Bill Ganelon was an angry old man. He had not been an old man when his anger had taken root. He had let the anger fester, though. He'd spent fifteen years in jail before he was released for good behavior—it was easy to have "good behavior" when he spent all of his time focused on the people who had put him in jail, who had made him their scapegoat.
When he got out, though, he discovered that the only one left who he could really blame for his incarceration was Superman. Luthor was dead. The goons he had had contact with in Metropolis were either dead, too, or already in jail being punished for something else. His anger took on a singular focus.
The trouble with Superman was that he was hard to pin down. Sure, he seemed to spend most of his time in Metropolis, but that had always been the case. It was his home-base, like Gotham was Batman's home-base. Yet different… Superman traveled the world on a daily basis, rousting ne'er do wells and such.
Bill began to put together a binder. When his parole officer asked what he was up to, he gladly showed it to him. It was full of neatly clipped newspaper articles pasted to black paper and preserved in clear sheet protectors. Each article spoke of Superman's heroics. There were print-outs from the Superman_Says blog, too.
"He sets a good example," Bill told his parole officer. "A shining example. He does stuff I can never hope to do, but I think he's a better role model than I had before."
His parole officer was mighty impressed.
After that, it was smooth sailing. When his parole officer made random checks, he simply glanced at the binder or the newspaper clippings strewn about, and assumed Bill was making an effort to change his ways and fit into the civilized world. He didn't look in the binder, so he didn't see the notes that had begun to fill the margins, written in white pencil on the black paper, or in red pen on the articles themselves. The internet searches into Lex Luthor's history went unnoticed or explained away as a peripheral interest.
When his parole officer checked in on him, Bill pumped him full of stories about his job on an overnight cleaning crew that cleaned several office buildings around the city. He was on the crew that did an insurance firm every night. Bill was in charge of the insides of the windows on the first floor, and dusting the main lobby. He filled his parole officer's ears with comments on the different qualities of various window cleaner brands, and his personal preference for Swiffer duster sheets (though the company always bought a knock-off brand).
Years later, when he truly had his own apartment, not a place in a halfway house, and he didn't have to check in with his parole officer anymore, his Superman project had taken over the entirety of his spare room. The walls were plastered with bits of paper and notes. He had notebooks filled with notes, half-finished thoughts, and suspicions.
Not long after his parole officer had stopped looking over his shoulder, Bill had requested and been granted a transfer to the Daily Planet's cleaning crew. He cleaned the first few floors, well away from the bullpen and any reporters who might recognize his face. His research had gotten much easier after that.
His one true lead in his search for Superman was the Man of Steel's closeness with Lois Lane.
It didn't take as long as he expected to pick up a few odd jobs in the neighborhood. He joined the lawn service that tended the house across the street and a few others along the block. After a week of that, chatting with some of the neighbors when they jogged past and whatnot, he began work as a handyman for the house behind and catty-corner to the Kents'.
Opportunity was with him. The Martins, the family he was working as a handyman for, went out of town for two weeks. Not only that; they went out of town and left him with a long list of jobs to do for them. And a key to their house.
On the third night of his watch, he finally saw something useful. He'd been camped out on the deck, sitting in a patio chair drinking beer he'd taken from the Martins' fridge. He had a camera (also borrowed from the Martins) with a very snazzy lens. It had a night setting that allowed him to take quality photos without a telltale flash, and a detachable scope sort of thing so that he could zoom in close on the Kents' windows and yard.
Most of the photos he had taken so far were uninteresting family shots. Clark made dinner. Various family members were in and out. He didn't have a direct view of the dining room, but they all disappeared for awhile around 7, so he assumed they sat down to dinner together. Quaint. Clark and Lois cleared dinner away together, and one of their daughters—he thought it was the youngest, the only one who still lived at home—took out the trash. Every night, the same routine.
Then, on the third night, just after 7 p.m., he noticed the patio door was open, but he didn't know when it had opened. Lois did the dishes by herself. He went back through his photos, looking when Clark had gone, but he couldn't pinpoint it. There was a suspicion creeping up on him, something too juicy and impossible to be true, but it fit so perfectly.
The daughter left the house shortly after dinner, tossing an overnight bag into the back seat of her car. That left Lois alone in the house. Bill wondered if Superman would make an appearance when she was alone, showing up for an interview or something less professional. Or maybe Clark would show up again, and Bill could have his suspicions confirmed on how he fit into the picture.
And then it happened. Exactly what he'd been waiting for.
Bill had zoomed in on the door to the balcony off Lois and Clark's bedroom. The door was mostly a glass panel with a gauzy curtain in place over it. The balcony door was open, though. Lois had opened it wide on the beautiful night after she'd changed into a silky-looking nightgown. He had probably taken more pictures than he needed of her standing out on the balcony in that nightgown.
Superman dropped out of the sky and landed on the balcony. It surprised Bill so much that he almost dropped the camera. It didn't surprise Lois, though. Bill had the camera refocused on the balcony in time to catch her practically throw herself into Superman's waiting arms. They kissed—one of those long, lingering kisses—out on the balcony. Normally, Bill supposed, that would go unnoticed. The surrounding houses didn't have a good vantage on the Kents' backyard or windows, not without the particularly good camera.
The particularly good camera that clicked away through that nice, long kiss. He captured several dozen shots as Superman and Mrs. Kent went at it on the balcony. As Lois wrapped her legs around the man she'd spent decades claiming she'd only had a professional relationship with. And then Superman carried Lois into the bedroom she shared with her husband.
