She drove well under the speed limit back to Edenton, and Pauline helped her carry the roll of canvas into the warehouse, where they set it down by one of the garage doors. A little breathless, Pauline stood with her hands on her hips and looked around at Anna’s vast working space, with its beamed ceiling, dusty skylights, and dark corners. “This is a … I don’t know … a bit of a strange place to work,” she said.

Anna laughed. “You should have seen it before it was cleaned out,” she said. “I hated it. But now it feels like home. Almost.”

“Oh my, look at this!” Pauline exclaimed, walking toward the cartoon paper where Anna had drawn her three Tea Party ladies plus Freda. “I recognize each one of them.” She turned to Anna. “You really are very good,” she said.

“Thank you.” Anna carried the sketch across the room to show her how the drawing would look in color.

“I wish I had some artistic talent,” Pauline said.

“Well, I don’t know the first thing about nursing, so we’re even,” Anna countered.

Pauline stayed a while longer, but Anna was glad when she left. Pauline was becoming a good friend, but Anna’s work felt like a greater calling at that moment than friendship. Was that a terrible thing? It was the truth, and once Pauline left, Anna happily organized her new paints and brushes and palette, feeling the thrill of excitement at the thought that she would soon be using all of them.

Chapter 29. Morgan

Chapter 29

MORGAN

July 7, 2018

The mural was entirely clean. Abraded, scratched, and worn, but clean.

And extraordinarily, nightmare-inducingly weird.

That stick in the black woman’s mouth? Once clean, it became a knife. But the weirdest discovery of all—the discovery that made me gasp out loud and had me running to Oliver’s office to drag him back to the foyer—was that one of the Tea Party ladies dangled a hammer from her hand. Like the ax, the hammer dripped blood, which stained the hem of the woman’s dress and pooled on the floor near the ladies’ feet. Anna Dale might have been crazy, I thought, but Mama Nelle appeared to have most of her marbles still intact.

Once I’d finished cleaning the lower right-hand corner of the mural where Anna had placed her rounded-and oddly distorted-looking-signature, I called everyone into the foyer for a viewing. I moved the ladder and my supplies table out of the way and all of us stood in the middle of the room. Lisa, Adam, and Wyatt on my left. Oliver and his visiting twelve-year-old son Nathan on my right. All I could see was the work that was still waiting for me to do, but everyone else seemed impressed.

“Awesome colors,” Adam said. He lightly punched my bare arm. “Nice work, Christopher.”