The Woman I Helped at the Grocery Store Gave Me a Strange Warning About My Husband
I put the phone on the table and immediately began checking the house. I looked around with new, weary attention.
The house now seemed foreign, hostile, and unsafe. Every familiar creak of the floorboards and every rustle outside the window made me flinch nervously and look around.
I methodically walked through all the rooms on the first floor, carefully checking the windows. All were tightly closed with latches.
Nowhere were there even the slightest signs of an attempted break-in. The front door was locked with two turns of the key and the chain exactly as I had left it for the night before bed.
It seemed everything was in perfect order, but for some reason, this did not calm me down at all. On the contrary, it worried me even more.
I walked again, as if drawn by a magnet, to the kitchen window. I peered at the tracks again.
Now in the brighter morning light, they were visible even more clearly and even more frighteningly. They were very large and very deep.
The distance between steps was quite wide; it was definitely a man of tall, heavy, large build. He walked leisurely, completely confidently, and calmly.
He knew exactly what he was doing and why he came. Twenty minutes dragged on excruciatingly and unbearably long, like hours.
I sat in the kitchen clutching a cup of completely cold tea in my trembling hands. I literally could not take my tense gaze off the window.
What if this unknown person returns right now? What if he is watching somewhere nearby, waiting for the right moment when I step out or get distracted?
Finally, bright headlights hit the window. I jumped up from the chair and looked out.
The recognizable cruiser of the officer arrived. Gareth Pernell got out of the car, a tall, heavy-set African-American man a little over fifty in a uniform winter jacket and a warm hat.
I literally ran to the door and threw it open before he could ring the bell.
“Officer Pernell, thank you so much for coming so quickly.”
“Oh, think nothing of it, Mrs. Vance. It is my job.”
He deliberately shook the stuck snow off his heavy boots, walking after me into the kitchen.
His experienced gaze immediately caught the window and the view of the yard.
“Show me exactly where the tracks are.”
We went out together onto the cold porch. The frosty, prickly air painfully burned my flushed face and lungs.
Officer Pernell slowly and thoroughly descended the creaking wooden steps, carefully examining the snowy yard. He walked right up to the tracks and carefully squatted down, examining each print for a long time.
“Boots size 12, maybe even 13,”
he muttered thoughtfully to himself, clearly estimating.
“Deep tread. Sole looks like work boots or combat boots. Coming from the gate.”
He slowly traced the entire chain of tracks with an attentive gaze from beginning to end. They went straight to the living room windows then methodically along the entire wall of the house to the back.
Then they went back the same way to the gate.
“Very strange. Who could it even be?”
I hugged myself tightly, wrapping up in the old jacket I had hastily thrown over my shoulders. I was shivering not only from the cold.
“That is indeed a very good and important question.”
Gareth heavily rose from his squat, brushing snow off his knees.
“Tell me, Mrs. Vance, do you have any serious conflicts with neighbors? Maybe someone took offense at something or holds a grudge?”
“No, what do you mean? We speak absolutely normally with all the neighbors.”
“We live quietly and peacefully. We do not bother anyone and we do not quarrel with anyone.”
“And your husband? When exactly did he leave for his trip?”
“Yesterday evening around 7:00. He left for a long haul for at least a week, maybe even longer.”
The officer slowly nodded, recording something intently in a small battered notebook.
“That means this person knew for sure that you remained in the house completely alone. Very interesting and concerning.”
“Opened the gate carefully, walked through calmly, then just as carefully closed the gate back and left. Did not hurry at all. Behaved confidently.”
“Officer, what do you think he was doing here at all? Why come at night and walk around the house?”
“That is exactly what we have to find out.”
The officer looked at me with a very serious, heavy gaze.
“There are several possible options. Maybe he was scoping out what exactly is valuable in the house, preparing for a robbery.”
“Maybe he was checking thoroughly to see if anyone lives in the house, if it is empty, or maybe…”
He significantly did not finish, but I understood perfectly well without words.
Maybe this person was preparing for something much worse than a simple robbery—for an attack, or for violence.
“Do any of your neighbors have security cameras installed?”
Pernell asked in a business-like manner, looking around at the neighboring houses.
I thought tensely, remembering Mrs. Higgins across the street.
