The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [89]
“Maybe that’s a clue,” I point out.
“It’s not the newspaper boy anymore. This guy’s older. Could that be part of it?” Serena asks.
“Maybe that’s where it started,” I add, already rearranging the panels. “The Cain book is supposedly ancient, right? Maybe they found it in a cave or something. Maybe that 184 King Street building is where the killer tried to hide. Something like— Something like this.”
“How does that make sense?” Serena asks. “It doesn’t even read right.”
“It’s not right,” my dad insists. “If all we’re supposed to get is the address and some random cave, then why include the close-up of the gun and the dodging bullet panels? What’d the curator say? When this story got rejected, Siegel or Shuster supposedly tore the whole thing to shreds. But of those shreds, these four panels, for some reason, got saved. That isn’t happening without a good reason.”
“Maybe it’s like the KKK thing,” Serena suggests. Reading our confusion, she reaches for a pamphlet on Superman history that she pulled from the museum gift shop. “In here. It’s . . . here,” she says, flipping to the page. “In the late 1940s, as a way to destabilize the Ku Klux Klan and make them think they were being infiltrated, the Superman radio show was covertly given the secret passwords that the Klan used to call and organize meetings. They were aired as part of the broadcast. Regular listeners had no idea. But the Klan knew. From there, they started infighting, looking for the snitch. The show hid it right in front of everyone.”
“Meaning what?” I ask. “Jerry Siegel hid it in front of everyone, too?”
We all look down at the panels. There are worse ideas.
“What about the first letters of the captions,” Serena says. “L . . . U . . . T . . . H . . . E . . . If there was an R, it’d spell Luther. Lex Luther.”
“I think Luthor has an o, not an e,” I point out. “But if you rearrange the letters: Let Uh . . . Tel Uh . . .”
“It doesn’t spell anything,” my dad says.
“Maybe it’s the whole text. Luckily he sees a torch,” I read from the first line.
For the next ten minutes, we rearrange the letters, coming up with such insights as “A Churches Likely Toes,” “A Checklist Holey Ruse,” and “Holy Accuser Heels Kit.” From the map we got at the car rental place, the search for 184 King Street is just as fruitful. There’s a King Avenue. But in all of Cleveland . . . all of Cuyahoga County . . . there’s not a single King Street.
“Maybe we still have the order of the panels wrong. Maybe the one with the torch is last, not first,” Serena says as she rearranges them. “Instead of the man reaching for the flame, maybe he’s tossing something into it.”
“So now they burned the book? Then why save any of this?” I ask.
Once again, Serena and I look down at the panels. My father hasn’t taken his eyes off them. And once again, like clockwork, he’s fourteen steps ahead of us.
“It’s not a word puzzle. It’s a visual one,” he says.
“What?”
“Comics are a visual medium. All the panels—they’re pictures, right? Now look at the pictures . . . see what they have in common.”
I stare but see nothing. “What’re you—? You spotted something, didn’t you?”
“A moon,” Serena blurts.
“Exactly. A moon,” my father says. “There’s a moon in each one.”
On the table, I see the moon in the Yowzie panel but nowhere else.
“Like Ellis’s tattoo,” my dad says, now excited. “He had a crescent moon in his tattoo.” But as I continue to stare . . .
“You still don’t see it, do you, Calvin? It’s in every panel—and not just in the sky,” my dad says, finally pointing it out. “Look at the base of the flame . . . the barrel of the gun.”
“Hocus-pocus,” Serena whispers to herself. “How’d you even see that?”
I’m tempted to ask the same, but I know the answer. My father was a painter. To match that restaurant lettering . . . he always had the perfect eye.
“So you think the moon’s the key?” Serena asks.
“Not the key,” he says. “More like the X. As in marks the spot.”
One by one, he peels each of the wet panels from the table.
“What’re you doing?” I challenge.
“Just watch,” he