“I just want you to know…” He hesitated, turning toward me. “What you said tonight about never being loved? I just want you to know that you’re wrong.”
It took me a moment to understand. “You?” I whispered.
He nodded. “Me.” He gave me a half smile. “And not as a big brother, either. You’re a good person, Morgan Christopher.” He reached out to brush my hair away from my throat, and the touch of his fingers … or maybe it was his words, or maybe just the solid, comforting presence of him … I couldn’t have said … but something made my eyes sting and my throat tighten. For a moment, I was too stunned to speak.
Then I seemed to pull myself together. I leaned across the console to kiss him and felt the warmth of his hand against my cheek. The intensity of his touch as his fingers wrapped around the side of my throat. I heard him groan, ever so slightly, just enough to let me know the kiss was having the same effect on him that it was having on me.
He drew away, but didn’t let go of me. “Damn console,” he said with a smile.
“Damn console,” I agreed. I wanted my body next to his.
“I’ve wanted to do that ever since the first day you walked into the gallery,” he said.
“You just wanted to kiss that Mary Travers singer, and I happened to look like her,” I teased.
He shook his head. “Nope. It was you I wanted. You, with this sexy tattoo”—he ran a finger over my shoulder—“and your cute knees poking out of the holes in your jeans, and your silky hair … and … I could go on and on about your … sexiness, but it’s really the person you are that won me over, Morgan,” he said. “The way you listen to me go on and on about Nathan. The way you care. Your passion about the mural. Your … what’s the matter?”
I’d started to cry. He leaned across the console to wrap me in his arms. “What is it?” he asked, his breath warm against my temple.
It took me a moment before I could speak. “I just … It’s been a long time since anyone said anything nice about me,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I deserved it.”
“I don’t buy that.” He tightened his arms around me. “You hit a rough patch. Maybe some of it was of your own creation, but we all screw up. I had a son at seventeen, remember?”
I smiled, my chin resting against his shoulder.
“It’s all behind you.” Drawing away from me, he looked into my eyes. “Now you move forward.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
“I know.”
“How did you know?”
“I’ve been picking up the vibes,” he said. “I didn’t want to act on them, though. Didn’t want ‘us’ to get in the way of our work.”
“God, you are so mature!” I laughed, giddy with a joy I couldn’t remember ever feeling before. I felt safe with him.
He let go of me then. “Get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow’s going to be crazy.”
I instantly sobered. “Do you think Adam and Wyatt will get the mural up in time?”
He nodded. Tugged at a lock of my hair. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, leaning in for another kiss. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Chapter 65
August 5, 2018
The gallery opening was scheduled for noon, and I intentionally took my time getting ready, aiming to be there no earlier than eleven. If Adam and Wyatt hadn’t shown up at six A.M. as promised, and the mural was still resting on the foyer floor, I didn’t want to know. I sped up as I walked toward the gallery, though, checking my phone with every other step. If there was a problem, surely I would have heard. So far, not a single text this morning.
Even though I’d dropped exhausted into bed at three thirty that morning, it had taken me a while to fall asleep. That last-minute surprise from Oliver? Wow. It felt real, everything he’d said. It felt genuine and it felt right. And that kiss! I smiled to myself, remembering, and a woman walking toward me on the sidewalk smiled back.
“’Morning,” I said as I passed her, and then I laughed. And despite the fact that I was wearing a dress and heels for the first time in well over a year, I ran the last block to the gallery.
Although Lisa’s sedan and Oliver’s van were parked in the small lot, and the catering company’s van was parked at the curb, I found myself alone when I walked into the foyer. Winded from the run, I stood in the middle of the room and saw that the information counter, laden with brochures, had been moved into place, and above it, stapled imperceptibly to the stretcher and high on the wall, hung the mural.
Damn, I thought. That is one beautiful, crazy painting!
The lump in my throat surprised me. I loved the painting in front of me. I loved all I’d done to return it to the intriguing composition Anna Dale had intended.
“It’s beautiful!” I yelled into the echoey air of the gallery, and soon Lisa and Oliver joined me in the foyer, along with a young guy from the catering company. To my surprise, Lisa gave me a hug—and not a baby, half-assed hug, either. She held me a long time, wrapping me in the scent of jasmine.
“Thank you,” she said, drawing away, yet still holding me by the shoulders and looking intently into my eyes. “You saved my house. I know I’ve been a bitch to deal with.” Her smile was rueful. “But I’m very, very grateful to you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, although I thought Lisa had it backward. Lisa had saved me, whether she’d meant to or not, and in more ways than one.
I saw Oliver leaning against the wall by the wall text, arms folded across his chest, a smile on his face, looking sexy as hell in a black shirt open at the collar, and I wondered how I could have ever thought of him as anything but.
“Dynamite job, Morgan,” he said.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I said, remembering his help the night before, and he winked.
Lisa looked at the catering guy. “Are we squared away now?” she asked. I heard sounds coming from the small kitchen and guessed the servers were setting up for the opening.
“Good to go,” the man said. He looked at me. “You paint that?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the mural.
“I restored it,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means she brought it back to life,” Oliver said.
