Big Lies in a Small Town (ARC)

by Diane Chamberlain

  Anna turned down Pauline’s invitation, too afraid of what she might say if she spent more than a few minutes with her friend. She didn’t want to hear any more of Pauline’s questions and suspicions. She was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Giving herself—and Jesse—away. Anna could no longer trust her mind or her tongue. Her brain felt soft, her thoughts jumbled.

  If Miss Myrtle wondered why Anna was so quiet at breakfasttime, and why she was now home for supper each evening instead of working late into the night, she didn’t say, but the landlady was clearly worried about her.

  “You should see a doctor,” she told her Thursday morning. “You’re usually so happy-go-lucky. Most likely, you just need some iron.”

  It took Anna a moment to smile in response, as though Miss Myrtle’s words had to fight their way into her brain. If only the cure for what ailed her could be so simple, she thought. But iron wouldn’t help her. There was nothing that would ease her guilt and fear.

  When Anna dragged herself to the warehouse Friday morning, she found Jesse already there. He stood in front of the mural and looked over at her, his eyes dark with worry.

  “Anna,” he said quietly. “What did you do?”

  She followed his gaze to the mural. There, jutting out from between the skirts of the Tea Party ladies, was the red fender and black tire of Martin’s motorcycle. Anna gasped, her hand to her mouth. Why was she surprised? She’d painted it. She knew she had. Yet her memory of painting it was hazy and dreamlike.

  “I’ll fix it,” Jesse said. “You rest.”

  “I’ll only put it back,” she told him.

  He frowned at her. “Why?” he asked. She heard panic in his voice. “You gotta forget what happened!”

  She didn’t know why. All she knew was that the motorcycle had to be there.

  But Jesse painted over it. Anna watched him add the ladies’ skirts back where they had been. He was a good artist, but he was only learning how to work in oil and Anna could see him struggle to imitate her style of painting. Anyone with even a slightly discerning eye would know she hadn’t painted those skirts. Yet she felt indifferent, watching him. She would come back later tonight, after he was gone. Even though the warehouse haunted her at night, she’d return. She needed to put that motorcycle back where it belonged.

  Chapter 51

  MORGAN

  July 20, 2018

  I thought about Mama Nelle as I sat in front of the library’s microfilm reader that evening, hunting for more articles about Anna. I wished I’d had the key to unlock Mama Nelle’s memory, and now it was too late. I felt saddened by her death. I hoped she’d died peacefully. Painlessly.

  I’d just about mastered the microfilm reader now, yet it took forever to hunt for articles that mentioned Anna, especially since they were few and far between. But an article suddenly jumped out at me. An odd one. I noticed it only because of the word “artist” in the headline.

  Local Portrait Artist Goes Missing

  Anna? I wondered, though it seemed odd they’d call her a portrait artist.

  I began to read.

  Well-known Edenton portrait artist Martin Drapple disappeared sometime Friday, according to his wife. Friends reported that Mr. Drapple had been despondent over losing the government-sponsored post office mural competition to New Jersey artist Anna Dale. Mrs. Drapple stated that her husband had helped Miss Dale work on the mural and that “it was humiliating for him to lose out to a girl artist.” She said that his new motorcycle is also missing. Anyone with information to the whereabouts of Mr. Drapple is asked to contact the Edenton police department.

  I sat back in the chair and frowned at the microfilm screen. Who the hell was Martin Drapple? He’d helped Anna? Was there some sort of love triangle going on with him, his wife, and Anna? Or with him, Anna, and Jesse?

  It took a minute for that one statement to register: ‘his new motorcycle is also missing. I thought of the motorcycle poking out from the Tea Party ladies’ skirts. A coincidence or something else?

  I paged through the following week’s paper, hunting for more news and found this:

  Post Office Artist Anna Dale Closes Warehouse to Visitors

  For a number of weeks now, artist Anna Dale has had an open-door policy in the former Blayton warehouse where she’s been busily painting the mural that will hang in the Edenton Post Office. Abruptly this week, she shut her doors to the public, stating she wanted the completed mural to be more of a surprise when people finally see it.

