Mini Mystery
Someone was in the house. She was sure of it. Carol sat up, frowned and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Is it possible she'd imagined it? No, there it was again—that unmistakable tinkling of the bells attached to her back door.
Q. How do you fix a squashed tomato? A. With tomato paste!
The nightstand clock read 3 a.m. Normally she’d be sound asleep by now under the effects of her nightly sleeping pill. But tonight, she’d been too wound up to take it. Today she had won the lottery. Four million
dollars. And tomorrow she was planning to take her ticket to the state lottery office in Chester and claim the prize.
In hindsight, maybe she shouldn’t have told anyone about her good fortune. But she had been so excited that she invited people over for a celebratory dinner: Veronica, her sister, Veronica’s deadbeat boyfriend, Pete, and her friend Mary.
Veronica had pressed to see the winning ticket, but Carol told her that the ticket was in the safe. Veronica, who had lived with Carol for a year before moving in with Pete, looked puzzled and commented that she’d never seen a safe in the house. Carol smiled and let it drop. But the truth was the ticket was hidden in a novel titled The Safe, a recent book club selection, which now sat among hundreds of other books that filled her living room bookshelves.
It was a breezy night. Perhaps a window had been left open and that made the bells move? The clincher was the squeaky kitchen floor. Wind couldn’t make a floor creak.
Carol’s cellphone was downstairs on the table by the front door. Gingerly, she stepped over to her bedroom window where, from her vantage point, she could see that the length of her street and her driveway were clear of any cars. A beam from a flashlight crossed her ceiling, startling her. Whoever held it had passed by the staircase that led up to her room. But for the moment at least, they were not coming upstairs. Carol crept to the bedroom door, took a nervous peek out into the hallway, then moved to the top of the stairs and softly made her way halfway down. She stooped and watched through the stair rails as the beam bounced around the dining room, hiding the person behind it, and then headed toward the living room.
Carol was scared, but she was also angry. Did one of her dinner guests come back to snatch her winning ticket? Money made people do bad things. And this was millions. Her sister and Mary both knew where her spare house key was, but Pete didn’t. Unless Veronica had told him. And since she had once lived there, Veronica would have known where the squeaky floor spots were. If she remembered.
Pete, who had been unemployed since last summer, knew the layout of the house because he had done some painting work for her a few months ago.
Who knew she took sleeping pills at night? Her sister did. Had she mentioned it to Pete? She didn’t think her neighbor knew, but she might. Mary lived down the street, and the two women had become good friends because of their monthly neighborhood book group. Veronica was also a member of that book club, but she attended meetings mainly for the food and wine and barely paid attention to what novel they were discussing.
It was possible the flashlight was held by a random burglar who wanted jewelry and money. Carol decided to wait until the intruder got further into the house before she made a run for the front door. Silently moving down to the first step Carol watched the light move past her largescreen TV, her laptop computer and even her purse—and then head straight for the bookcase. Carol knew who the burglar was. She quickly grabbed her cellphone off the table and dialed 911 as she dashed out through the front door.