Marissa Simmons
When my mother awoke one morning and got in her car to drive to work, just as she would any typical weekday, she unfortunately found her wallet to be missing from the glovebox. The car was in the garage, just as any typical weekday, and was secluded away from any major streets or highways. My mother normally leaves her car unlocked, but this usually is not a source of concern. Also, on this very day, the garage door had been left open overnight, leaving a wide possibility for theft. But that never happened really--not here, not to us.
We figured that the wallet must've been stolen. Who did it, or when it was done, were the questions left unanswered. We assessed the situation and tried to come up with all of the possible suspects. Did we have guests recently? Were these guests left unattended? After quickly pondering the last few weeks in our heads, we readily recognized that no one had been inside the house except for the people who lived there. We questioned my mom and asked her when she last remembered having her wallet. She said she remembered using it just the night before to buy groceries and remembered having it in her glovebox when she came home. That settled it. The wallet had to have been stolen that night.
Finally some evidence surfaced that suggested a possible solution to our puzzling conundrum. A neighbor called and said she found my mother's wallet in the bushes near her house. She had known it was hers by the address on her license and decided to call. Finally, we thought. The wallet was found. We were so overjoyed about the fact that we knew the exact location of the wallet and who found it that we overlooked one small issue: why was the wallet in the bushes of a house five houses down the street? We went over to the neighbor's house, where my mother finally got to feel the foreign leather in her hands. She opened the wallet to find that her credit card was missing. The happiness was short--lived, now we had to find the plastic.
We called around to neighbors to see if they had any suspicions about who could have crept into our garage that night. Eventually, we dialed the right number that led us to some incriminating evidence. A neighbor said that her teenage boy's friends had come over the night before, and unfortunately made the wrong decision to sneak out and cause trouble around the neighborhood. Few had saw them through their window, sprinting from house to house attempting to find an in; our house was the jackpot. We made it easy for them by leaving our garage door open that night. From the street they could see a BMW and figured the person who owned it, might have something of value in it. They took their chances when deciding to open the car. Would the family inside hear us? Would there be an alarm? Once they realized that they were safe in opening the door, they searched around for something they could use. They successfully found the wallet and took the one thing out they could be useful to them. They left the evidence across the street, evidently assuming the neighbors wouldn't notice a wallet resting in their Hydrangea when they left their house the next morning. A simple phone call to all of the friends with their son that night led us to the people in charge. Closure, at last, was ours.