  Postmaster Clayton Arndt is unconcerned. “Artists are mercurial,” he said when asked for comment. “We’re giving Miss Anna the privacy she needs to concentrate on her work right now.” Mr. Arndt thinks the mural will be completed by the end of April.

  Others were not so certain that all is well with the artist. “I think she must be ill,” said Mrs. Oscar Grant who lives on North Granville Street. “I’d stop in most days to watch her paint and she’d say we were welcome to visit any time we wanted, and now suddenly we can’t. Doesn’t make sense.”

  I made copies of the articles, then took an Uber back to the gallery, hoping Oliver would still be there. He was. It seemed he lived there these days. I found him in the empty rear gallery, measuring one of the walls.

  “Oh, good,” he said when I walked into the room. “I can use a second pair of hands. Hold this?” He handed me the end of the tape measure and motioned for me to walk to the far end of the room. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you were done for the day?”

  “I found some articles I wanted to show you.” I walked the end of the tape measure back to him and watched him jot something down in his notebook.

  He slipped the tape measure into his jeans pocket and held out his hand. “Let’s see,” he said.

  I handed him the two sheets of paper, then stood next to him as he read. His scent was ever so slightly earthy, as though he’d worked hard all day, and we were close enough that our shoulders touched. He wore a black T-shirt and I wore a blue top—sleeveless, of course—and I liked the feeling of his skin against mine. I liked it more than I ever could have imagined, and I didn’t move away. Neither did he.

  “Hmm,” he said, when he finished reading, his gaze still on the articles in front of him. “What do you make of the motorcycle?”

  “I have no idea. It’s crazy, isn’t it? And then the speculations that she’s sick. Maybe she was dying of natural causes. I don’t…” My voice trailed off. I’d lost my train of thought as I breathed in Oliver’s scent. I wished he’d put his arm around me. I wanted to feel his fingers press against my shoulder. Were my feelings toward him completely one-sided? I was eight years his junior. I’d thought that was a lifetime when I first met him. Now I didn’t care. Please touch me before I go out of my mind.

  But he stepped away so he could look at me. “We’re never going to know the answers to all this,” he said, nodding toward the articles in his hand.

  I felt suddenly despondent. “I know,” I said. “But at least we can speculate, just for the fun of it.”

  He smiled at me, and maybe he even said something more to me, but the gallery lights all settled in the blue of his eyes and I seemed to momentarily lose my hearing.

  He was, suddenly, extraordinarily beautiful.

  Chapter 52

  ANNA

  April 2, 1940

  At breakfast that morning, Anna prepared her own plate so that there was not as much food on it as Freda would dish out. She’d taken to doing that lately, the only way to keep Miss Myrtle’s questions about her withered appetite at bay. This morning, though, Miss Myrtle must have noticed, for she wrote down the name of her doctor on a piece of paper and set it next to Anna’s coffee cup. Then she lifted her own cup to her lips and took a sip.

  “The police found Martin Drapple’s body on the banks of Queen Anne Creek,” she said, setting her cup down again. “Some children stumbled across it and they were acting funny and their mama finally got it out of them. She went down to the s
tation and…”

  Anna didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Her hand was frozen around her fork.

  “Pauline told me last night,” Miss Myrtle continued. She picked up her knife to crack the top of her soft-boiled egg. Anna turned her head away from the sight.

  What questions would an innocent person ask? she wondered, though her foggy brain would not cooperate. Miss Myrtle saved her the effort.

  “His head was bashed in, poor troubled soul,” she said. “I thought he was such a lovely man and gifted artist, but something was terribly wrong with him. Pauline said that Karl told her he beat his wife and the children sometimes. Can you imagine? I’m guessing she did it. The wife. But if he beat her, who could blame her? I hope she gets away with it.”

