It’s a fine explanation, but this isn’t the kind of neighborhood where people leave their doors unlocked.
“Mr. Johnsel!” I call again.
Still no response.
Next to me, Naomi doesn’t move. I know how she works. Federal agents need warrants before they can march into a strange house.
“C’mon, I’m a potential suspect wanted for questioning—you can chase me inside,” I tell her, grabbing the doorknob.
“Cal, wait!”
Too late. “Mr. Johnsel, you there? Anybody home?” I ask as I step inside.
The main hallway and kitchen are both empty. All the lights in the house are off. That’s a good sign. Johnsel and his wife are at least eighty years old. Maybe they did forget to lock the door.
“Mr. Johnsel? . . . Mrs. Vivian?” my dad adds, halfway up the stairs.
I turn to follow. Naomi’s right behind him, her gun clutched in both hands and pointed down by her knees.
We keep calling their names, circling upward past the second floor. A few of the bedroom doors are closed, but again, all the lights are off. Nothing but an empty house. I head for the third floor.
“Dammit!” my dad shouts.
“What? What’s wrong?” I call out, racing up the stairs two at a time.
Stumbling onto the third-floor landing, I follow the noise into the open room with the exposed wooden slats along the ceiling and the milk crates and religious books stacked along the walls. The heart of creation. Jerry Siegel’s bedroom.
“So this is where he came up with Superman?” Naomi asks.
“Doesn’t matter,” my dad says, pointing to the walls. “It’s already picked clean.”
He’s right about that. The rest of the house is filled with ancient peeling wallpaper that hasn’t been changed in decades, but up here . . . I didn’t notice it before . . . all four walls are peeled away, revealing nothing but cracked plaster and some fake pine paneling just between the windows.
“Can we possibly be more stupid?” Naomi asks.
“Don’t say that,” I shoot back. “We had to come and check.”
“But to think that after seventy years, no one would come here and pull the wallpaper themselves—”
“Okay, let’s just regroup . . . rethink,” I jump in. “Maybe there’s something we missed.”
“What’s to miss? We heard the story fifteen times,” Naomi says. “Young Jerry lying awake in this room . . . staring out at the stupid crabapple tree and pining for his dead dad. Where else is he gonna hide it? In his sock drawer? Under the floorboards? Maybe he tucked it behind the wood paneling,” she shouts, kicking at the pine panels between the two windows.
“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 that says she doesn’t buy it, either. But before she can say anything, my dad pulls his hand from the hole. He’s crestfallen.
“It’s empty,” he tells us.
“You sure?” I ask, waving him off the chair. “Lemme see.”
Standing on the chair, I reach into the hole and pat around. Filled with dust and old bits of plaster, the space feels like a narrow shelf built into the wall. But whatever was once there is long gone.
“Maybe there’s another somewhere else,” my dad says, already skating his fingertips along the wall on our right. Now excited, Naomi starts patting down the wall by the door. But within a minute, it’s clear this is the only hole.
“You sure it’s empty?” Naomi asks me.
“I’m telling you, it’s just dust and sand and whatever old crusty stuff settles in houses after seventy years.” Rummaging in the hole, I sweep out most of the debris, which rains down in a gray cloud, followed by the original flap of wallpaper that was covering the hole. Still attached at the base, the torn flap sticks out at me like a tongue, then sags downward against the wall. But it’s not until the flap of wallpaper dangles that I finally see what’s printed on the opposite side. It’s hand-drawn . . . black-and-white . . . like an old 1930s . . .