Dark Mural Read online

  Dark Mural

  Nicole Tang Noonan Mystery #1

  By Rick Homan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First published 2018

  Copyright 2018 by Rick Homan

  www.RickHoman.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, establishments, events, or locales is purely incidental.

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to my Sisters in Crime (and brothers); my fellow writers and the librarians at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco; and most of all to my wife, Ann.

  Chapter 1

  As I sat at an umbrella table in front of Emma’s Deli in Blanton, Ohio, a man walking up the street stopped a few yards away and stared at me.

  It wasn’t the five-second stare. Everyone I met in Ohio needed five seconds to stare when they laid eyes on me for the first time. It took them that long to understand they were meeting an Asian woman with freckles. The only exceptions to this rule were people who had seen my name, Nicole Tang Noonan, on my resume. They needed only three seconds.

  I couldn’t be sure of the expression on his face because he was silhouetted against a bright sky, but I had the feeling his upper lip was raised in disgust. He wore work boots, jeans, a t-shirt, and a cap with a logo I didn’t recognize.

  The sight of him made my skin crawl.

  When Abbie came out of the deli and sat on the other side of the table, he shook his head and walked on by.

  I looked to Abbie for an explanation. “What’s his problem?”

  “Trust me: You don’t want to know.”

  Abbie Krauss, assistant professor of economics, was my new best friend. We both lived in the section of on-campus housing devoted to single faculty: a series of wooden sheds with no porches and no landscaping, set in straight lines on either side of a gravel road. They looked like the kind of unit provided as disaster relief for evacuees after a flood or hurricane. We called them Rabbit Hutches.

  “I guess people around here aren’t used to seeing Asians unless they’re running a restaurant,” I said. The family, who operated the Golden Palace two blocks away, were the only Asians I had seen outside of Columbus. This was mind-boggling for me since I was from San Francisco where a third of the people are Asian.

  Abbie shook her head. “Not everyone around here is like that. His name is Huey Littleton. He’s part of a big, extended family—lots of cousins—and most of them have never been more than fifty miles from home. They’ve been here quite a few generations, so they seem to think the entire county should be only for people like them.”

  “White people?”

  Abbie nodded. “Preferably relatives.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Bow and step aside when he passes by?”

  “I know it’s insulting, but it’s the way things are here, and in a way it works. For instance, over on Maple Street, there are two bars, Buddy's and Marten’s Tavern. Buddy's is for locals like Huey. Anyone from the college would take their life in their hands if they went there on a Saturday night. Marten’s is where students can go and nobody bothers them.”

  “Charming,” I said. “Be sure to tell me if there’s anything else I can do to avoid frightening the horses.”

  “So what did you want to talk about?” asked Abbie.

  “My first week of classes is not exactly taking flight.”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “I’ve heard there’s a mural in the chapel that dates from the time of the Civil War.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “So you’ve seen it?” I asked. “What’s it like?”

  “It depicts the group led by Felix Fuchs who came here from Germany and established the religious commune, which eventually became Fuchs College.”

  “How can I get in to take a look at it?”

  “Drop by Facilities Management and sign out a key. What are you thinking?”

  “If the mural is any good, I’d like to meet my art history class in the chapel. I think my students would be more interested in learning about the history of someone else’s art if they first looked at some art that is part of their own college’s history.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” said Abbie. “Let me know how it goes. There’s another thing you might do. Have you met Jacob Schumacher?”

  The name did not ring a bell. I shook my head.

  “He’s the chairman of the history department. He’ll be glad to hear that you’re taking an interest in the mural or anything to do with the history of the place. One of his ancestors was part of that original group who came here from Germany. It’s a good idea to have him on your side.”

  Key in hand, I walked down College Avenue to the chapel. It was a plain, square building about thirty-five feet on each side with an entry hall on the west. No effort had been made to create an impression on the visitor; no materials had been squandered. It had no steeple. What charm it had, it achieved through proportion. In this it reminded me of the Shaker furniture I had seen in museums. The German immigrants who settled this land were not Shakers, but they lived in similar circumstances and apparently made what they needed in the same spirit. They took pleasure in simplicity.

  The eastern side of the building had windows all the way across to provide ample morning light. The north side had no windows, and that was where the mural had been painted. I couldn’t make out any detail as I peered in, but I could tell it covered the entire wall and included several vignettes.

  I let myself in, walked to the center of the large room, took in the mural, and was struck by its power. It was what we used to call folk art. This artist may have been untrained but was not unpracticed. Most important, the work was free of pretension. He or she had not felt any need to emulate the styles of great artists or strive for some conventional notion of beauty. Instead, he had developed his own vocabulary and used it to communicate what was important to him.

