Watch Out

by Alison Hughes

  I tried to get inside the mind of a thief. Someone completely, totally different than me. I thought of busting a back window or forcing a lock, then slipping into a strange house. Once you get past Why on earth would they ever do something so wrong? you come to I wonder what would that feel like?

  To a thief, stealing probably feels exciting. Maybe nerve-racking. But once they get away with it, they might think how easy it is. They might try to convince themselves that being a criminal isn’t so bad. Easy money. Nobody gets hurt. People just buy new stuff. But thieves never seem to think about how it feels to have something stolen. Not to the stealer but to the stealee.

  My family’s been pretty lucky so far. I’ve only ever had my bike stolen. I had left it outside a store. The thieves smashed the lock and took it. They must have been desperate, because it was a piece of junk. Rusted up and murder on the hills. But I wandered around for, like, twenty minutes, confused. I thought I had forgotten where I left it. It was a very weird feeling to discover that something of mine was just gone. But imagine if it was something inside your own home that went missing. That would be a terrible, scary feeling. Somebody going through your stuff. Your mom’s stuff.

  When I was in eighth grade, a girl in my class once told us how her house had been burgled. The thieves had dragged a neighbor’s ladder over and used it to crawl into an open second-floor window. Full-on robber mode. They’d stolen bikes, jewelry, iPads. The usual kind of stuff you might expect a thief to take. But they’d also taken some leftover pizza from the fridge. Pizza. I think that freaked me out most of all. The idea of strange people in your house stealing stuff but also being relaxed enough to have a snack. Taking your family’s food. Creepy.

  I was just passing the yellow house, the one Gary said had been hit the day before. Looked all right to me. No damage to the front door. Nobody around. I walked past it slowly. No smashed window, no police tape. Would they put up police tape? Probably not. Anyway, I didn’t see any. All in all, from a crime-show point of view, a big letdown. I even walked down the back lane and peered over the fence at the house. Nothing unusual.

  I walked down to the house second from the corner. I was starting to feel kind of stupid. Gary had probably just invented these two latest robberies because he’s so excited about this whole thing. There are people who do that. Lie about crimes just to get attention. Or report useless things to the police or pretend to have witnessed something. Gary might be that kind of weird.

  The front of the house looked fine. Peaceful, sleepy. But as I was passing, a door at the side of the house opened and a woman stepped out. She jumped a little when she saw me and watched me walk by with her eyes narrowed. I barely looked over, but I could see that the glass in the top half of the door had been smashed. A few strips of duct tape crisscrossed the frame.

  I was in business.

  There really had been a break-in. The jumpy lady and that door proved it.

  Okay, so where did that get me? I had to think. I kept walking, down to the park at the end of the street. I sat on a bench. It was a little chilly, so I slipped my hood up.

  Seven break-ins (I was willing to believe Gary now). Ten days, maybe two weeks since they had started. In this neighborhood. Why here? This wasn’t a rich area. Maybe it was someone who knew the area, who felt comfortable here. Could it be someone who actually lived in the neighborhood?

  In my head I went over the list of people I know by name or by sight. It is a long list. We have lived in this neighborhood since I was about three years old.

  My mind ticked off house after house.

  But did we really know any of these people? For example, our next-door neighbors. The Brants on one side and old Mr. Lee on the other. We said hi when we saw them. My mom talked to them if she was out raking leaves. Tom and I shoveled Mr. Lee’s walk when it snowed. But did we really know them? An image of Mrs. Brant popping in for a quick robbery on her way to the grocery store flashed through my mind. Of Mr. Lee using his walker to smash a window. Ridiculous. Stupid.

  Calm down, Charlie. You’re freaking yourself out.

  I tried to be logical. Realistically, what type of person could be a robber? I left old people and young mothers off my list of suspects. I supposed it was possible in theory for a new mom to park the baby in the backyard, pick a lock, burgle a house and be home in time to pick up the other kids from school. But really? Seriously?

