The plaster was old and brittle. It didn’t take much to pry it free. I whacked the wall with the back of my hand and more chunks fell.
A hoof.
“Huh. ” The hoof wasn’t life-sized or anything, but it meant a much bigger drawing or painting was still hidden. I glanced around the room for something larger and more solid than my hand, and I saw a rusty shovel lying beside the stairwell door.
I picked it up, got a good grip, then swung it.
After the first impact or two, I had to hold my breath against the airborne grime and close my eyes against the dust. But it gave me more of the horse, and part of a rider. I swung the shovel higher. More wall dissolved. More plaster came down.
After a few minutes of effort, I’d revealed a magnificently amateur painting of a white-hooded man on a galloping steed.
“Huh. ” I said, and then I said it again because I couldn’t think of anything new to add.
The mural was somewhat smaller than the window next to it, and composed in a style that could best be described as earnest but unpolished. It displayed thick lines, flat color work, and a shabby grip on the basics of proportion. It was obviously meant to be inspiring, or possibly intimidating, but it was damn-near comical.
I stood back and made another scan of the room, paying closer attention to the walls. Here and there more similar pieces—probably by the same artist—peeked through the plaster. I gave one of the more perplexing spots a slap with the shovel and turned up a burning cross that looked almost jolly.
I also found two more partial horses and riders, but I couldn’t see the point in exposing them. Whatever was lurking beneath the plaster was no lost Picasso, after all. I’d gotten the message, or at least the general idea of it.
The bank building was old, probably from the middle of the nineteenth century. An upstairs room in a professional establishment—a secret Klan meeting place? Sure. It wasn’t surprising. Hell, it was only marginally interesting.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked Ann Alice, but she didn’t feel like being helpful anymore.
My phone rang, cluttering up the quiet with a jingling tune. It was Nick.
“All done here. You still want coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, eyes still firmly planted on the first horseman. “But let’s go somewhere else. I’ll meet you at Greyfriar’s in about twenty minutes. ”
When I met him twenty minutes later, Nick was his usual charmingly direct self, and greeted me with a grimace.
“What the hell happened to you? You look like you’ve been—”
“Climbing around in a dirty old attic?”
“Yeah, but worse. What’s the deal?” He used his foot to kick a chair out for me, but I shook my head at him.
“Give me a minute to go clean up a tad. ” I left him for the bathroom, where I learned that his reaction had once again been understated. I was covered in streaked drywall dust and century-old plaster, which had transformed to a pale, muddy state in every crevice of my clothing.
I washed up, tied my hair back into a fat bun, and joined him again.
“Better,” he appraised.
I sat down. “You’re not going to believe what I just found. ”
“In Grandma’s attic?”
“In the attic of the old Clark’s furniture building, over on Market Street. ”
He lifted an eyebrow, then lifted his mug. “What were you doing there?”
“Long story. Not important. The important part is what I found up there. Under the plaster in the second-story storage space, somebody painted a bunch of old Klan murals. ”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. They were plastered over ages ago, but the plaster’s falling down and you can see them if you poke at it. ”
“That accounts for the peculiar new ‘product’ you’ve got going on in your hair. ”