Regular Life

Just when I thought I would slow down a little on blogging, the cops get involved.

And the whole thing helped me understand why not all of them are detectives.

On an unseasonably cool Saturday morning, Benjamin and I took a leisurely, unannounced bicycle ride to Mr. and Mrs. B’s house. Minutes before we arrived, however, Shannon called my mobile phone to remind me she needed help retrieving her mother’s dog from the vet (someone has to sit with the dog so she doesn’t get herself trapped in a corner of the minivan).

It seemed that with the simple punching of her phone’s buttons my wife had doomed Benjamin’s visit to his friend and my secret plan to watch the Olympics with Mr. B. Curses!

Mrs. B offered to let Benjamin stay for about an hour while Shannon and I got the dog. They had three kids already, so what was one more?

But this story is about the cops.

Shannon and I drove, windows open on a Texas day in August, to the vet. I reclined the driver’s seat and caught a cat nap while she went inside to get the dog. The breeze cooled me perfectly as I faded into the first levels of deep relaxation. I didn’t even notice the pollution inherent in a suburb so near a large metro area.

Then Shannon put either the dog or a French whore into the van. Apparently this vet had changed owners recently, and they had dropped the policy of bathing boarded dogs just before the owners come to pick them up. Instead they go heavy on the perfume, love-in-the-time-of-cholera style. (In case any of you wonders, this particular pup is better off in that environment than in an unfamiliar home, where canine senility doesn’t bode well for anybody involved — but a bath would have been nice.)

Our remaining and very simple task was to deliver the dog to my local in-laws’ townhouse. The vet closed at noon on Saturday, and their plane’s arrival later that day would have made them wait until Monday to bring her home.

We walked in the front door to an uncharacteristically quiet scene. Usually when I arrive there, Benjamin yells, “Daddy!” Instead, an odd stillness surrounded us as I bummed a yogurt from the ‘fridge and Shannon rushed to disable the alarm (hey, I needed to establish some semblance of routine). I rifled through the kitchen drawers in search of a spoon.

“Um, the alarm isn’t on,” Shannon said. “I’m sure I turned it back on before I left last time. That’s weird.”

I finally found a spoon in the last drawer I opened. “It isn’t like you to forget something like that.” I peeled off the yogurt lid and threw it in the trash, then joined Shannon in the entryway.

A loud sound came from upstairs. It sounded like a door closing and then latching.

Shannon and I looked at each other. “Just leave,” I said and followed Shannon out the door (or at least I hope I didn’t go first). We hurried around to the driveway and stood near our minivan. We figured we were relatively safe there. Well, I did, anyway… for about 15 seconds.

Not panicked yet, we got in the van and I called 911 (my first time) on Shannon’s phone. While I talked I drove us to a nearby visitor parking area.

(Note: city names changed to protect the innocent)

“Bloomsville 911, what is the nature of your emergency?” asked the 911 dispatcher.

“I’d like to report a possible intruder in my in-laws’ home,” I said. I rattled off the address as I read it off the numbers beside the garage.

“Oh, you’re in Bleemsville. Hold a moment and I’ll transfer you to their 911.”

I’m hoping that had I said I had cut off my leg or had been shot she would not have taken the extra time to transfer me. In the locator system’s defense, we were only about 100 feet from the border between Bloomsville and Bleemsville, but still, getting transferred when calling 911? There’s got to be a Rodney Dangerfield joke in there somewhere.

The first car showed up while I was on the phone with 911 — standard procedure, the lady said. The officer stuck his hand out his window and motioned urgently for us to drive down there.

In our van with a newly-expired inspection sticker on the windshield. Nice touch, that. Using my defensive driving skills, I pulled in so that our rear bumpers faced each other.

Three more squad cars pulled up. Must have been a slow day in Bleemsville.

Officers from all four cars walked quickly down the street to the townhouse. They opened the back yard gate and looked inside, then entered through the unlocked front door. All the while, one of them appeared to be turning his neck wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve, but was talking into the radio mic strapped to one shoulder.

A neighbor’s garage door opened across from us. I explained what was happening. “Oh, thanks,” the lady said, her face showing relief with just a note of concern.

A few minutes later, the policemen waved us down there. No way that many of them would miss the expired inspection sticker. As we walked up the street to the driveway, a very young officer explained that they didn’t find anything amiss, but that they would walk us through the house to make sure we were comfortable with it.

“We didn’t find any signs of forced entry,” the leader said. “Can you usually hear your neighbors here?”

“My mom actually lives here, not us. If I had been by myself I might have thought the sound was my imagination, but when we both heard it –” Shannon began.

“Well, nothing looks disturbed. The huge TV’s still here, so…” he trailed off, with what I swear was a muffled chuckle.

“Okay, well, thanks for checking it out,” I said, pretty much ready for them to just go and pose for whatever cop calendar was coming out next year. I appreciated their risking their chiseled jaws for us, but they didn’t have to cop an attitude.

Shannon and I went upstairs to find the source of the sound. Ceiling fans run in both bedrooms and the loft. Maybe something being blown by them finally fell? No, those rooms looked fine.

I walked into the bathroom and looked around. “Hey, Shannon,” I called. “I think I found something.”

“You did, what is it?” she said as she rushed to the doorway.

A few seashells, loosely glued together, sat in a lump on the tile floor. A foot away was a smaller clump. I looked up at the wall, where hung a circle mirror surrounded by a ring of thickly layered seashells. A gap in the shells revealed bare glue.

“Hey, drop those on the floor and see what it sounds like,” Shannon said.

“Okay. You go downstairs where we were earlier.”

I held the shells near the mirror and let them go. They bounced once off a small set of shelves and then clattered on the tile floor.

“That’s exactly what it was,” Shannon called up from the entryway.

Mystery solved. Case closed. In about 30 seconds. No thanks to Bleemsville’s finest.

(the first to tell the importance of the shells’ hitting two things instead of one gets a bonus point)

Comments RSS