  Let’s face it—this seemed like a young person’s kind of crime. And I thought it was more likely to be a young-guy kind of crime. Why? Well, men tended to commit more crimes than women did, didn’t they? Maybe I was being sexist though. Young women could be every bit as talented robbery-wise as young men. I didn’t doubt that. So I settled back on just young people.

  I was pretty sure about robbery being a young person’s crime. Climbing in windows, hauling stuff, stealing pizza, running away…you couldn’t have, say, a bad back and be a really effective thief. I added that to my list. So now it was no old people, young moms, children or people with bad backs.

  This was starting to feel a little ridiculous.

  But Sherlock always said to eliminate the impossible, and whoever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the culprit. Or something like that.

  A door opened across the road. At the car guys’ house. One of the car guys came out. Tom and I always call them the car guys because we don’t know their names. And they always have a bunch of cars parked on the street that they work on. So very witty of us.

  Anyway, those two guys were definite possibilities. They were youngish. Maybe mid- to late twenties. Uncle Dave’s age maybe. Come to think of it, they had the same kind of jean-jacket, shaggy-haired look as Uncle Dave, only they were both blond. Brothers, we thought. They looked like they wouldn’t have any trouble moving quickly, maybe even while carrying heavy stolen objects. They clearly had lots of stuff, including—I squinted to count the cars in the driveway and on the road—one, two, three, possibly four cars. And nobody knew what they did for a living. Suspicious? I sure thought so.

  Just then one of them pulled into the driveway. The garage door opened. I sat up straighter. The garage was packed! Stuffed with boxes and bags from floor to ceiling. The car guy got out of the car, opened the trunk and grabbed a box. Then the other car guy helped, carrying more boxes from the trunk into the garage. After that they closed the garage door.

  I started to get excited with this new possibility.

  See? Just a little quiet thought, and sometimes you could—

  Wait. Somebody else was coming out of the house. A guy in a hoodie. He stopped to say something to the others, then walked away quickly. He was carrying a couple of heavy-looking bags.

  I got up and crossed the park, slipping from tree to tree. I was trying to stay hidden as I followed. Okay, the guy was walking away from me, but still. That’s the kind of thing you do when you do detective work. You stay out of sight.

  He was a big guy. Hood up. Baggy sweats. He seemed a bit familiar somehow, but he wasn’t one of the car guys. There was something about that back. That shambling walk.

  He turned to check for cars at the crosswalk, and I got a glimpse of his face.

  Unbelievable.

  I was following Uncle Dave.

  Chapter Four

  Uncle Dave! I almost laughed out loud. I had been so caught up in being stealthy that I hadn’t recognized my own uncle.

  I started to run to catch up with him, but then I stopped. The more I thought about the situation, the more strange it became.

  Fact: Uncle Dave was broke. He had lost his job as an appliance-repair guy. That’s why he had moved in with our family a couple of months back.

  “Uncle Dave’s going through a bit of a rough patch,” Mom had said. “But you guys will love having him around. He’s such a sweetie. A big heart.” Mom had a soft spot for her little brother. He was paying rent, I knew. But not much.

  Fact: Uncle Dave had lots of time on his hands. He said he was at the library, upd
ating his résumé, job hunting. But was he really? Or was he breaking into people’s houses and stealing their stuff?

  Fact: I had seen Uncle Dave coming out of the car guys’ house. And by my very scientific process of elimination, I had already determined that they were the most likely suspects for the break-ins. Was he friends with them? Was he part of their gang? Or maybe he didn’t do the stealing. Maybe he was the one who sold the stuff. A partner. An accomplice.

  Fact: Uncle Dave was young(ish) and fit(ish). He would have no trouble climbing through a window or breaking the lock on a door. He was strong. He’d carried Tom up to our room like he was a ten-year-old.

  Fact: Uncle Dave had been acting strange lately. He stayed out late most nights of the week. He had stored a ton of boxes in the basement. God. All those boxes! Why had I never thought twice about all those boxes? I had assumed it was just his stuff from his old apartment. But I remembered him saying something once about his things being in storage. So what was in all those boxes? He’d better not be using our house to store stolen goods.