The man looked at the mural again, then gave me a confused-looking smile. “Cool,” he said. He headed for the foyer door, speaking to Lisa over his shoulder as he left. “I’ll be back to pick up the servers at five,” he said.
“Fine.” Lisa was already looking past him to the gallery’s first visitor: Andrea Fuller.
Andrea stopped in her tracks in the middle of the foyer. “Well,” she said, “that certainly looks different than the last time I saw it.” She looked at me, and I was afraid she might ask if I’d done the work entirely by myself. Did I have to admit to Oliver’s contribution to point one percent of the mural? But Andrea just smiled.
“Nice job, Morgan,” she said. She walked toward the side wall where Anna’s original sketch was displayed along with the “before” photograph of the mural and Oliver’s wall text about Anna Dale. She glanced from the photograph to the mural. “Unbelievable job, actually,” she said. Then she turned to Lisa. “You all set for the grand opening?”
“We are.” Lisa smiled broadly, and I knew she was letting out her breath in relief at Andrea’s response to the mural. Lisa was home free. “Let me show you around,” she said.
The two women started down the curved hallway and Oliver looked at me. “How’re you doing this morning?” he asked.
I looked again at the mural. It filled the entire foyer with color. “I think,” I said, returning my gaze to Oliver, “that I want to be an art restorer.”
He smiled. “And I think that’s an excellent idea,” he said. “Lots of schooling ahead of you, though.”
“That’s better than lots of jail time.”
He laughed and held an arm toward me. “Come here,” he said.
I walked over to
him and he wrapped me in a hug. “You okay after last night?” He spoke quietly into my ear.
I knew what he meant. His loving words in the van. The kiss.
“I don’t know.” I pulled away with a smile. “I was really enjoying the whole ‘big brother’ thing.”
“This’ll be even better,” he said, a serious expression on his face now. “I promise.”
The front door opened and two women walked into the foyer, dressed in their Sunday clothes. “We’re your Art Guild volunteers, ready to man the information desk,” one of them said.
“Perfect,” said Oliver, letting go of me. “Let me show you around.”
It was an extraordinary day. People came from as far away as Asheville and Washington, D.C., and the reporter from the Charlotte Observer stayed for two hours. She interviewed me about the mural, and toward the end of our talk, she pointed to my alcohol monitor and said, “Interesting ankle jewelry.”
I told her the truth, all of it, while she scribbled her notes, and I had the feeling the whole tone of the article she would write changed in that moment.
The only negative of the day was that by five o’clock, my feet were killing me and my ankle let me know that my sprain was not completely healed. Shortly after five, once the last guests had left and the servers were cleaning up, I found Lisa sitting on the steps of the gallery’s small back porch, teary with happiness, or perhaps with relief. I sat down next to her and put a tentative arm around her shoulders. We sat in silence in the hot, sticky August air as Lisa blotted her eyes with her fingertips. Finally, she spoke.
“You don’t need to move out any time soon,” she said. “I think you have something cooking with Oliver, and I’m guessing you don’t have any place to go. Am I right?”
“Yes and yes,” I said, dropping my arm from her shoulders. “And I’d really like to stay for a while. Thanks.”
“You’ll have to find a job,” she said, sounding more like herself. “No freeloading.”
I smiled. “I’ll start looking right away,” I promised, though I had no idea what sort of job I could find in this little town. I’d do anything to be able to stay while I figured out what I’d do about school, though. “I think I want to go back to college,” I said.
“Good,” Lisa said with a decisive nod. “Exactly what I was hoping to hear. I owe you the rest of that fifty thousand, plus there’s something I didn’t tell you.”
“What?”
“My father specified that if you’d return to school, his estate would pay for your education, regardless of what you decide to study.”
I was speechless, the thrill of her words sinking in. “Oh my God,” I said finally. “I don’t know what to say. Are you sure he was ‘of sound mind’?”
Lisa gave me a genuine smile. “You’re the last beneficiary of my crazy father’s generosity. Use it well.” She got to her feet, looking down at the phone in her hand. “And now I need to run to my office,” she said. “I’d like you to stay and help Oliver straighten up.”
“Sure.” I winced as I got to my own feet. “Go do what you need to do,” I said. “Oliver and I will take care of the gallery.”
At five thirty I was helping the servers carry the last of the trays out to their van when a limousine pulled into the parking lot, the late summer sun glinting off its shiny black finish. I watched the driver get out of the car and reach for the handle of one of the rear doors, but the door flung open before he’d even touched it, and a woman nearly sprang from the car. She was about sixty, maybe older, and her gray hair was chopped short. Ignoring the driver, she walked around the front of the limo and opened the other rear door. My heart began to pound. Somehow, I knew who was in that backseat. I knew it, and I handed the tray I was carrying to one of the servers and walked toward the limousine. By then, the gray-haired woman was helping a much older woman from the limo. The old woman, who was about my height but whose ramrod-straight posture made her appear taller, didn’t look much like the ancient newspaper photographs of Anna Dale, yet I knew without a doubt that was who she was. Her white, chin-length hair was thin, the texture of cotton candy, and she wore small, sparkly pink-and-purple glasses. Her face was full of sharp angles—her chin, her slender nose, her high cheekbones. She wore pink lipstick that looked freshly applied.
