I'm a busy bee this morning, having already done 2 loads of laundry, one load of dishes, and picked up the living room, though to be frank I'm taking a wee break before moving on to the dreaded dining room and the closet that resides there. The closet that is a catch all for everything and anything. I'm almost scared to open its door.
Strange odd night last night. KC and I were coming home from Brenda's via our usual route when about 10 minutes from home, there was a police barricade blocking all lanes. At first I thought it must be some sort of sobriety check point, but as we inched up closer to the state troopers, I watched them with flashlights in hand checking each and every vehicle from front to back. I was a little nervous just for the sake of being nervous as we pulled up, and felt a little dumb when the trooper began asking me questions.
Turning my head away a slight bit as he flashed his flashlight directly in my face, he began asking me questions. "Where are you headed this evening." My mind blanked for a second before I managed to stutter out the word "home".
"And where is home?" he pressed.
"Blankety Blank Road." I said. He then turned his flashlight into the back seat of our car, shining it on KC.
"How old is the girl?"
"Nine." I answered.
"Alright then," he said giving me a nod and a wave forward, "You can go."
I have to admit it freaked me out quite a bit. It's an odd feeling you get being questioned by a complete stranger and wondering if they're thinking that your kid is not your kid. I was tempted to ask questions. Find out what was going on. Were they looking for a child? Had someone been kidnapped? Was there a criminal on the loose? But I kept my mouth shut and drove on, wondering all the way home.
And perhaps it was because they had made me jumpy, that the car pulled over in front of a wooded area on my road made me regard it with a suspicious eye. That and the fact that the back passenger door was open and there seemed to be two older men sitting inside, one in the front seat and one in the back with only the overhead light illuminating them. It made me uneasy. And I slowed down as we passed them, trying to see what they were doing in their old light green jalopy. But I really couldn't see much of anything. Didn't note anything overly odd save for the fact that they were sitting there by the side of the road with the back door of the car open.
I called Brenda from my cell phone as we continued down the road and proceeded to tell her everything, including my odd thoughts about the car. "Should I call the police?" I asked. "I didn't really see anything, but it's certainly not normal."
I spent the next few minutes hemming and hawing and asking Bren to turn on the news to see if she could find out anything. Meanwhile, we pulled into our driveway, hopped out of the car, and quickly made our way inside. "I'll call you back in a moment." I said to Brenda, clicking off my phone.
Inside I grabbed the broom that I keep by the front door and made my way, room by room, checking all the corners and the dark spaces. My sister Jo asked me later on in the night as I told her about everything,
what exactly had I planned to do with the broom in the case that something was amiss? ... I told her I was really hoping not to find out.
The car on the side of the road however was still nagging me. And when something nags me, it's a given that I will not be able to put it out of my mind until I've laid it to rest. And so I told KC to put on her shoes and come with me out to the car.
"You're going to go check to see if that cars still there aren't you Mom?"
Since I didn't think she'd fall for the excuse of taking a quick ride for no reason in the middle of the night, I shook my head yes.
Needless to say, my five minute run down the road didn't prove anything at all other than the car that had previously been there was gone. Not that I had some sort of big plan of what to do had it still been hovering on the side of the road. (Though I was on the phone with Bren the entire time I was driving to check things out. I guess my plan was to tell Brenda the license plate number if it was still there and call the troopers with my possibly overblown suspicions.)
Returning home, I sent KC off to bed, took up shop on the living room couch and promptly fell asleep there for the remainder of the night unable to catch anything on the late night news about what could be going on. Presently there has been nothing on the morning news either ... But it was all too weird to have just been my fertile imagination at work.
Odd.
Oh well, I suppose there is naught else to do now except return to my cleaning ... Unless I can convince KC to try baking cookies with me instead. (Don't think of this is an easy thing to do. My daughter is more than aware of my less than Betty Crocker like baking skills.)
