I set down my brush and palette and got up from my chair to walk toward them. “Saundra brought it over,” I said, “along with these sketches of her family that she thought were Jesse’s.” I handed the sheaf of sketch paper to Lisa. “But they’re not Jesse’s,” I said. “They’re actually Anna Dale’s.”

“What?” Lisa asked. “Why would Saundra have anything of Anna Dale’s?”

“You have to read the journal,” Oliver said.

Lisa looked annoyed. She glanced at her phone. “You’ll just have to tell me what it says,” she said, setting down the journal and the portraits. “I don’t have time to read anything right now.”

“The journal’s incredible, Lisa,” I said. “It explains all about the—”

“Not you.” Lisa waved a hand toward me. “You keep working. Oliver can tell me.”

“I can talk while I work.” I walked back to my seat in front of the mural, and Oliver and I told Lisa the whole story of Anna Dale in Edenton.

“My God,” Lisa said when we’d finished. By that time, she’d stopped looking at her phone every few seconds and was sitting in Oliver’s chair, leafing through the sketches. “I wonder what ever became of her?”

“Wish we knew,” Oliver said.

“Well,” she said, getting to her feet. “No point in wondering about it right now. We have bigger things to deal with at the moment.” She turned to Oliver. “Do you have all the … the write-ups about each piece ready to go?” she asked.

“They’re all ready to slip into their frames and get on the walls,” he said. “With the exception of Anna Dale’s, which I’ve rewritten three times already. She’s a moving target, you might say.”

I felt Lisa’s gaze burning into the back of my head. I kept my fingers moving, delivering the infinitesimal brushstrokes to the roof of one of the Mill Village houses.

“You know, Morgan,” Lisa said, crossing the room toward me. “I know you’ve done a meticulous job on this thing and I appreciate it, but I personally don’t care if you rush through the bit you have remaining. Who is ever going to look closely at all that grass and whatever else is down there in the corner?”

Facing the mural, I tightened my lips as I tried to pick my response. “I’ll be looking closely at it,” I said finally. “I have to do it right, Lisa. Don’t worry. I’ll have it done by Sunday morning.”

“Doesn’t it need to be stretched or something again?” Lisa touched the side of the mural where it was tacked onto the stretcher. “With staples instead of these tacks? How long is that going to take?”

Oliver spoke up. “If worse comes to worse, I’ll add something to the wall text saying the restoration was just completed and the mural will soon be—”