Once, during the week after it happened, Pauline stopped by the warehouse to ask her to go to lunch. At the sound of Pauline’s car outside the warehouse, Jesse put the brush and palette in Anna’s hands and pulled her to her feet, his hand on her elbow.
“’Least pretend like you workin’,” he whispered.
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.