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 station 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?