The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [50]
The drag marks came up the steps. Pa’s heavy body had left a deep trench in the mud. Foot trails had dried in front of the stairs, continuing out behind the house from when we’d gone to check the cuckoos. The footprints had hardened like you see sometimes in concrete sidewalks. Like fossils! Grum’s shoe fossils wobbled at the edges, showing how careful she was to find a firm grip. Barbie and I had both been barefoot. Barbie’s big toes stuck out of the prints like fat heads. I filed it away for teasing later.
Who had brought Pa inside? I tried walking in the half-erased tracks under the drag marks to identify them. They couldn’t be mine—I’d been sleeping. They couldn’t be Grum’s because Grum couldn’t drag Pa into the house without winding up in an ambulance. The prints looked longer than Ma’s feet, more like Pa’s. But Pa couldn’t have dragged himself. It must have been Barbie, even though I didn’t see any fathead toes. She was the one who’d suggested bringing him inside in the first place. Her feet were the one part of her that I hadn’t outgrown this week. Oh, and her fingernails.
Now that it was daylight and I had followed the foot fossils most of the way there already, I thought I’d look inside Jed’s castle. Maybe I’d find some kind of clue there that we’d missed the first million times we searched. After he didn’t come home, Ma had checked all of Jed’s pockets while me and Barbie rifled through his books and papers hunting for names, phone numbers, anything that might give us a lead. We contacted all his friends from school, all his old girlfriends, even a bunch of people he knew from marches, protests, rallies, and such. Nobody had seen or heard a trace of him.
Upon opening the door, the sweet smell inside the castle hit me again, but I was hit harder by the sight of the empty wall where the cuckoos had hung. It used to be just plain, grayish-white Sheetrock with white stripes of joint compound because Jed didn’t want to take the time to paint before moving in. Well, not anymore. Now it had an intricate design, all beautiful swoops and swirls of pastel colors, just faint enough that we wouldn’t have noticed it last night in the candlelight. The pattern looked a little like the baby blankets Grum crocheted. No, more like seashells all tossed together, or a bunch of old jewelry spread out on a satin sheet. Then I realized exactly what it reminded me of: the art in Boots Odum’s house. His paintings.
Had he come out here and painted Jed’s wall? No, of course not.
Had Jed come back and done it? If so, it had to be after Thursday morning when Stupid showed up inside the henhouse. I’d have noticed the change when I checked the castle then. Was the paint still wet? I ran my finger along the sea-shell curves, and that’s when I realized something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
There wasn’t any paint on the drywall. The color came from underneath the layer of unpainted paper. It had an almost shimmering lifelike quality to it. And as I ran my finger over it, the color began to move. I didn’t need any magic glasses to see it.
I yelped. Because now I knew exactly what it was. That stuff. Whatever it was in the rocks that made the amazing colors. It had somehow leached into the wall. And somehow set the cuckoos off. And who knew what else it could somehow do? Straighten Miss Beverly’s neck . . . and turn her prized poodle into a statue.
Was that stuff what Jed had tried to warn me and Barbie about? Only one way to know, and that was to find him. Which I’d planned to do in the first place, before I got distracted. If only my brain could be more like Barbie’s sock drawer.
I went running out of the castle straight to my bike and was rounding the corner of the house when I had to slam