Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,9

but art was all I’d ever cared about. Trey told me to tough it out. “He’s an asshole,” he said about my professor. “Your work is awesome.” Trey always had a way of building me up when I was down, but he wasn’t an artist, so what did he know? And then the accident happened and I’d landed in prison, and that pretty much made the “drop out/don’t drop out” decision for me.

“What did you mean about the artist going crazy?” I asked Lisa. “What does that mean, exactly? Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Things were different back then. Maybe she’d just been depressed and was never able to get treatment for it.” I thought I knew something about going crazy. Sometimes in the past year, I’d felt insanity creeping in. Paranoia in my case, but that had been based in reality. There’d been women in the prison out to get me.

Lisa kept her eyes on the road and shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know,” she said. “My father told me that about her one time and I didn’t think to ask him anything more. I’d never seen the mural, so I didn’t really care, but I think he was obsessed with it.” She looked in her rearview mirror and put on her blinker to change lanes. “Whatever was wrong with the artist, it was enough to prevent her from turning the mural over to the post office and getting paid, so it must have been pretty serious.”

“What’s the subject of the mural?” I asked, trying to focus on conversation to keep my mind off the road.

“I think just things related to the town,” Lisa said. “To Edenton. Most of the old murals were like that. We’ll see it soon enough, anyway.” She didn’t sound all that invested in the mural, and I guessed it was just a means to an end for her. Something she had to take care of to get the gallery up and running.

“So … you said there would be other artists’ work displayed in the gallery?” I asked.

Lisa nodded. “There’ll be a permanent collection of my father’s work, then a room for a few other well-known artists he had in his collection, many of them his good friends. That will change every few months. Then a rotating display of the work of the young artists he’s helped over the years and that work will be for sale.” Her voice had grown tight. “There’s just too much to be done before we can open the doors.”

“Is this your background, too?” I asked. “Art?” Lisa didn’t strike me as an artist. She looked more like the patron of an artist, if anything. Someone who could afford the awesomely tailored suit she was wearing and the diamond tennis bracelet that glittered at her wrist.

“I’m a Realtor,” she said. “I have no artistic talent … or interest … whatsoever, except with regard to the historical architecture of the houses I sell.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why did Jesse Williams—I mean, your father—put you in charge of the gallery, then?”

Lisa didn’t answer right away and I thought I might have stepped over a line with the question. But she finally spoke. “I’m his only child, so I’m it.” She let out a sigh. “I knew the gallery was in the works when he died, of course, but I had no idea he was going to dump it all in my lap.” She glanced at me. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I loved my father—I adored him—and I want to do this for him, but he gave me an impossible deadline and threw you into the mix…” She shook her head. “I still have my real estate business to run. I have clients to deal with. This is a busy time of year for me.”

“He must’ve thought you could pull it off,” I said.

Lisa sighed again. Then she reached for the radio, pressed a few buttons, and a podcast began to play. Something about mortgages, and I guessed we were done with our conversation, such as it was.

* * *

If anyone had asked me to guess what sort of house Jesse Jameson Williams had lived in, I would have pictured a Frank Lloyd Wright contemporary hugging a hillside. And I would have been wrong. Lisa pulled into the long driveway of a huge, two-story Victorian with double-tiered porches decorated with elaborate white railings. The whole front of the house looked like it was covered in white lace, and a garden, alive with color, stretched the