“Can you see this picture?” I asked. “Do you recognize—”

“Jesse!” she said, her gnarled finger touching the image of the black man.

“I don’t think so, dear,” I said, shocking myself when the word “dear” came out of my mouth. I’d never used it before in my life. “Jesse would only have been a boy back then. This is from 1940.”

“It’s Jesse,” she said stubbornly. “Seventeen. Eighteen. My big brother.”

I took the picture back from her and looked hard at it. Could she be right? The black man could possibly have been a teenager. The thought excited me. That might explain how the mural came to be in Jesse’s possession. He was somehow connected to it. Somehow involved in its creation. I set the photograph on her lap again. “Do you know who the white boy is?” I asked, wondering if by some miracle that boy was still alive and clearheaded.

She looked at the photograph again, but her focus was on Anna. “She so pretty,” she said, then pressed her finger to her lips again as if to shut herself up. “That white boy,” she said suddenly. “He had somethin’ to do with the po-lice. But later. Not…” She tapped the print. “Not back then.” She was losing me again.

“I have another picture,” I said, pulling the large print I’d made of the half-cleaned mural from the manila folder. “I’m restoring Anna Dale’s mural,” I said, “and I know a lot of it still needs cleaning and inpainting … the paint restored … but is this familiar?”

She was already grinning as I set the photograph in her lap. “Ain’t seen this thing in forever,” she said. “Where’s the black lady? She was my fav’rite.”

I smiled, excited that she recognized the mural. “She’s up here in the corner,” I said, pointing to the upper right-hand corner of the print. “I haven’t cleaned her off yet, so she’s hard to see.”

Mama Nelle squinted behind her glasses. “What you done to her mouth?” she asked.

“I’m not sure what’s going on with her mouth,” I admitted. “It looks like she has something in it, or she’s biting a stick or something. I’ll know once I clean that part off.”

Mama Nelle frowned at the picture. I could see her gaze shifting from one bit of the painting to another.

“There are some odd things here,” I said, pointing. “Do you see the ax? Those little red spots are blood drops coming off it. I don’t know what that—”

“Weren’t no ax.” Mama Nelle shook her head. “’Twas a hammer.”

It was my turn to frown. “What do you mean, ‘a hammer’?”

She quickly turned her face away from me, tightening her lips as if she’d said too much.

“Can you tell me what you mean by a hammer?” I tried again.