Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,71

have to make do.”

Anna didn’t answer. She didn’t want to save him. She just wanted him to have the same chance as everyone else.

“What about the other boy?” Pauline asked. “The white boy?”

“Very nice young man,” Anna said. “He could be an architect, his sketches are so technically perfect. He wants to be an artist, but his drawings have no passion in them.”

“Like Jesse’s,” Pauline said.

Anna nodded. “Like Jesse’s.”

They found the shop without too much trouble and they were both astonished by the enormous roll of canvas. Fortunately Karl had thought to give them a good length of rope before they left his and Paula’s house, so with the help of the salesman in the shop, they were able to tie the roll securely to the roof of Anna’s Ford. She picked up the paints she’d ordered as well as some brushes and charcoal and other supplies. She felt that thrill of excitement she always got when she had new tools in her possession. On a whim, she also bought two stretched canvases as gifts for Peter and Jesse.

She drove well under the speed limit back to Edenton, and Pauline helped her carry the roll of canvas into the warehouse, where they set it down by one of the garage doors. A little breathless, Pauline stood with her hands on her hips and looked around at Anna’s vast working space, with its beamed ceiling, dusty skylights, and dark corners. “This is a … I don’t know … a bit of a strange place to work,” she said.

Anna laughed. “You should have seen it before it was cleaned out,” she said. “I hated it. But now it feels like home. Almost.”

“Oh my, look at this!” Pauline exclaimed, walking toward the cartoon paper where Anna had drawn her three Tea Party ladies plus Freda. “I recognize each one of them.” She turned to Anna. “You really are very good,” she said.

“Thank you.” Anna carried the sketch across the room to show her how the drawing would look in color.

“I wish I had some artistic talent,” Pauline said.

“Well, I don’t know the first thing about nursing, so we’re even,” Anna countered.

Pauline stayed a while longer, but Anna was glad when she left. Pauline was becoming a good friend, but Anna’s work felt like a greater calling at that moment than friendship. Was that a terrible thing? It was the truth, and once Pauline left, Anna happily organized her new paints and brushes and palette, feeling the thrill of excitement at the thought that she would soon be using all of them.

Chapter 29

MORGAN

July 7, 2018

The mural was entirely clean. Abraded, scratched, and worn, but clean.

And extraordinarily, nightmare-inducingly weird.

That stick in the black woman’s mouth? Once clean, it became a knife. But the weirdest discovery of all—the discovery that made me gasp out loud and had me running to Oliver’s office to drag him back to the foyer—was that one of the Tea Party ladies dangled a hammer from her hand. Like the ax, the hammer dripped blood, which stained the hem of the woman’s dress and pooled on the floor near the ladies’ feet. Anna Dale might have been crazy, I thought, but Mama Nelle appeared to have most of her marbles still intact.

Once I’d finished cleaning the lower right-hand corner of the mural where Anna had placed her rounded-and oddly distorted-looking-signature, I called everyone into the foyer for a viewing. I moved the ladder and my supplies table out of the way and all of us stood in the middle of the room. Lisa, Adam, and Wyatt on my left. Oliver and his visiting twelve-year-old son Nathan on my right. All I could see was the work that was still waiting for me to do, but everyone else seemed impressed.

“Awesome colors,” Adam said. He lightly punched my bare arm. “Nice work, Christopher.”

“Thank you.” I had done nice work. The colors popped. Not the way they would have with a coat of varnish, but still. Compared to the way the mural had looked when we’d first stretched it? A completely different animal.

“It looks pretty messed up to me,” Nathan said, and everyone laughed. I’d met Oliver’s cute son only a couple of hours earlier—he was spending a few days with his dad—but already I’d learned that this was a boy unafraid to speak his mind. I liked that about him.

“It has a way to go,” Oliver agreed with his son.

I looked at Nathan. “If you’d seen it before I started cleaning it,” I said,