  Fact: Our house hadn’t been targeted. Why not? Because Uncle Dave wouldn’t do that to his own family? I mean, good. Thanks, Uncle Dave, but still…

  There were a lot of strikes against good old Uncle Dave.

  I picked up my pace.

  Now he was right in front of me, skulking along the street. Hauling those heavy, heavy bags. His head was down, like he was thinking.

  Yeah, I hope you’re thinking about how you’re going to explain going to jail to your sister and her kids.

  “Hi, Uncle Dave,” I said. Very casual. Not at all suspicious.

  “Charlie! Dude, you surprised me there,” he said. He looked nervous. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, I’m just out for a walk. Want me to help you with those bags? They look heavy.”

  Uncle Dave pulled the bags closer to him.

  “Nah, thanks. I got ’em. We’re almost home anyway.”

  “So what have you been doing, Uncle Dave?”

  “Not much, not much. Met up with a friend for coffee. Library. Job hunting. The usual.”

  Riiiight. Job hunting at the car guys’ place. This was going to kill Mom.

  When we got home, Uncle Dave bolted downstairs. Was it my imagination, or was he acting guilty? Or was he just being his usual slightly awkward Uncle Dave?

  “Hi, Tom! We’re home,” I called up the stairs. “Dinner soon.”

  “Great. I’m starving!” he yelled back.

  I went into the kitchen to fix dinner. My specialty: frozen pizza and prepeeled baby carrots.

  I wondered whether I should talk to Tom about Uncle Dave. But what did I actually know? So far I had no real proof. Tom is nicer than I am. He’d explain all my so-called facts about Uncle Dave away so they’d look more ridiculous than suspicious.

  No, I decided to keep it to myself for the time being.

  I’d wait until Uncle Dave went out that night. He went out almost every night. Volunteer work, he would say. Or meeting a buddy for beer. Upgrading his online job-hunting profile at the library. Hitting the gym. It was always something. Mom said it was good that he was getting out, that it was healthy.

  But what if, instead of stacking cans at the food bank, he was casing houses to rob? What if he was pawning stolen property at one of those seedy shops downtown?

  Not so healthy, Mom, I thought. Not so healthy.

  I’d wait until he was out of the house, and then I would go down and check some of those boxes in the basement. That was my plan. It was the sort of no-brainer thing any detective would do.

  And not feel guilty about doing it.

  Chapter Five

  “Well, thanks for the pizza, Charlie,” said Uncle Dave, scraping some crusts into the compost bin. I’ll say this for Uncle Dave—he does help with the dishes.

  “Hey, I made it myself, just for you.”

  He laughed. “Well, I better get going. Helping out at the food bank tonight at the warehouse.”

  “Wow, again?” I said. “You must be their hardest-working volunteer.”

  “Nah, but I try to get there a couple of times a week. You and Tom going to be okay? Your mom is working another double shift, right?”

  “We’ll be fine.” I watched him stack the dishwasher. “So you really like volunteering there?”

  He looked surprised. I guess I’d never shown much interest before.

  “Yeah, I do. Good people, you know? Very friendly crowd. You should come sometime, check it out.”

  That was unexpected. A thief wouldn’t invite somebody to check out a fake volunteer job, would they? Unless they were very, very clever. Throwing people off the scent.

  “Maybe I will, thanks.” We’ll see, Uncle Dave, we’ll see.

  Uncle Dave glanced at the clock. “Well, I’d better head out. Sure you guys will be okay?”

  “Yeah, don’t worry. See ya, Uncle Dave.”

  “Have fun, little buddy.” He pulled on his jacket and shouted, “Bye, Tom!” before he left.

  I let a full ten minutes go by. Just in case he’d forgotten something. Just in case he came back. But he didn’t.

  The basement was all mine.

