He handed me the yellowed article, folded in half. I unfolded it carefully and laid it flat on the edge of the makeshift desk. Leaning forward, I read the date at the top of the page: December 14, 1939. The headline: New Jersey Artist to Paint Mural for Edenton Post Office.
“It’s your Anna Dale,” Oliver said.
My Anna Dale. The words made me feel instantly closer to the artist. There was a photograph of a girl about my age standing a distance in front of what looked like a warehouse. She wore a light-colored, neatly tailored coat and gloves, but no hat. Her hair looked very dark—maybe even black—and it was cut in a striking chin-length bob with thick straight bangs that just grazed her eyebrows. The overall look was very dramatic and, at the same time, almost impish. She wore an engaging smile. A confident smile. She didn’t look the least bit deranged.
“Wow,” I said. “So this is our talented and possibly nutso Anna Dale?”
“Read it,” Oliver said.
I read the article to myself.
Miss Anna Dale, 22, of Plainfield, New Jersey, is the Edenton winner of the 48-States Mural Contest sponsored by the United States Treasury Department. Upon completion, the 12 × 6 mural will be mounted on the post office wall above the door to the postmaster’s office. Miss Dale did not get specific in discussing the subject of the mural. “Edenton has a rich history and a rich present,” she said. “I hope to capture both in the mural.” When asked about the concern some Edenton residents have expressed about an artist from New Jersey painting a mural for a Southern town, she replied, “It’s an honor to get to live in Edenton while I work on the mural so I can get to know the residents and hopefully give them a painting they can enjoy for many years to come. I’m very excited about the opportunity. I’ve already begun creating the proposed sketch for the mural,” Miss Dale said, “and will soon submit it to the Section of Fine Arts. Once I get approval from them, I can begin working in earnest. At that time, the public will be most welcome to come to the warehouse to watch me work. I hope I can create something that will make Edenton proud.” Miss Dale believes she will hear from the Section of Fine Arts sometime after the New Year.
I was transfixed. By the words. By the photograph. I gently touched the old paper, soft as felt beneath my fingertips, and was surprised to feel my eyes sting.
“What happened?” I asked the air as much as Oliver. “Why did she just disappear and leave the mural behind? She sounds perfectly sane, but if she did go crazy, like Jesse told Lisa, do you think they locked her up, or…” My voice trailed off as I studied the photograph of the smiling young artist.
“Something clearly went wrong,” Oliver said.
“How did Jesse Williams end up with the mural?” I looked at the date of the article again. December 14, 1939. “He would only have been a kid then.”
Oliver shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll ever know,” he said.
“She looks and sounds perfectly sane,” I said again.
“She does.”
I sat back, my gaze resting on the photograph. I touched Anna Dale’s smiling face and felt something shift inside me. All I had wanted to do when I got out of bed that morning was come up with the quickest way possible through this job to get my fifty thousand dollars and stay out of prison. Lisa didn’t care as long as I could hang the mural on the wall by August 5.
Anna Dale, though … She’d been excited about the mural. She’d wanted to do a perfect job. Her heart had been in it and then something happened. It must have been something truly terrible to turn this pretty girl into … what? A mentally ill artist who mysteriously vanished from the art world? I shuddered. I wanted to do right by her. This girl who was my own age. I wanted to give life to the mural that Anna Dale never had the chance to give it.
The mural had been cut from its former stretcher so sloppily that it was a challenge to get it square on the new stretcher. It took a couple of hours for Adam, Wyatt, Oliver, and me, along with a few of the other construction workers, to stretch the mural into place and secure it with dozens of thumbtacks. I watched from a distance as the men attached the mural very low on the wall, helping them get it straight and square, ready for me to work on. Done with their job, the men returned to their work inside the gallery, but I stayed in the foyer a while longer. Now that the mural was on the wall, facing me head-on, the bare spots and the filth that seemed to coat every inch of the painting were more apparent, and yet the art behind the grime seemed to pop out at me. Those women and their broken teapot. They looked angry, didn’t they? The black woman in the upper right-hand corner seemed to grin around the stick she held in her teeth. The motorcycle looked ready to race from the mural into the foyer.
I thought of the newspaper article again and its photograph of the optimistic young woman with her short black bob. I shuddered. It was like seeing the photograph of someone in an obituary. You could see the ignorance in their faces. Their blindness to what was coming. Anna Dale had looked that way in the photograph. She’d been at the beginning of her adventure—the beginning that had somehow become an ending.
For the first time, I noticed the artist’s signature in the lower right corner of the mural and I walked forward to crouch in front of it. Anna Dale. Gently, I touched the filthy letters, but drew my fingers away quickly, startled by the roughness of the painting’s surface. Anna’s writing was vertical and round, painted in a grime-covered gold. I stared at the signature a while longer, wondering how a life that had started with so much promise could now be shrouded in such mystery.
Chapter 16
ANNA
December 25, 1939
“You must be Anna!” Pauline Maguire handed the grocery bag she was carrying to her husband and reached for Anna’s hands. “Mama’s told me so much about you!”
“You, too,” Anna said, pleased by the woman’s friendliness. Anna had met no one so close to her age in Edenton, and she felt an instant bond with the young woman whose room she was inhabiting.
“This is my husband, Karl,” Pauline said.
Karl, his arms weighed down with bags and a large rectangular wrapped gift, only nodded with a smile. He looked quite a bit older than Pauline. A few gray strands silvered his brown hair.
“So happy to meet you,” Anna said, taking one of the bags from his arms. “Miss Myrtle is in the kitchen.”
Miss Myrtle had given Freda the day off to be with her own family for the holiday, so the three women set about cooking. They made a turkey, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, and butter beans, which Anna had never heard of but which were the same as the lima beans she’d grown up with in New Jersey. Karl donned an apron and made some of the best biscuits Anna had ever tasted. She’d never known a man to willingly cook.
“I only like baking,” Karl said with a wink. Anna liked him right away. He was so easygoing and friendly and it was clear that he adored Pauline. She remembered Miss Myrtle telling her that he was a policeman and so he’d been able to keep a good steady job all through the Depression when so many men went without work. He was also undeniably handsome, with blue eyes and that silver-laced hair that kept falling across his forehead in a way that Anna found winsome. She imagined he would look like heaven in his police uniform and she thought he and Pauline made a striking couple, despite the age difference.