Bill considered stopping there. He had enough on that single memory card (which was shortly backed-up on his laptop, and his external hard drive, and a USB drive he kept on his person at all times) to ruin both Superman and Lois Lane. Two birds with one stone.
But that creeping, juicy suspicion kept at him.
He remembered Clark Kent from Smallville High School. He had been a gangly, awkward teenaged boy through middle school, but by high school he had figured himself out, even if he was still growing faster than anybody else in his class. He had never gone out for sports, though the coaches all wanted him to, at least at first. It hadn't taken long for them to figure out that he was a complete klutz with awful eyesight—always walking into things, tripping over door jambs, cracking pencils when he tried to write. And he'd been a dork, always reading some classic novel or other, never being up-to-date on the school's latest victory. He'd been one of those kids on the peripheral—not an outcast, because he was quite likeable, but not particularly close friends with anybody, either.
But what if he'd been awkward because he was from a different planet? What if he hadn't played sports because he had Superman's strength and didn't want anybody to notice? Or, more like the Clark Bill knew, what if he hadn't played sports because he didn't want to hurt anybody with his otherworldly advantage? And the tripping and walking into things could be explained by the x-ray vision; maybe he hadn't known how it worked yet.
The more Bill thought about it, the more it made sense. And the more it made sense, the happier Bill was.
Less than a week after he'd staked out the Kent house, Bill hired two photographers who were really just thugs. They would break into the Kent house while nobody was there and take pictures of everything. Gathering evidence.
"There will be nobody in the house from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.," Bill said, handing each of the photographers sitting across the table from him a list. "You are the experts at breaking-and-entering, so I'll leave getting past the alarm system and into the house up to you. Once you are inside, I need answers to all the questions on that list. Take pictures of everything while you're at it."
"Everything?"
"Everything. Take pictures of the house. Take pictures of the pictures they have on their walls. Take pictures of the furniture. Do they have crappy, secondhand stuff, or did they buy a new leather set last month? Is the bathroom filthy? What shows do they have on their TiVo? Do they have TiVo?"
The men nodded, paging through the list. It was extensive. Bill was figuring that the more evidence he built up, the better. He didn't have a plan yet. He wasn't sure, exactly, what he would do with the evidence. All he knew was that he wanted it. He wanted proof.
A week later, his checking account was almost entirely empty from paying the two idiots with the cameras to answer his questions. He couldn't risk breaking in himself, though. First off, he wasn't that good at breaking into places or disarming alarms. And second, if he was caught all his plans would have dissolved before they'd begun.
The thugs—a pair of former PIs who had been driven out of Gotham by the Dent Act—had done a good job. They had not only gotten in and out of the Kent house without being detected, but they had each filled the memory cards of their cameras.
The house itself had to have cost a million dollars. It was nestled in the suburban-like neighborhood where Metropolis's elite settled. It was on the edge of the island closest to downtown. A gated community, of course, to keep the riffraff out.
All the houses in the neighborhood were different. The houses farthest from the gate, closest to the coast, were the oldest. They had roots in the bungalow, but, more often than not, they had been expanded upon as time went on. There was a smattering of cookie-cutter type ramblers close to the gate, the newest additions. And in between these, the special-made selections—the houses that were modeled after various styles of houses from around the world. The Kents inhabited one such house, a tall Victorian model with a pillared porch on the front and a small turret. It was an unassuming creamy green color with dark maroon shutters.
It had two stories, plus the room in the turret. There was Adirondack-type furniture on the front porch, and a flowery front garden. The front room was done up as the formal parlor, with a big decorative rug on the floor beneath a glossy coffee table and sophisticated-looking furniture. There was a fireplace on the far wall with awful portraits of the family sitting on the mantle.
Bill had photos of those portraits, and he'd cropped them so that he had been able to print off just the pictures. He'd numbered them so that he could keep the order right—the one on the far left was number one, the one on the far right was number seven. Number one was a picture of the son wearing a tuxedo, probably about eighteen years old. Number two was a photo of the eldest girl wearing the cap and gown of a high school graduate. Number three was the wedding photo of Lois and Clark; they stood under a linen canopy in a grassy field, smiling at each other. Number four, six and seven were the other daughters dressed nicely and smiling cheerfully at the camera. Number five was a family portrait that wasn't quite up to date—the youngest daughter hadn't hit puberty yet, the other daughters were scattered through puberty, and the son was a young adult.
There were baby pictures hanging in the hall, one for each of the children. The kitchen was nothing special. Clean. The cupboards were full of dishes and such, the drawers full of silverware and utensils. The pantry was full of food. The dining room was barely big enough to fit the long table and all the chairs. The last room on the first floor was a den sort of thing with a big TV and a couch, several big armchairs. It was the coziest room on the ground floor.
The stairs were lined with photos, candids of the family and their friends. Bill cropped and printed them off, too.
Upstairs were the bedrooms. They were annoyingly normal. Beds and dressers, closets. There were clothes and shoes. The youngest girl still lived at home, so hers was the messiest—clothes on the floor, desk littered with notes-to-self, bed only mostly made. The master bedroom was similarly normal and lived-in; big bed (made), closet divided in two and filled with perfectly normal clothes.
There was a spiral staircase up to the turret room—a big, round room with walls full of windows. There were two desks, many file cabinets, and a TV mounted above the door.
It was a remarkably normal house for Superman to live in.