Friday, November 10, 2006

And I Was Worried

Yesterday, we leave the house at 8 am. After work, there is ultimate and dancing (you can guess which of us was doing what), and we don’t get home until about 10:30. Walking across the deck in back, I notice that our back door is swung wide open. I holler to Rob: “Hey Rob, the door’s wide open”. “I’m sure that I locked it when we left this morning. You were there with me when I did.” So, we pull ourselves together and venture on in to see what’s waiting for us.

Luckily, the first “things” waiting for us are Molly and Mackerel and we sigh a bit in relief: neither of them has escaped and gotten lost in the neighbourhood. We walk through the main floor and realize that our front window is also wide open, and we both know that we haven’t opened that window since the fall chill hit Toronto weeks ago. Obviously, someone had found their way into our house through the front window and found their way out through the back. We hurriedly make our way through the rest of the house. Rob notices right away that his iPod is gone – he’d forgotten to bring it to work (for the first time in weeks) and left it on the table near the front door. On the second floor, the office door is closed, and everything in it (computer, PSP, cell phone) is still inside. To the den – the Xbox is gone. Upstairs – everything on the third floor is still intact. No mess, no ransacking. I check through my jewellery box anyway. My most expensive piece is still sitting perched on my dresser. The others are where I left them. We head back downstairs and close the back door and head back to the window – trying to force it to close to stop the cold air from coming in. Immediately I realize what I’ve done. I’ve touched all of the evidence. I would have thought that I’d watched enough CSI not to make such a common mistake.

We call the police and they offer to send a car over shortly. We decide to focus on looking through the rest of the house for anything we might have overlooked the first time and settled in upstairs to wait. The cats are acting strange. I’m certain that Mackerel spent a good portion of the day outside. And there is a neighbourhood cat hanging around the backdoor in a way that implies we’ve had some four-legged intruders in the house too. At around 11:30 there is a kind of thumping noise from downstairs. Rob goes down to investigate and discovers that the thump was the thump of a very fat cat jumping out the open first floor window. As soon as he sees Rob, he darts. The next hour is spent employing ‘the usual methods’ to lure him back in. Any approaching humans send him running. Throughout the hour we intermittently hear the strange howl Mackerel makes when he’s scared, sick, or injured coming from the direction of the neighbour’s yard. I just don’t understand why, if he’s so frightened, he won’t come back in the house. Eventually, we leave him be, and I he comes home to eat some of the bait near the back door. Both cats get locked away until we can fix the window.

We are barely able to stay awake long enough for the police to arrive. Finally, it’s 1:30 and they’re here. They are extremely friendly and really great at helping us feel relaxed. One of the constables gets a few really nice fingerprints from the window glass (not mine, phew!) while the detective gets our statement and a list of the missing property. They speculate that a) (based on the size of the hand making the prints) it was a male adult OR very large handed female; b) the thief got spooked, which cut the ‘shopping spree’ short; c) it’s likely that the prints won’t come up in AFIS because thieves who’s prints are on file from prior arrests usually wear gloves. Who knows, though; maybe 10 years from now, we’ll get a call telling us that somebody got busted for some crime, and their fingerprints are a match for these. They advise us to change the locks and have the window secured. The male officer also entertains us with a hilarious impression of Horatio Cain.

Today, I have the day off of work to focus my attention on safekeeping our house. I go looking for my camera to take pictures of the fingerprinting for the blog and I can’t find it. I suddenly and sadly remember that, despite carrying it around in my purse for the last 2 weeks, I took it out and left it on the dining room table yesterday morning. It’s not there now. Instead, I grab for “George”, my iPod Shuffle so that I can work on some choreography. Both George and the neoprene case I normally keep him in are not here. Caroline says they aren’t at work either. I try desperately to remember where I last saw them. I’m still not sure but assume they were part of the losses. I call the police again and add two more items to the list of missing property. Derek comes over to housesit while I go to Home Depot to pick up the items I need. Five hours later, our house has new locks on both doors, the back door has a new door handle, and our first floor windows are completely inoperable. If someone wants in now, they’re going to have to break some serious glass.

Rob spends part of the day at work pricing out replacement iPods and researching home alarm systems. And I was worried that I’d have nothing to post about today. Today is the first day of NaBloPoMo that I didn’t have a story in mind at least a day ahead.

Talk to you soon,

B.

4 comments:

kristin said...

holy shit. i hope you are feeling ok.

Gina said...

Yikes!! Don't let it rattle you too much, or else the thief will have stolen more than just material items.

Kern said...

I'm with Gina. My parents' house was broken into a few years ago; I wasn't even living there at the time and it still messed with my head.

What you need to do is put the cats on an exercise regimen, then a Shrek2-Puss-in-Boots style self-defence course. Next time somebody comes a-prowling, they'll get more than they bargained for! :)

Rebecca said...

Don't worry guys, we're ok. And we don't feel too bad really. I mean, there's a bit of residual stuff. A little bit more frequent wondering "what's that noise?". And a sort of a tummy flutter when we approach the house after being out for a couple of hours. But really - ok. None of that 'I feel violated' kind of stuff you hear of on tv. And really, it could have been a lot worse. We almost feel fortunate that it wasn't worse. Everything that's gone is replaceable. We're ok.

B.