it!”

Anna twisted her arm from the woman’s grasp, stunned. She wasn’t sure what to say. She wasn’t going to apologize for winning the competition. Why should she?

One of the woman’s daughters spoke up before Anna could.

“Mama,” she said, trying to tug her mother toward the library door. “Let’s just go inside.” But the woman stood rooted to the steps.

“I wish everyone who entered could have won,” Anna said, lamely. “But I won the competition, fair and square. The entries were anonymous and—”

“Well, they shouldn’t have been anonymous!” The woman yelled so loudly that a man walking down the street turned to look at them. “The people runnin’ it should have taken experience into account, not to mention knowin’ somethin’ about Edenton! And they should have taken into account that a man would have a family to support. We could have used the money.”

The twin who hadn’t spoken studied Anna hard from beneath her furrowed brow, but the other one tugged again at her mother’s arm. “Mama,” she said, “it’s freezing out here!”

“I’m very sorry,” Anna said, annoyed at herself as the apology left her lips. She had nothing to apologize for. “It’s out of my control,” she added. She moved past the threesome and down the steps, clutching the railing, her knees shaking.

She walked briskly away from the library, looking over her shoulder every minute or so as if worried that Mrs. Drapple might be following her, ready to grab her arm again. Ready to sling more insults. Anna felt as though she’d stolen something from someone. She pictured Martin Drapple, whom she hoped never to meet, in a deep depression, penniless, struggling to figure out how to support his family. It wasn’t her fault, and yet she felt guilty. She was an interloper. An outsider. A female. Had she taken food from those little girls’ mouths?

Chapter 19

MORGAN

June 18, 2018

It was dusk when I reached Lisa’s house after my third full—very full—day of cleaning the mural. Sharp pains pierced my shoulder blades and I thought I could already see and feel a new firmness in my right bicep. I let myself in the front door with the key Lisa had given me, pulled out my earbuds, and headed through the living