  Anna’s breathing came in quick little gasps and spots dotted the air in front of her eyes. Miss Myrtle seemed too lost in her blather to notice that she was falling apart on the other side of the table, and when Anna stood up so quickly that she nearly took the tablecloth with her, Miss Myrtle looked up in surprise.

  “What is it, Anna?” she asked.

  “I just remembered … something I n-need to do.” She stumbled over her words. “Excuse me.” She lifted her plate quickly, shakily, hoping Miss Myrtle didn’t see that she’d eaten nothing from it, and carried it to the sink. Then she rushed from the house, gulping in lungful after lungful of clean air. Weeping, she walked toward the water in the hope no one would see her tears, her sobs growing stronger with each step. She sat on the sea wall, the stench of fish overwhelming, until she had control over her tears, but they were replaced by the horrid image of Martin’s body when the police discovered it. What did he look like after a week and a half? Face eaten away by animals. Brains oozing onto the earth. She still could not believe what she’d done. Leaning over, she vomited into the water.

  Getting to her feet again, she began walking, aimlessly, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth. She should go to the police. She could call Karl. Explain what happened. But she would get Jesse in terrible trouble. She would no doubt cost Jesse his life.

  She found herself near the Mill Village, which was quiet. Eerily quiet. The only sign of life seemed to be the occasional housewife hanging laundry in her yard. And then Anna spotted it: the face of a skeleton in the front window of one of the small Mill Village houses. She stared at the bony skull. It stared back at her. She walked on and saw that the next house also had a skull in the window. And the next. And the next. They didn’t frighten her. She was curious, standing still to observe each one. She thought of the Mill Village homes in her painting, then raced back to Miss Myrtle’s, holding the image of the skulls in her memory. She got into her car and drove quickly to the warehouse, where she found Jesse mixing paint. He might have spoken to her; she wasn’t listening. She quickly grabbed her palette, mixed a little Cremnitz white with a touch of lampblack and a smidgen of Antwerp blue. She pulled a crate in front of the mural, sat down on it, and painted the small delicate skull in the window of the first Mill Village house.

  “Oh, no,” Jesse said from behind her. “Anna.”

  She sat back to admire her rendering of the skull. It was absolutely perfect.

  Chapter 53

  MORGAN

  July 23, 2018

  Mama Nelle’s funeral went on and on and I thought I’d made a big mistake, agreeing to be there when I should have been working on the mural. My ankle twinged as I listened to Saundra and a few of Mama Nelle’s other children and relatives tell the tales of the old woman’s life. There were funny stories and poignant stories, but I felt little connection to the woman her family described. My relationship to Mama Nelle had been different. We’d shared secrets about Anna. The only problem was, I didn’t have a clue what those secrets were.

  When the service was over and we were walking up the aisle of the church, Lisa said, “People will get together at the farm but you need to go back to work, so I’ll drop you at the gallery before I head out there.”

  “All right.” There was no point in me returning to the farm for food and conversation when the person I most wanted to talk with was gone.

  “You wait here,” Lisa said when we had nearly reached the front door of the church. “I’ll bring the car around so you don’t need to walk that far.” My ankle was much better and I was out of the boot, but walking a distance was still hard for me.

  Lisa disappeared into the crush of people filling the vestibule and I pressed myself against the wall to keep out of the way. I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Saundra at my side.

  “It was very sweet of you to come,” she said.

  “I wanted to,” I said. “I really liked your mom.”

  “She liked you, too,” Saundra said, then added with a smile, “Even more than I knew.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know what to make of this, but Mama has … had … this big old chest in her bedroom. She kept all sorts of things in there.” Saundra rolled her beautiful dark eyes. “Papers and receipts and clothes and moth-eaten quilts. Anyway, the strangest thing … when I went in her room the morning she died … I found her…” Saundra seemed to choke up a little and I lightly touched her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Well”—she pulled herself together—“that morning, I went into her room and the floor and dresser were littered with everything she’d had in the chest. She’d emptied it out, tossed things around the room like she’d gone a little mad. But there was one thing … it must have been at the very bottom of the chest and she was driven to find it … a diary of some sort. At least I think that’s what it is. It has a lock on it, but no key that I could see among her things. I never even knew she kept one. She was not what you would call a writer.”

