My gaze had moved on. It appeared that the mural consisted of one large central section—the three women and the motorcycle—which was flanked by two smaller sections on either side. In the upper right-hand corner, an African-American woman appeared to be holding a basket of some sort, which was full of something indiscernible, thanks to the filth and abrasions. Something was wrong with the lower half of the woman’s face, too. Was she clenching a stick between her teeth? Beneath her, in the lower right-hand corner of the mural, there was a row of small houses. I walked toward the other end of the mural to look at the painting’s upper left-hand corner. I wasn’t at all sure what I was looking at. A boat, maybe? Yes, it had to be a ship of some sort. And beneath it, in the fifth and final vignette, a white man—at least I thought his skin was white beneath the grime—stood tall, holding a log or length of wood or something like it in his hands. Five separate scenes, all of them a mess. The entire mural looked as though someone had attached it to the back of a car and dragged it facedown over earth and stones and mud for miles and miles. To me, the painting—all seventy-two square feet of it—looked utterly beyond saving.
I turned to Lisa. “Did you have any idea it was this bad, or that it had…” I pointed to the motorcycle. “Was that what your father meant when he told you the artist had gone crazy? Maybe he’d been referring to the motorcycle?”
Lisa slowly shook her head, her gaze riveted on the mural. “My father certainly didn’t prepare me for this,” she said. “I swear, that old man … if he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him.”
“You sure you want this hanging in here?” Adam asked Lisa. “Right here in the front room where everybody starts out?”
Lisa let out a long breath. “Oh, shit, I’m not sure of anything,” she said, “but my father was as clearheaded as an old man could be and his instructions couldn’t have been more explicit. So it will hang in here. Once Morgan whips it into shape, that is.”
I steadfastly avoided her eyes.
“I think it’s sick,” Wyatt said, and I knew he was using the word as a compliment. “Without the bike, it’d just be another old painting. This way, it’ll be a jump-start for conversation.”
“It’s definitely fascinating,” said Oliver. “It’ll be an amazing piece of art once it’s cleaned up. It’ll tell some of Edenton’s history, which is just what you want from one of these old post office murals. These little houses, for example.” He pointed to the lower right corner. “They’re the Cotton Mill Village, aren’t they?” He looked at Lisa who slowly nodded.
“I guess,” Lisa said, as though she hadn’t yet made that connection. I wondered what the Cotton Mill Village was.
Oliver leaned as far forward as he could without stepping on the canvas. He brushed his dark hair off his forehead and squinted, as if he could summon up X-ray vision to see beneath the grime. “Look at the detail in the women’s faces,” he said, pointing to a less soiled area around one of the women’s eyes. “Anna Dale was an excellent artist.”
“If you say so,” Lisa said.
“No wonder they never hung this thing in the post office,” Adam said.
“That motorcycle makes absolutely no sense.” Lisa shook her head.
“I’m guessing it made perfect sense to the artist,” Oliver said.
Adam looked at me. “Maybe you could just paint out the Indian,” he suggested.
“Are you kidding?” Oliver’s eyebrows rose high above his glasses. He gestured toward the canvas. “This is obviously what the artist wanted to create. It should be restored exactly as she intended.” He looked at me. “Right?” he asked.
I nodded as though I did this sort of work every day, but I couldn’t quite meet Oliver’s eyes. I could already tell that the curator was perceptive. I was afraid my face would give away the fact that I didn’t have a clue how to fix what ailed this mural.
“There’s a story here,” Oliver continued. “I only wish we could know what it is.” He bent over to lift one of the edges of the canvas. “Look at how ragged the edges of the canvas are,” he said. “It looks like someone just hacked it from the stretcher. Why would anyone do that?”
It was only one of a hundred unanswerable questions about the mural, I thought. I tried to look beyond the damaged images to the work expected of me. The canvas reeked of mold or mildew, the scent strong enough to fill the whole room. It stung my nostrils and made my lungs burn. Filth coated the painting except for the areas where friction had simply worn the paint from the surface. There were dozens of scraped sections where there was no paint left at all. I felt Lisa turn her gaze on me.
“You’ll have to finish this by August fifth,” she said, quietly, so that only I could hear her. There was unmistakable worry in her voice. “Can you do it?”
Deadline or not, I didn’t know how to begin. If I had a year to learn about art restoration, a year to study and practice, then maybe I stood a chance. But I couldn’t let Lisa doubt me. I couldn’t let her see my weakness. I wouldn’t give her any reason to turn this job over to someone else and send me back to hell. I’d have to figure out how to restore this weird piece of art, and I’d have to do it quickly.
“Yes,” I said, looking directly into her eyes. “Absolutely.”
Chapter 8
ANNA
December 9, 1939
Anna’s very full Saturday began with moving into Myrtle Simms’s large and charming old home, and she felt as though she suddenly had a grandmother. She’d never known her own grandparents, so spending time with an older, overly attentive woman was unfamiliar to her, and rather a comfort.
The Simms house stood in a row of similar good-sized homes, some of which appeared to have fallen on hard times. Myrtle Simms seemed to have managed to keep the outside of her home and yard up, even if there were some signs of wear and tear inside. A bit of peeling paint here and torn wallpaper there. But all in all it was a charming home, and Anna was grateful to the men of the town for arranging her stay there.
Myrtle Simms was a compact little lady, quite short, and she greeted Anna at her front door in a yellow flowered housedress.
“Call me Miss Myrtle, dear,” she said, leading Anna into a neat and clean living room with comfortable furniture and carefully displayed knickknacks on every level surface. They sat down to a snack of tea and squares of pineapple upside-down cake baked by Miss Myrtle’s maid, Freda, who offered Anna a warm smile but didn’t speak. Once Freda left the room, Miss Myrtle confided that the maid was mute.
“She hears fine,” Miss Myrtle said, “but she’s never uttered a word to me in the thirty years she’s worked for me. I love her, though. She was a second mother to my daughter, growing up. We couldn’t have held this house together without her.”
They chatted for a while about the competition that had brought Anna to Edenton, and once they’d finished their cake, Miss Myrtle got to her feet.
“Let me show you around,” she said. They headed toward the stairs, the older woman chatting the whole time. “My daughter Pauline recently got married and her husband Karl is a saint,” she said. “He helps me with dripping faucets and leaky pipes. Pauline’s a nurse in a doctor’s office a couple of days a week, and Karl’s a policeman. They live about a mile away. You’ll be moving into Pauline’s bedroom.” They’d reached the landing and turned right. “There are two other spare bedrooms up here, but neither one has a bed.” She chuckled. “One is my sewing room and the other already has a crib in it. No baby on the horizon yet, but I’m an optimist!”