  The mural contained several scenes and dozens of figures—men, women, and children—perhaps more than a hundred. They filled the wall, which was more than thirty feet wide and almost as high, plus a triangular space above, reaching to the roofline. The primary colors looked washed out, either because time had faded them or because the mural needed cleaning. Behind all the other images was a single tree with its roots in the ground near the floor and its crown filling the space near the ceiling. It was so faint that it appeared as if through fog, and everything else shone in front of it.

  I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into. I had expected to find a simple landscape with some cows on the hillsides and a few houses. This mural was complex and detailed. Rather than viewing one scene from a single perspective, it included multiple scenes, each in its own perspective, as if the artist wanted to show things happening simultaneously. It was going to take me a while to understand the work before I could sort out what I would present to my students.

  Monday morning was chilly, a reminder that my first Ohio winter was coming. I set out with a spring in my step to walk to the chapel, eager to meet my students and see how they would respond to a real work of art.

  I don’t know what made me glance at my little yellow car as I left my Rabbit Hutch, but, when I did, I saw black spray paint on the hood. The crude, slashing lines spelled, “JAP OUT.” Frozen in my tracks, I guessed that, if “JAP” was a reference to Asians in general, then I was looking at a racist slur, and it was aimed at me. My heart started thumping.

  I looked up and
down Montgomery Avenue to see if anyone else was around or if any of my neighbors was looking out a window. I suppose I wanted witnesses, though I was also looking for anyone with a can of spray paint in his hand. I saw no one.

  I pulled out my phone to call campus security and noticed I had about ten minutes until it was time to meet my students. Not wanting to be late for my own class, I started jogging toward the chapel.

  Chapter 2

  No one was waiting when I got to the chapel, so I unlocked the door and phoned security. As I recited the few facts I had to the dispatcher, my students came walking up College Avenue, and I waved them inside. The dispatcher promised to send a car, we hung up, and I took a moment to calm the rage building inside me and focus on art history before going in.

  With the students sitting in a semicircle, facing the mural, I was about to speak when I heard voices from the front door.

  “I told you we’d be late,” said Kate Conrad, an especially enthusiastic student of art history, today wearing a sequined t-shirt, jeans, and ballet flats with a satin varsity-style jacket. Devon Manus, who usually seemed more interested in Kate than she was in him, followed her. He looked as if he had gotten out of bed just in time to throw on a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a bomber jacket.

  After they found chairs, I said, “Look at the mural.”

  Most of the students glanced at the wall for a few seconds, then looked back at me. Kate kept her eyes on the mural, moving them from side to side and top to bottom.

  “What did you see?” I asked.

  Ursula Wilmot scowled. As usual, she was dressed as if on her way to an office job and had her ring binder open on her lap, ready to take notes.

  Byron Hawley, dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, all smeared with many colors of paint, so everyone would know he was an artist, said, “Poor use of perspective. Little sense of anatomy. Limited color palette.”

  Kate said, “The life of a community.”

  Looking around the room, I asked, “What goes on in this community?”

  This got some of them squirming in their seats. Ursula Wilmot now had both hands wrapped around her ballpoint pen as if she were about to snap it in two.

  Kate spoke up. “Work. Worship. Life and Death.”

  “Let’s take another look,” I said.

  They all looked at the mural, and their eyes were busy.

  “Keep looking,” I said, as I walked around them and went to where I had left my backpack and shopping bag on a chair by the lectern. I tore two sheets for each of them off a pad of newsprint. I also gave each of them a crayon. “Maybe we should take some notes.”

  Most of them put their books and backpacks in their laps and started making tiny marks on the newsprint. Kate got an extra chair on which to rest her feet and started drawing. Devon sat an arm’s length away from her, glancing first at the mural, then at Kate’s drawing, and then doodling on his own sheet.

  “Are these going to be graded?” asked Ursula. Her sheet of newsprint was still blank.

  “If anyone asks me that again, I will grade them,” I replied.

  Everyone got to work.

  I walked around the room, sneaking peeks at their drawings just to make sure they were giving it the old college try. Some of the students were making clusters of tiny figures, separated by lots of open space. Byron Hawley had produced an accurate sketch of the lower half of the mural and was adding his own details and shading. Devon’s page was a collection of starts and stops: stick figures without arms, a tree with only half its crown.

  Kate’s page was a wild collection of stick figures with punctuation marks, circles, arrows, and dotted lines that seemed to suggest relationships. She was the only one to represent all parts of the mural: the scenes of work across the bottom of the wall, the scenes of worship across the upper part, and the crown of the tree reaching to the roofline. It looked like she was making connections between images and interpreting the overall layout.

  In other words, she was doing what I’d done yesterday afternoon when I spent a couple of hours with the mural. How does a student in a beginner’s art history course understand a work of art on a level usually achieved by graduate students? I started getting excited, thinking about how much Kate might accomplish this semester.