“We’re very late, I know!” she called to me in a surprisingly strong voice as I approached her. “We had quite the flight, and the drive from the airport took forever. But”—she motioned toward the gallery—“I didn’t want to miss this!”
Chapter 66
I reached the old woman where she stood next to the limousine. Her right hand rested on the top of a turquoise wooden cane, so she reached for me with her left hand, which I took in mine. I squeezed her hand gently, surprised to realize that I was fighting back tears.
“Judith Shipley?” I asked, just to be certain my emotions weren’t clouding my thinking.
“That’s right,” she said. “And this is my overprotective assistant, Gloria Hite.”
Gloria Hite and I nodded at each other. I seemed unable to find my voice.
“I found the invitation to Jesse’s gallery opening in a stack of papers on my desk early this morning,” Judith said, cutting a glance at her assistant. “Gloria knows I don’t like traveling anymore, so she took the liberty of making the decision for me not to attend. Had I known about it before this morning, we would have been here on time.” She gave Gloria a look of mock annoyance.
Gloria ignored the dig. “Let’s get you out of this heat,” she said.
“We are too late, aren’t we?” Judith said as we moved at a snail’s pace toward the gallery entrance.
I managed to find my voice again. “The … festivities ended at five, but you are very, very welcome.” My whole body tingled with the excitement of walking next to her. “You’re one of our featured artists,” I said. “I’m so happy you’re here.”
“That’s very kind of you,” she said. I could hear the Northeast in her voice. As I’d read the journal, despite knowing she was from New Jersey, I’d imagined her sounding like me. A born-and-bred Southerner. But now, her—or at least Judith’s—roots were clear.
We’d reached the gallery entrance. Through the glass doors, I could see Oliver behind the information counter, the mural a wall of color and craziness behind him. Taking a deep breath, I pulled open the door and held it wide for the two women.
Oliver looked up as we walked inside, but before he had a chance to say anything, Judith dropped her cane to the floor with a clatter.
“Oh!” She raised both hands to her face. “Where…? How did this…?” She turned to Gloria. “I need to sit,” she said.
Before Gloria could budge from Judith’s side, Oliver raced across the foyer, grabbed a chair from the side wall, and slipped it behind the old woman just in time. Judith nearly fell into it. She pressed her hand to her mouth.
“Do you have some water?” Gloria asked me, and again, Oliver was quicker than I was, producing two small bottles of water from behind the information counter. I seemed to be too numb to move. Oliver unscrewed the top of one of the bottles and handed it to Judith. The second, to Gloria.
“Judith Shipley?” he asked the older woman, as I had only moments earlier.
Judith was drinking from the bottle, her hand shaking wildly, her gaze riveted on the mural.
“Yes,” I answered for her. Yes, she was Judith Shipley, but if I’d had any doubt that she was also Anna Dale, it had been erased the moment she reacted to the mural. I walked to the side of the foyer to grab another of the chairs and carry it over to where we had gathered, and Gloria sat down on it without a word. She looked at Judith with genuine concern in her dark eyes.
“I knew this would be too much for you,” she scolded. “You know you don’t travel well any—”
Judith raised a hand to stop her. “It’s not the travel,” she said. “It’s this mural. I … It’s been so long since I’ve seen it.”
I looked at
Oliver to discover he already had his eyes on me. I was sure he had the same questions running through his head that I did. How should we approach this? At this point, was there any danger to Judith in revealing that we knew the truth? And how much did Gloria know?
Oliver ducked the questions by getting two more chairs for us, and we sat in a semicircle in the middle of the foyer, all of us gazing at the mural.
“I’m Oliver Jones, the curator for the gallery.” Oliver finally introduced himself. He nodded in my direction. “And Morgan here is the person who restored the mural.”
Judith looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “Jesse had it?” she asked.
“Yes.” I looked directly at her. “An artist named Anna Dale painted it.” Almost without thinking, I reached over. Rested my hand on top of hers. Took a deep breath. “Judith…” I glanced at Oliver and he nodded. “We believe that you are Anna.”
“What?” Gloria looked annoyed. “Who the hell is Anna?”
Judith didn’t look at me, but to my surprise … and relief … a smile began to light her face. “I haven’t heard that name in a very long time,” she said.
“Are you Anna?” Oliver asked. The gentleness in his voice touched me.
Judith nodded. “I suppose there’s no harm in saying that now,” she said. “I doubt anyone’s going to lock up an old woman after eighty years.”
“What are you talking about?” Gloria asked.
“Oh, hush,” Judith said to her. “I’ll explain it all later.” She looked at Oliver, then me. “How did you know? Did Jesse say something?”
“I never met Jesse,” I said, “but in his will he asked that I be the one to restore the mural, and I—”
“Ah,” she interrupted. “You were one of his projects?”
I smiled. “Apparently, though I have no idea how he even knew I existed,” I said. “Anyway, Jesse kept the mural in his studio for many years, and—”
“Here? In Edenton?” Judith looked stunned, her eyes wide.
“Yes,” I said.
Big Lies in a Small Town Page 34