“I guess,” Lisa said, as though she hadn’t yet made that connection. I wondered what the Cotton Mill Village was.

Oliver leaned as far forward as he could without stepping on the canvas. He brushed his dark hair off his forehead and squinted, as if he could summon up X-ray vision to see beneath the grime. “Look at the detail in the women’s faces,” he said, pointing to a less soiled area around one of the women’s eyes. “Anna Dale was an excellent artist.”

“If you say so,” Lisa said.

“No wonder they never hung this thing in the post office,” Adam said.

“That motorcycle makes absolutely no sense.” Lisa shook her head.

“I’m guessing it made perfect sense to the artist,” Oliver said.

Adam looked at me. “Maybe you could just paint out the Indian,” he suggested.

“Are you kidding?” Oliver’s eyebrows rose high above his glasses. He gestured toward the canvas. “This is obviously what the artist wanted to create. It should be restored exactly as she intended.” He looked at me. “Right?” he asked.

I nodded as though I did this sort of work every day, but I couldn’t quite meet Oliver’s eyes. I could already tell that the curator was perceptive. I was afraid my face would give away the fact that I didn’t have a clue how to fix what ailed this mural.

“There’s a story here,” Oliver continued. “I only wish we could know what it is.” He bent over to lift one of the edges of the canvas. “Look at how ragged the edges of the canvas are,” he said. “It looks like someone just hacked it from the stretcher. Why would anyone do that?”

It was only one of a hundred unanswerable questions about the mural, I thought. I tried to look beyond the damaged images to the work expected of me. The canvas reeked of mold or mildew, the scent strong enough to fill the whole room. It stung my nostrils and made my lungs burn. Filth coated the painting except for the areas where friction had simply worn the paint from the surface. There were dozens of scraped sections where there was no paint left at all. I felt Lisa turn her gaze on me.

“You’ll have to finish this by August fifth,” she said, quietly, so that only I could hear her. There was unmistakable worry in her voice. “Can you do it?”