  After a while I stood before them again and asked, “What goes on in this community?”

  This time the answers came quickly. They were looking at their drawings as they called them out. “Farming . . . I think they’re harvesting wheat . . . Picking fruit . . . Cooking . . . Must have been Thanksgiving dinner. There are five women in the kitchen . . . I counted six . . . Is that one guy giving a sermon? . . . Building something . . . I don’t know what those people in the middle are doing . . . I think that group of people on the right are singing in a choir . . . What are those little things at the top? . . . It’s hard to see up there.”

  Our fifty-minute period was almost done. “I think we know a lot more about this mural than we did when we walked in this morning. Do you think we’ve seen all there is to see?”

  Kate laughed and said, “I think there might be a few things we haven’t picked up yet.”

  “My point here is that we look at something, and think we’ve seen it, but when we start looking for things, we understand that there’s a lot more to see.”

  I was starting to sound like Obi Wan Kenobi, so I decided to wrap it up. “Keep your drawings handy. We’ll refer to them again. I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

  Someone called out, “Are we meeting here again?”

  “No. In the classroom.”

  They packed up and started leaving. Kate approached me and said, “I’ve been at this school three years, and I’ve never been in here and seen this mural. It’s really interesting.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “If we’re not going to meet in here again, is there some way I could come in and look at it some more?”

  These were words every teacher wants to hear. “I might come in Thursday afternoon to study it,” I said. “You’re welcome to join me.”

  “Thanks, I will,” she said. With that, she turned and headed for the door.

  Devon also stopped to talk to me. “Great class, Dr. Noonan. I really learned a lot.”

  From the door Kate made a loud kissing sound, laughed, and walked out. I was surprised to see Devon look embarrassed at having his tactic exposed.

  “Thank you, Devon,” I said. “I’m glad you learned a lot. I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

  He trotted off toward the door like a golden retriever with a tennis ball.

  I dropped my backpack and shopping bag in my office and walked over to the snack bar in the Student Services Center, which looked out on a lawn that was bounded by the library and the Old Classroom Building. Both of those buildings dated from the 1920s and had been designed in the collegiate gothic style. The pointed arches and carved ornaments gave the impression of a medieval European town. By contrast the Student Services Center, which had been built in the 1970s, had the feeling of a shopping mall.

  After eating most of my yogurt and banana, I called campus security. The woman I had spoken with was no longer answering the phone, so I had to give my name and explain why I had called earlier.

  I heard a keyboard rattling before the officer said, “Yes, I have the incident report in front of me. Patrol was dispatched at 10:03. The officer reported the words, ‘JAP OUT,’ spray-painted on the hood of a yellow Toyota Tercel. A photograph is attached to the report. What is your question?”

  “I’m new to this campus, so I’m wondering what security does in a situation like this.”

  “In any instance of vandalism, we increase patrols in the area. We’ll also search our database for similar recent reports to see if there’s a pattern.”

  “I see. Have there been other instances of messages like this spray-painted anywhere on campus?”

  “I don’t have that information in front of me. If you like, Dr. Noonan, I can attach
a note to this report and have someone give you a call when that’s available.”

  I agreed to that suggestion, thanked him, and hung up. I was a little surprised he didn’t address the possibility that this was a hate crime. I needed to think about whether to pursue that angle on top of trying to get three courses on track, learn my way around a new school, and get around to shopping for some winter clothing. I decided for the moment to wait and see what campus security would come up with, but my mind was in such a state that further routine work was out of the question. I packed up and headed back to my Rabbit Hutch. It was time to find out who spray-painted my car.

  Chapter 3

  After a quick change from classroom biz-casual into a tank-top and knit pants with a flannel over shirt, I walked up Montgomery Avenue to the next Rabbit Hutch and knocked on the door. No one answered. The same happened at the next Rabbit Hutch and the one after that.

  I turned up Ohio Avenue, which was lined on both sides with duplexes probably built around 1960. These were real houses, with peaked roofs, built of brick. I’d heard these went to couples with or without kids and sometimes to single faculty after they’d been on campus a few years.

  After knocking on a few doors I found someone at home, introduced myself, waited for the five-second stare, told her what had happened to my car, and asked if she’d seen anyone who didn’t live in the neighborhood passing by last evening or had heard anyone prowling around during the night. She said she hadn’t, expressed disgust at what had been done to my car, and offered to help in any way she could.

  I had the same conversation three more times as I worked my way up one side of Ohio Avenue and down the other, but my luck changed when I came to the next-to-the-last duplex, and the door was answered by an African-American man in his thirties. His black loafers were gleaming, his slacks had a knife-edge crease, and he wore a purple sweater that complemented his dark skin. He was only a few inches taller than me and neither heavy nor thin. He was compact, well-proportioned.