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It flared to life, illuminating the gaudy floral pattern of the wallpaper. That same bright light clearly showed the spot where I’d begun to pick at it the night before, the edge now starting to curl slightly.
“Do you need this?” Hazel asked, proffering the bucket she held.
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Let me pull at it a little bit and see what I can find.”
I climbed the stairs while she followed, casting furtive glances in every direction as if she expected a whole army of demons to emerge from the walls and start attacking us.
To tell the truth, I was sort of on edge, too. It was more unnerving than I’d thought it would be to have the house so deadly silent, the only sound the faint whisper of the air conditioning in the background. And the air in here really was downright cold, so that made my story about the hoodie a bit more plausible.
I grabbed the edge of the wallpaper and pulled. To my relief, it came up in one continuous sheet, pulling away from the plaster beneath with a weird sucking noise that sounded somehow sticky.
Hazel looked on, eyes wide with shock. “It shouldn’t do that.”
“Shouldn’t do what?”
“Come off in one piece like that. If this wallpaper is as old as the house — or even if the previous owners hung it years ago — it should be really dry and come off in patches…and only then after a lot of coaxing.” She came closer and put her fingers on the section of wall I’d just revealed. “This still feels damp.”
“You mean it’s new?”
“Sure feels that way.”
Now it was my turn to stare at the wall in consternation. “How long does wallpaper take to dry?”
Hazel shrugged. “It depends on a lot of factors. But we’ve been damper than normal here, thanks to all the thunderstorms, so it could take up to a week or even longer.”
A week. My parents had closed the deal on the house six days earlier. But what did that mean, exactly?
Frowning, I kept pulling on the wallpaper, tearing it off in huge sheets. Hazel caught them as I yanked them down, and then set them over to one side of the landing.
They revealed a clear patch in the plaster, about two feet wide and five feet in height, starting at the baseboard. For a second or two, I could only stare at it.
My friend spoke next, sounding hesitant. “Do you think there was something wrong with the house, so they fixed it quickly and then put up new wallpaper, hoping your parents wouldn’t notice?”
That seemed like the most plausible explanation. Shady, yes, but all sorts of underhanded stuff went on during real estate transactions. However, my instincts were telling me that there was more going on here than a simple ploy to conceal some bad plumbing.
I set my hands on my hips and said, “I think we need to tear down this wall.”
15
Household Demons
For a second or two, Hazel only stared at me. Then she seemed to find her voice and said, “You want to do what?”
“I need to get inside this wall and see what’s going on in there.”
That declaration earned me an emphatic head shake. “Selena, this house is more than a hundred years old. That’s plaster and lath you’re talking about, not drywall. You’d need a crowbar to open it up.”
Right. I hadn’t even stopped to think about that aspect of the situation, since I’d be the first to admit I wasn’t exactly what you could call an expert when it came to old houses. I quickly ran down the list of items in my car that might help in this particular situation and came up with exactly one. “Would a tire iron work?”
Her eyes widened even further. “You’re seriously going to tear up this wall with a tire iron?”
Good question. My mother had told me it was okay to pull down some of the wallpaper, but that wasn’t exactly the same as giving me carte blanche to demo the wall using automotive tools. Well, better to ask forgiveness than permission…and obviously I would pay whatever it took to repair the wall and hang new wallpaper, or have it painted if that’s what she and Tom would prefer.
“Yes,” I said. “Hold tight.”
I all but ran down the steps and out the front door, then grabbed the tire iron from the Beetle’s cargo compartment. When I returned, Hazel had moved closer to the wall and was running her fingers over the plaster.
“This is all new, too,” she told me. “That’s probably part of the reason why the wallpaper wasn’t curing properly. The glue couldn’t set while the plaster underneath was still damp.”
