Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,59

of color.

I found him in his office, hunched over a spreadsheet on his computer. He held up a hand to keep me quiet as he moved figures from an invoice to the spreadsheet and I stood patiently, waiting for him to finish his task before I disturbed him. From the speaker on his desk, a sweet-voiced woman sang a song about paving over parking lots. Watching him, I couldn’t help but smile. Intense blue eyes focused on his task. That faint, perpetually rosy look to his cheeks as though he’d been outside in the cold. I felt like bending over to give him an affectionate hug. I’d known him all of ten days, but I already had tender feelings toward him. He seemed like the sanest person in my life, which, I had to admit, wasn’t saying that much.

He finished at the computer, then swiveled his chair to look at me. “Whatcha got?” he asked.

“Something intriguing.” I nodded in the direction of the foyer.

He followed me back to the mural and I showed him the mirror with its little red-haired man. He climbed onto the ladder for a closer look.

“Wow,” he said, a sparkle in his eyes as he looked down at me. “So now we have a motorcycle. A bloody ax. And a dapper-looking fellow in a mirror. We’ve got a real puzzle here, don’t we?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Unless Jesse was right and she was simply out of her mind. But she looked and sounded so sane in that old newspaper article you have.”

“She did,” he agreed. He pulled out his phone and snapped a couple of close-up pictures of the mirror.

I had a sudden idea. “Would that newspaper be online?” I asked. “The one that article was from? Maybe there were more articles about her.”

“Tiny, small-town paper?” Oliver shook his head as he climbed down the ladder to the floor. “I doubt it. You could try the library, though. I bet they have old copies.”

“Maybe.” I looked toward the mural, nearly half clean now, and felt a smile cross my face. “I like this part of restoration,” I said. “The cleaning part.”

“The easy part, you mean.” He grinned at me.

I sighed, my smile gone. “Everything I read about how to inpaint and … all of it … makes me feel so ignorant. It’s overwhelming.”

“Step by step,” he said patiently, motioning to the mural as he headed back to the hallway. “Let me know what other bizarre stuff you find in the next square.”

Instead of walking to Lisa’s house when I left the gallery that evening, I headed to the Edenton library to see what I could find in the local paper from 1940.

The old editions of the Chowan Herald, all on microfilm, were located in the small, cramped, and quiet second story of the library. I was the only person up there, and it took me thirty minutes to figure out how to operate the microfilm machine. I was frustrated by the time I loaded the reel for 1940 and even more frustrated when I realized there was no indexing—no way to search for Anna’s name. I began running through the papers week by week, studying the crude images with the dodgy machine, finally finding a photograph in the February 15 edition. The large but grainy picture appeared to have been taken inside the warehouse—Mama Nelle’s “big barn,” I felt sure. Anna and her very cool haircut stood next to an empty canvas … or at least, it appeared empty until I enlarged the shot and saw the faint but clear pounce lines that covered the surface. I understood immediately what I was looking at. Anna Dale had created a cartoon of the mural and pounced the image onto the canvas. A thrill ran up my spine, knowing that the canvas I was looking at was the very canvas I was working on, and I had the out-of-body feeling that I was there, with her, in that warehouse. I squinted at the faint, grainy image. I could see no pounce marks for the motorcycle, although it was hard to make out much of anything on the canvas.

The photograph was interesting in other ways, too. Anna stood to one side, pointing to the canvas, a wide smile on her face. She wore wide-legged pants and a smudged white smock. I thought she was beautiful. I smoothed my hand over my own shoulder-length pale hair, wondering how it would look in that bob. Flat as a pancake, most likely. My