“He’s one of my favorite artists,” I answered Lisa.
“Ah.” For the first time, Lisa smiled, or nearly so, anyway. “That’s very good to hear, because he has a lot to do with my proposal.”
“I don’t understand,” I said again. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” I’d read about his death in the paper in the prison library. He’d been ninety-five and had certainly led a productive life, yet I’d still felt a wave of loss wash over me when I read the news.
“He died in January,” Lisa said, then added, “Jesse Williams was my father.”
“Really!” I sat up straighter.
“For the last twenty-five years of his life, he dedicated himself to helping young artists,” Lisa said.
I nodded. I’d read about his charitable work.
“Artists he thought had promise but were having a hard time with school or family or maybe just heading down the wrong path.”
Was she talking about me? Could Jesse Williams have seen my work someplace and thought there was something promising in it, something that my professors had missed? “I remember reading about some teenaged boy he helped a few years ago,” I said. “I don’t know where I—”
“It could have been any number of boys.” Lisa waved an impatient hand through the air. “He’d focus on one young man—or young woman—at a time. Make sure they had the money and support necessary to get the education they needed. He’d show their work or do whatever he saw fit to give them a boost.” She cocked her head. “He was a very generous man, but also a manipulative one,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Shortly before he died, he became interested in you,” Lisa said. “You were going to be his next project.”
“Me?” I frowned. “I never even met him. And I’m white.” I lifted a strand of my straight, pale blond hair as if to prove my point. “Aren’t all the people he helped African American?”
Lisa shook her head. “Most, but definitely not all,” she said with a shrug. “And to be frank, I have no idea why he zeroed in on you. He often helped North Carolina artists, so that’s one reason—you’re from Cary, right?—but there are plenty of others he could have chosen. Why you were on his Good Samaritan radar is anyone’s guess.”
This made no sense. “Isn’t anything he had planned for me … or for anyone … didn’t his plans die with him?”
“I wish,” Lisa said. She smoothed a strand of her Michelle Obama hair behind her ear with a tired gesture. “My father’s still controlling things from the grave.” She glanced at Andrea with a shake of her head, while I waited, hands clutched together in my lap, not sure I liked this woman. “I lived with him,” Lisa continued. “I was his main caretaker and he was getting very feeble. He knew he was nearing the end and he met with his lawyer”—she nodded toward Andrea—“and updated his will. He was in the process of building a gallery in Edenton. An art gallery to feature his paintings and those of some other artists as well as some student work.”
“Oh,” I said, still puzzled. “Did he want to put one of my pieces in it?” Maybe that was it. Had he somehow heard about me and wanted to give my career—such as it was—a boost through exposure in his gallery? Ridiculous. How would he have heard about me? I couldn’t picture any of my professors at UNC singing my praises. And what on earth would I put in his gallery? My mind zigzagged through my paintings, all of them at my parents’ house … unless my parents had gotten rid of them, which wouldn’t have surprised me.
“Nothing that simple,” Lisa said. “He wanted you to restore an old 1940s mural, and he stipulated that the gallery can’t be opened until the restored mural is in place in the foyer. And the date of the gallery opening is August fifth.”
This had to be a mistake. They had to be looking for someone else, and I felt my chance at freedom slipping away. Restore a mural? In two months? First, I had no experience in art conservation, and second, I’d worked on exactly one mural in my nearly three years in college and that had been a simple four-by-eight-foot abstract I’d painted with another student my freshman year. “Are you sure he meant me?” I asked.
“Definitely.”
“Why does he … why would he think I’m ‘uniquely qualified’ to do this?” I asked, remembering the phrase. “How did he even know I exist?”
“Who knows?” Lisa said, obviously annoyed by her father’s eccentricities. “All I know is you’re now my problem.”
I bristled at her attitude, but kept my mouth shut. If the two of them could actually help me get out of here, I couldn’t afford to alienate them.
“I suppose he thought you were qualified by virtue of your art education,” Andrea said. “You were an art major, correct?”
I nodded. I’d been an art major, yes, but that had nothing to do with restoration. Restoration required an entirely different set of skills from the creation of art. Plus, I hadn’t been the most dedicated student that last year. I’d let myself get sucked in by Trey instead of my studies. He’d absorbed my time and energy. I’d been nauseatingly smitten, drawn in by his attention and the future we were planning together. He’d told me about his late grandmother’s engagement ring, hinting that it would soon be mine. I’d thought he was so wonderful. Pre-law. Sweet. Amazing to look at. I’d been a fool. But I knew better than to say anything about lack of qualifications to these two women when they were talking about getting me out of here.
“So … where’s this mural?” I asked.
“In Edenton. You’d have to live in Edenton,” Lisa said. “With me. My house—my father’s house, actually—is big. We won’t be tripping over each other.”
I could barely believe my ears. I’d not only get out of prison but I’d live in Jesse Jameson Williams’s house? I felt the unexpected threat of tears. Oh God, how I needed to get out of here! In the last miserable year, I’d been bruised, cut, and battered. I’d learned to fight back, yes, but that was not who I was. I was no brawler. My fellow inmates mocked me for my youth, my slender build, my platinum hair. I lived in a state of perpetual fear. Even in my cell, I felt unsafe. My cellmate was a woman who didn’t talk. Literally. I’d never heard a word from her mouth, but her expression carried disdain. I barely slept, one eye open, expecting to have my throat slit with a stolen knife sometime during the night.
And then there were the nightmares about Emily Maxwell, but I supposed I would bring them with me no matter where I went.
“You’ll work on the mural in the gallery, which is only partially built at this point,” Lisa interrupted my thoughts. “There’s plenty of room in the foyer. That’s where my father wanted it displayed.”
“It’s not painted on a wall?”
“No, it’s on canvas and it was never … hung, or whatever you call it.”
“Installed,” Andrea said.
“Right,” Lisa said. “It was never installed.”
“Who painted it?”