Part 3 — Behind The Furnace
I did not go back inside. I called the Akron police non-emergency line and asked for a welfare check on a person who may have lived in our house in 1987. Then I asked Tom to wait with me on the porch swing.
Officer Denise Carter listened carefully and took notes. The Grubers attorney, reached by phone, gave permission to open the wall. Officer Carter cut the padlock herself. Behind the furnace was not a tragedy at all. It was a 1962 fallout shelter, a concrete room with two bunks, shelves of old canned peaches, and hundreds of pencil drawings taped to the walls by a girl of seventeen.
Walter Gruber had sealed it in 1988 after his daughter left home, and he had given the key to Marge across the fence, to keep until she was ready for it. The knocking Marge had heard was the old water pipes, hammering when the furnace kicked on. The plumber told us it was a five-minute fix.
The missing person file told the rest. Carol Gruber had run away at seventeen after a fight about going to college. She called her mother from Portland, Oregon in 1988. Chief Gruber had filed the report himself, and then closed it, ashamed of how he had spoken to her.
Officer Carter asked Portland police for a welfare check. An hour later, Carol herself answered the phone at her veterinary clinic. She wept. “Is my dad alive?” she asked.
Some doors are locked from the outside because the person who locked them could not bear to look inside.
Our attorney reviewed the seller disclosure. The form had mentioned the shelter in one vague sentence. The Grubers agreed to a $9,000 credit for the cleanup, and they sent us a long, honest letter of apology. Mrs. Gruber moved to Portland to be near her daughter, and Walter joined her in the spring.
Tom and I cleaned out the shelter together. We kept the drawings and mailed them to Carol in a flat box, wrapped in tissue paper.
Marge and Lou arrived the next day with a casserole and an apology for scaring me. We ate on the back steps, and Marge told me stories about the little girl who used to draw on the sidewalk.
The room became Tom wine cellar. On the wall by the door, one pencil drawing stayed, a front porch with an oak tree.
In April, Carol came to visit. She stood in our front yard for a long time, looked up at the swing, and said softly, “That was my swing.”