“Mrs. Higgins across the street seems to have a camera. She installed a system last year after the Petersons’ garage got broken into.”
The Search for the Hidden Truth
“Excellent. That can help a lot. Let us go to her right now.”
He asked to see the footage. Possibly the camera captured who exactly came and what car they arrived in.
We quickly walked out the gate and crossed the empty snowy road. Mrs. Higgins’s house stood directly opposite.
It was neat and well-kept, painted a pleasant light blue with nice wooden shutters. I rang the doorbell at the gate.
About a minute and a half later, the front door of the house swung open. The hostess herself appeared on the porch, a plump, good-natured woman of about seventy.
She was in a bright floral housecoat with gray hair neatly gathered in a small bun at the back of her head.
“Ara, honey, what happened? Is something wrong?”
Mrs. Higgins squinted anxiously, looking with curiosity at the officer standing nearby.
“Mrs. Higgins, hello. You see, someone strange walked in my yard last night.”
“There are clear tracks left in the snow. Officer Pernell came to sort it out. Can we look at the recording from your security camera? Maybe something important is visible on it.”
“Oh Lord have mercy!”
The neighbor threw up her hand sincerely.
“Someone strange walked around at night and you were alone? Vernon is on a long haul. My God, how scary!”
“Yes, come in quickly. Of course, come in. We will definitely look.”
We walked inside the cozy house into a small but very clean and tidy living room. It was densely packed with old, sturdy furniture made of dark wood.
A modern flat-screen TV hung on the wall, and beneath it stood a black box for the video recorder with blinking green and red lights.
Mrs. Higgins fussily and a little confusedly turned on the TV, fiddling for a long time with several remotes.
“Here it seems to be working and showing. Officer Pernell, you figure out this technology yourself because I do not understand it very well. My grandson set it up.”
The officer silently nodded, confidently took the remote control, and began quickly rewinding the recording. I froze nearby, not tearing myself away from the screen, afraid to miss even a single thing.
On the black and white grainy recording, the street in front of Mrs. Higgins’s house was clearly visible. My own house opposite, the gate of my yard, and part of the yard itself were on screen.
“You say your husband left the house around 7:00 in the evening?”
Gareth clarified, not taking his eyes off the screen.
“Yes, around 7:00, maybe a little later.”
He quickly rewound the recording to 8:00 in the evening and set playback to normal speed. The picture was not the best quality; it was grainy, black and white, and blurred in places due to the falling snow.
But on the whole, it was quite possible to distinguish what was happening. The street was completely empty and deserted.
Snow was falling in a thick veil, making visibility very poor. Time on the recording crawled slowly forward: 9:00 p.m., 10:00, 11:00.
“Here, look closely. Right here!”
Pernell poked a thick finger intensely right at the screen.
At a quarter to midnight on the deserted street, an unfamiliar car unexpectedly appeared. A regular dark sedan slowly and leisurely drove up.
It neatly stopped right opposite my house. A tall man in a dark bulky jacket and a knit cap pulled low over his forehead got out of the car leisurely.
It was absolutely impossible to make out a face on such a recording. He calmly looked around as if checking if there were witnesses.
Then he confidently opened my gate and disappeared behind it, dissolving into the darkness.
“Lord have mercy,”
I whispered, feeling my insides turn traitorously cold and my legs going weak.
About ten minutes later, maybe twelve, the man appeared in the frame. He walked out of my yard again completely calmly.
He just as methodically closed the gate behind him on the latch, got into his car, and slowly without rushing drove away, disappearing around the bend.
“Pause,”
Officer Pernell commanded shortly, hitting the button. He rewound a little bit back and froze the image at the moment when the car was visible best of all.
“Here is the license plate. Hard to see because of the snow and darkness, but I think we can try to make out a few numbers.”
“And here on the side door of the car… that is a logo of some company writing.”
I squinted, staring intensely at the blurred, fuzzy image on the screen. On the side of the car, there was indeed something light painted, some large inscription or an emblem.
“Looks very much like a company car,”
the officer muttered thoughtfully.
“Definitely not a private owner. Some organization, a serious firm.”
“Or maybe it is appraisers from a real estate agency,”
Mrs. Higgins suddenly piped up.
She had been standing nearby all this time, watching intently and pressing both hands to her ample chest.
“But from a realtor agency?”