  I wasn’t sure why Saundra was telling me all this, and my confusion must have shown in my face.

  “She wrote a note and put it on the cover of the diary,” Saundra said. “She wrote, Give to the girl with the yellow hair.”

  I was stunned. “Why would she do that?” I asked, but my mind was racing. How far back did the diary go? Was there a chance Mama Nelle had revealed something about Anna in it? Something she thought I should know?

  “I have no idea,” Saundra said.

  I looked down at her empty hands. “Did you bring the diary with you?” I asked.

  “Well, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, an apology in her voice. “I’ll definitely turn it over to you, since that’s what she wanted me to do, but I would really like to read it first myself. I had no idea she kept it and I really—”

  “Of course.” I could imagine how hungry the daughter of a loving mother would be to read about her life, although I couldn’t care less what stories my own mother might tell. I wanted to ask Saundra, When can I get it?, but managed to hold my tongue.

  “I’ll have to break the lock.” Saundra looked apologetic.

  “Of course,” I said again. “I wonder if there’s something in it about Anna Dale and that’s why she’s leaving it to me.”

  “I’ll let you know if I come across anything like that,” Saundra said, “but honestly, Morgan? you shouldn’t get your hopes up. She wasn’t thinking clearly at all the last couple of days. It doesn’t make any sense she’d leave her diary to you. I think she was simply not herself that night.”

  I nodded. “I understand,” I said. “And I’d like to read it, but I’ll give it back to you afterward. It should stay in your family.”

  “Thanks for understanding that,” Saundra said. “Oh, and I also found some old sketches of family members that Uncle Jesse drew when he was a boy. Do you think Lisa might want them for the gallery?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll ask her.” But my words came out woodenly, mechanically. All I could think about was getting my hands on Mama Nelle’s diary.

  Chapter 54

  ANNA

  April 5, 1940

  Anna wasn’t sure if Jesse was angry at her or maybe just worried
. She didn’t really care which. He was wisely keeping people away from the warehouse and they didn’t understand why they couldn’t come inside to watch her paint, as they had in the past. She didn’t know what he told them or why they obeyed him, either. She heard someone muttering about the “uppity colored boy” giving them orders, but she shut out the words. They had to stay away.

  Martin’s spirit was in the warehouse. Jesse didn’t believe Anna when she told him, but two of the lights that hung from the ceiling beams blew out during the week and Anna was certain Martin had made it happen. She’d never believed in spirits before, but now she did, utterly and completely. The lights were up too high for her and Jesse to fix, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything. She didn’t even care about painting the mural … except that she’d added a hammer to the painting before Jesse’s arrival the day before. He hadn’t even noticed, which had struck her as amusing for some reason.

  “Why you laughin’?” Jesse had looked suspicious. “That ain’t no real laugh.”

  Anna’d tightened her lips to hold back her laughter. The hammer was practically right in front of him and he didn’t see it. It didn’t seem all that funny to her later, but at that moment, she’d nearly been in hysterics. She’d thought she should add some drops of blood dripping from the hammer’s claw.

  “You done lost your marbles,” Jesse had said, worry in his dark eyes.

  She knew she’d lost her marbles. Every once in a while, she thought she found them again and in those moments she knew clearly that her mind was going downhill but it was easier to just keep plowing forward than to find a way to fix the mess she’d made.

  The doctor came to the house on Friday afternoon. Miss Myrtle insisted that Anna see him, and he came upstairs to her room and listened to her heart and her lungs and looked into her throat and her ears.

  “You are very slender for your height,” he announced, tweaking the end of his waxy mustache, “and Miss Myrtle is afraid you’re not getting enough to eat.”