  Let’s be honest. It wasn’t the best part of the house. Dim lights, ratty old carpet, a dusty treadmill. A pullout couch was opened into a bed with rumpled blankets. A TV on top of some Ikea drawers completed our “luxury bachelor suite.”

  That’s what Mom calls it.

  “Let’s let Dave have the basement. It can be his bachelor suite,” she’d said when he moved in. She had been so excited. He was her only brother, younger than her by eight years or something like that. They are pretty close, I think. Anyway, it was good for Mom. Another adult to talk to, someone in the house when Tom and I went to visit Dad. Though that wasn’t happening so much lately, with his new girlfriend in the picture. Fine by me.

  So it would really, really suck if Uncle Dave turned out to be the jerk robbing everyone in the neighborhood. It would be a betrayal of a lot of things. A betrayal of Mom. I really hoped my suspicions didn’t turn out to be true.

  I went over to the boxes stacked against the wall. There were a lot of them, maybe ten or fifteen. Some open, some still sealed up. I got to work.

  First box: books. Certainly not stolen. Or if they were, Uncle Dave was one weird thief.

  Box under that: some old dishes. Nope. The stuff looked like it came from a thrift store.

  Next box: vinyl records.

  Box after that: hockey cards.

  Box after box after box. I went through them all. There was lots of stuff. Candlesticks, vases wrapped in paper, wooden bowls, a bunch of framed pictures. And then I opened a small wooden box. Jewelry. Jewelry! A whole box of it.

  My heart sank. I should have been excited. Triumphant.

  But I wasn’t. Because I realized that what I was doing down here was trying to prove to myself that Uncle Dave wasn’t the thief. And now I was looking at a box of jewelry he had stashed.

  “Shit,” I muttered, closing it back up. The dishes, the records, the hockey cards, the books…all of that was probably his. But jewelry?

  I knew nothing about jewelry. What was valuable, what was not. All of this stuff looked shiny and sparkly. Some of it looked old. Where the hell had he gotten it? Why did he have it? Could there possibly be another explanation?

  A little voice inside me said, Nope.

  I checked through the other boxes. More stuff. Random stuff. Confusing stuff. Horseshoes, an old lady’s brush-and-comb set in engraved silver, magazines from the 1980s, toys. Toys. What the hell would Uncle Dave be doing with toys?

  I closed the last box. I felt completely baffled. So much weird, random stuff. No iPhones, electronics, watches or money. But that box of jewelry haunted me.

  I stood up and stretched my back. It was killing me from bending over so long. My eyes fell on the two bags I’d seen Uncle Dave carrying away from the car guys’ house. I unzipped the first one. Speakers
. A microphone. Cords. In the second bag was a keyboard, some pedals, more cords.

  “Shit,” I muttered again. Because this seemed to clinch it. This was expensive, portable stuff. And I’d never once heard Uncle Dave play an instrument.

  I had to talk to him.

  I had to find out why he was doing this.

  I had to get him to stop.

  Chapter Six

  “You’re quiet,” said Tom. “Weirdly quiet.”

  “Just tired, I guess.” And worried. So very, very worried.

  We were lying on our beds in our room. We’d put bookshelves down the middle so we could each have a little privacy, but we could still talk to each other.

  “I’m trying to figure out how the hell to connect this thing to the keyboard,” Tom said. “What are you doing?”

  I’m trying to figure out how the hell to save Uncle Dave from going to jail. But I wasn’t going to tell Tom anything until I’d talked to Uncle Dave. I thought maybe if I could just make him see sense, if I could get him to somehow turn over the stuff, maybe we wouldn’t even have to involve Mom.

  “Nothing. Just lying here.”

  “Well, do something. Read a book. Watch a show. Hey, I know! Spy. Maybe we’ll catch those thieves. Want to play a round?”

  Spy is a game we have been playing since we were young. It is simple. Basically it involves each of us looking out the window with our binoculars and seeing what we can see. That’s it. Sounds lame, I know, maybe even creepy. But it isn’t. Nothing much ever goes on, so the point of the game is to take very regular, boring things and make them sound funny or ridiculous.