I pointed to the droplets. “Can you see this?” I asked. “She was so detailed. A huge painting like this and she still paid attention to every little thing. Even the catch lights in the drops of tea.”

I looked down at Oliver to see him craning his neck, studying the image hard, eyes narrowed in concentration.

“Better tea drops than blood, right?” I smiled.

“Move the ladder for a sec,” he said.

I climbed down to the floor and pulled the ladder aside as Oliver stepped closer to the mural. “I think you spoke too soon,” he said, reaching up to touch one of the drops I hadn’t yet cleaned. “Hand me the dowel.”

I gave him the dowel and watched as he carefully smoothed the cotton tip over the spot.

“Oh, no,” I said. The droplet was the same size and shape as the tea drops, but this one was most definitely red. Bloodred. I looked at Oliver in silence, and he met my eyes.

“This woman was not well,” he said quietly.

I thought of the photograph I’d copied from the microfilm machine. The smiling, confident-looking girl standing in front of the huge canvas. “I’m starting to feel sorry for her,” I said. “I think maybe she really was losing her mind and there was probably no treatment for her back then.”

“I wish she hadn’t fallen off the face of the earth,” he said, handing me the dowel again. “I would love to see more of what she could do.”

“I worry she killed herself,” I said. “That’s the only explanation I can think of. Obviously she was messed up.”

Oliver nodded. “Yet for the most part, she still managed to produce a pretty phenomenal mural.”

“I want to find out what really happened to her,” I said. “Why did she turn a perfectly normal painting into a house of horrors?”

He looked at me with amusement. “How do you plan to do that?” he asked. “Find out what really happened to her?”

“I don’t know, but I have to.” I studied the bloody ax blade. The little red-haired man in the mirror. The drops of blood. The motorcycle. “I think Anna Dale is starting to haunt me.”

Chapter 26. Anna

Chapter 26

ANNA

January 11, 1940

There was a dusting of snow on the ground late that morning, and Anna’s car slid a bit as she turned onto the long dirt road leading to the warehouse. Once inside the warehouse, she turned on the space heaters and pulled them close to her workspace. She was carefully laying out the wood she’d need for the stretcher when Martin Drapple suddenly cracked open the door and shouted, “All right if I come in?”

She jumped, startled. She’d been so engrossed in her work that she hadn’t heard his car.