“Yes, come sit,” I said. “This is Oliver. He’s the curator of the gallery.”

“Mama, this is Uncle Jesse’s gallery,” Saundra said loudly as she helped her mother onto the chair, then sat down next to her. “He planned it before he passed.”

Mama Nelle didn’t hear a word her daughter said, I was sure. Her gaze was riveted on the mural, and now that I had her in the gallery, I wasn’t quite sure what to say to her.

I glanced at Oliver, who gave me a nod that said, You brought her here, now ask her your questions.

“Does the mural look like you remember it?” I began, thinking that was a safer question than the one I really wanted to ask: Had Miss Anna and Jesse been lovers?

Mama Nelle lifted one tremulous hand to her lips, then shook her head. “Where you get this?” she asked, nodding toward the mural.

“Jesse had it in his studio for many, many years,” I said. “I’m restoring it. Cleaning it up. Fixing the paint.”

“Is Jesse the one what ruint it?” she asked.

“Ruined it?”

She pointed, her arm trembling. It looked like she was pointing to the peanut lady, the woman with the knife between her teeth. “What’d he do to it?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that in all the years the mural had been in Jesse’s possession, he might have been the one to tamper with it. That didn’t fit the story, though. The “Anna Dale lost her mind” story.

“There are strange things about the mural that we don’t understand,” I said, moving to stand in front of the painting. “The knife in her teeth. The motorcycle.” I pointed out the other oddities. “But we think Anna … Miss Anna painted them. Not Jesse. But … Mama Nelle.” I took a deep breath. “I was wondering if Jesse and Miss Anna were more than friends.”

Saundra turned her head from the mural to me. “You think they were lovers?” she asked.

Mama Nelle didn’t seem to hear either of us, her gaze still on the mural.

“I saw an article in the paper from back then,” I said to Saundra. “It said there’d been a racial slur written on the outside wall of the warehouse where Anna painted and where Jesse was her … apprentice, or helper, or … I wondered if there was something more between them.”

“Ah,” Saundra said, understanding. “Well, if there was, it’s certainly ancient history now. It hardly matters, does it?”