Mid-afternoon, Mayor Sykes picked Anna up from Miss Myrtle’s house in his green Chevrolet for the drive to the warehouse that he hoped would become her new studio space.

“What do you think of Miss Myrtle’s?” he asked, chewing his cigar as he drove. The smoke filled the car and Anna wanted to roll down the window, but then they’d both freeze. The mayor exuded a sense of power in his strong, resonant voice. Although she remembered him being short at lunch, she hadn’t realized how very fat he was. His belly strained at the buttons of his wool coat and brushed against the bottom of the steering wheel. His hair, which had seemed either blond or gray in the restaurant, was actually a mixture of the two. His entire presence was quite overwhelming to her in the small confines of the car, and she felt very young, very girlish sitting next to him. Actually, she felt quite vulnerable, an unusual feeling for her. She didn’t like it.

As they chatted about Miss Myrtle’s house, the weather, and the things the mayor’s teenaged sons wanted for Christmas, she thought about how few men she’d truly known in her life. She’d never had a chance to know her father. Her uncle Horace, Aunt Alice’s husband, was such a quiet man that she didn’t feel as though she knew him at all. Then there was Mr. Prior, the sculpture teacher at Van Emburgh, who seemed to think her work was wonderful, so of course she’d liked him very much and had hardly found him intimidating. The only other male art teacher at Van Emburgh, Mr. Blaine, had been kind, serious, complimentary, and almost certainly homosexual and unthreatening.

Cigar-smoking men who took up more than their share of space were a new species to her.

After driving for a short while, Mayor Sykes pulled onto a long, narrow dirt road that led into a short tunnel of trees, at the end of which was a large, decrepit-looking, once-white warehouse partially surrounded by woods. The side of the building facing the car had a series of tall windows that Anna doubted would be enough to let in much light in that wooded setting.

“Here we are,” Mayor Sykes said as he slowly drove toward the building. “No one’s used this ol’ warehouse in a generation or two.”

Anna couldn’t have said why, but she had an instantaneous fear of the building as they neared it. They weren’t very far from town, yet the location felt isolated, and even before the mayor had stopped the car, she was already planning to use the excuse of poor lighting to turn down the offer of the building.