November 21, 2003 - 8:29 a.m.
I took the boys out to Target yesterday afternoon for milk, cherry pop tarts, nightlight bulbs and the other essentials of life. When we returned, about 45 minutes later, the garage door was up.
Now, both Mike and I have done things like this before. Sometimes we just forget to close it, sometimes we didn't push the button on the remote enough. But as I got out of the car I noticed the back door to the house (the garage is detached) was also open. That was unusual. I had dashed back into the house to get Marcus's jacket before we left but I was fairly certain that I had closed the door behind me. Since the backyard is fenced, I generally don't lock it but I thought for certain I had closed it.
Leaving the boys in their carseats for the moment, I peeked into the house. All was quiet. Our tv and dvd player were still in place. Nothing looked wrong. But I was hesitant to go walking around by myself. I called Mike on the cell to have him listening in case someone turned out to be hiding in the coat closet.
After a few minutes conferring with Mike, the stray thought tiptoed through my brain that not everyone who breaks into a house is out to rob the place. And I retreated back to the garage, called the police, and gave Zack and Marcus each a pop tart to pacify them while we waited.
A patrolman arrived within a few minutes and went into the house to check it out. I heard him shout into the open door Loudoun County police department or something like that and watched him draw his sidearm before crossing the threshold.
I felt pretty foolish for having gone inside at all.
He checked the place top to bottom and found no one. Mike came home about then and we walked through the house, too, checking to be sure our computer and other valuables were still around. The wind may have blown the door open. I may have left the garage door up. It did not appear that anyone had been in the house. In any case, the patrolman recommended that we lock the back door in the future and consider better deadbolts as well as change the access code to the exterior garage door keypad.
If the ADT guy had shown up last night, what a sale he could have made...
