The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [76]
“What about the attic?” my dad asks. “Was there wallpaper up there?”
“No,” I say. “It’s completely—”
“Crabapple,” Naomi blurts.
“Wha?”
We both turn to see Naomi staring out of the room’s side-by-side double-paned windows. “The crabapple tree. You can’t see it from here.”
My dad and I race next to her. Sure enough, the never cleaned windows are thick with dust and remnants of cracked paint, but they still give a muddy view of the front lawn as well as the snow-covered street and the equally beat-up houses that sit across the way.
“I don’t get it,” my father says.
“Look!” Naomi insists, pointing out to the right.
We press our foreheads against the cold, filthy glass, but no matter how hard we push, there’s no view of the crabapple tree that sits in the alley on the right side of the house.
Pulling back, I check the far right side of the room, but there’s nothing but wall.
“These are the only windows in here,” Naomi points out, still at the front windows.
“So if you can’t see the crabapple tree, either the whole Superman creation story is wrong . . .”
“. . . or this wasn’t Jerry’s room,” Naomi says excitedly. “Is there another room with windows that overlook—?”
“Right below us,” I say, already rushing toward the stairs.
52
There,” Naomi says, racing toward the small window, then pointing outside at the surprisingly full tree that stood alone in the alleyway on the east side of the house.
“You sure that’s a crabapple?” I ask.
She nods. “You can see the fruit.”
“So then this,” I say, turning back to the modest room lined with family photos, old track team trophies, and a National Geographic foldout poster of a mountain lion, “this is where Superman was really created.”
“They painted over it, but there’s definitely wallpaper here,” my dad adds, already tracing the wall with his fingertips. For a moment, I forgot he used to be a painter. “Here’s the seam,” he adds, nicking the 1970s cocoa brown wallpaper with his fingernail.
“So what now?” I ask. “Peel the whole room down?”
“I peeled wallpaper in my old apartment,” Naomi says. “Best thing is to wet it with soapy water—it’ll come right off.”
Behind us, though, my dad’s still running his fingertips from one side of the wall to the other. When he reaches the end, he raises his hand a few inches and goes back the way he came, like an old typewriter. The way his fingers skate along the wall . . . it’s as if he’s feeling for something.
“What’re you doing?” I ask.
“Playing a hunch,” he replies, now on his tiptoes with his hand reaching upward. When it gets too high, he pulls a nearby chair into place, climbing up so he can touch the top of the wall, right where it meets the ceiling. Naomi shoots me a look.
“Lloyd,” I call out to my father.
He’s not listening. “Most people use wallpaper for decoration,” he explains without looking back at us. “But in older houses, especially if you had access to a lot of it, which I’m guessing they did if they were drawing on it . . .” A few feet from the corner, he stops, his five open fingertips pressing against the top of the wall, sucking it like a starfish. I can see the way the paper gives. He feels something underneath.
“. . . it could also give you one hell of a hiding spot,” he says, shutting his eyes so he can focus on his touch.
With a hard push, he presses his fingertips against the wall. And with one final shove, the paper tears, flopping inward like a fallen playing card and—in a small, decades-old puff of smoke and dust—revealing a softball-size hole that swallows my dad’s hand up to his wrist.
“H-How’d you know that was there?” Naomi asks him.
“I told you,” he says, reaching up into the hole like Tom searching for Jerry, “playing a hunch.”
Naomi gives me a look