“What, sweetie?” she asked.
“Uhhhh, hmm, um, well, like, do you think, like, there will be an estate sale or anything? Or will a museum want them? He was an artist, right? Might be some neat stuff. I might come back to Coalfield to bid on something.”
“Honey, did you smoke weed?” she asked. “A museum is not going to take Mr. Avery’s stuff. He was not that famous of an artist.”
And then I felt really sad because I did want to get my backpack so I wouldn’t get discovered, but I also wanted his haori, to wear it as I walked across campus. But instead, I just told my mom that I had to go study. And we never talked about it again. As far as I know, my backpack is still somewhere in his sister’s house. I now wondered if Mazzy had found it, but I was getting way ahead of myself. I had eaten seven of the burgers already. I needed to slow down. I had to let Mazzy tell me what she knew, so I could figure out what she didn’t know.
Mazzy said, “And finally, after Henrietta had unearthed from various basements and barns, and even a few friends’ houses, every single painting of Henry’s in existence, she then gave me this huge bundle of letters from Randolph Avery. I mean, they must have written to each other at least once or twice a week until Avery died.”
I imagined that, somewhere in his sister’s house in Coalfield, all of Mr. Avery’s letters from Henry were hidden away, perhaps in the same place as my book bag.
“So I’ve been reading them, one by one, making notations, cross-checking them. I mean, a lot of it is about the fact that Randolph loved the Dodgers and Henry loved the Yankees, and so there are a lot of baseball names I had to go over. But I got to the summer of 1996, and I was interested because Randolph was regularly updating Henry on the panic, and I’m sure you know that a fair number of people suspected that he might have been responsible for it.”
“Yes, I had heard that. It makes sense,” I said. I mean, I had told her on the phone two weeks ago that it was me, but maybe I could still figure a way out of it. Randolph Avery had hidden the evidence the first time, and I wondered, now that he was dead, if he might just keep hiding it for me.
“Well, but no,” Mazzy said, looking slightly confused. “Right? Because it was you.”
“Let me hear more of what you know,” I said.
She told me that several of the letters mentioned me. She pulled out a photocopy of one of the letters, and she waited for me to move my tray, all those little empty hamburger boxes, so she could place it in front of me. I was immediately struck by how messy Mr. Avery’s handwriting was, not the elegant long strokes, the flowing cursive, that I imagined from an artist. It was printed, scratched into the paper, and then I remembered, Oh, he was dying, and that’s cruel, of course, but it made sense. I don’t know why it mattered to me that Mr. Avery’s handwriting be beautiful, but I think if you wear a Japanese kimono around Coalfield, then you should also have beautiful, flowing handwriting that looks like calligraphy.
“So,” Mazzy said, interrupting the weird stuff going on in my head, “this is what’s important. He mentions to Henry that he’s figured out who did it. He says, right here, ‘I might be the only person in the world, Henry, who knows this for a fact.’ And then, look: ‘It’s my neighbor, a girl, a teenager named Frankie Budge.’”
I read it along with her, watching her finger move across the text. It made me gasp when I saw my own name. He had told. He had told someone.
“And that’s you,” Mazzy said.
“It’s my name, yes,” I admitted. I kept reading, and I could see Mazzy tense up for a second. Henry, it’s astonishing. This plain little country girl, so painfully awkward and dull—“Okay, wait, keep reading,” Mazzy said—might be the greatest artist I’ve ever known. She puts my work to shame. Your work, I’m sorry to say, love, as well.
She took the letter back and put it away. “He talks about your . . . your accident. He calls it something else, but, anyways, he mentions the posters, and he says that he closely observed them against the very first ones, and he had often noticed you walking around at strange hours, and he’s certain it was you. And that you told him it was you.”
“And this is how you found out?” I asked her. “Like, you weren’t trying to find out? You just wanted to write a book about this painter that no one has ever heard of?”
“I mean . . . yes.”
“And because that old lady gave you these secret letters, you now know that I made the poster?”