Portage River Farm

I received a mysterious call at work today. My cell phone indicated that the call was from Janet's cell phone but the only sound I could hear when I took the call was wind whistling across the phone's microphone. The sound went on for a moment or two while I attempted to get her to answer and then the line went dead.

I tried to call her back right away but she was apparently making another call. Thinking about the likely course of events, I decided that she was outside of our house trying to call me to tell me that her car was in the pond. My mind jumped to this odd conclusion because that same morning I had walked out and noticed that her car was missing from its normal parking spot. Looking around, I found that it was sitting out in the field having rolled there during the night after being left without the parking brake engaged.

Shortly thereafter, she called again and uttered a phrase that erased any remaining thoughts about errant cars. She said, "I just got off of the phone with the County Sheriff". I listened intently to the rest of her tale with a pit in my stomach.

Shortly before, Janet had glanced out of the front window of our house and noticed a strange light blue pickup truck parked about a third of the way up our driveway. She saw that two men were sitting in the truck looking at our house. In case you don't think this sounds odd, we live way out in the country and people just don't drive up private driveways without having some business there. As well, anyone who was legitimately visiting our home would have driven up to the house instead of lurking on the rise overlooking the front yard.

Assuming that they were up to no good, she balled up her courage and headed right out to confront them. As she crossed the porch and headed up the driveway, she dialed my cell phone number in case she needed me for backup. That is when I came into the story as a tiny voice saying "Hello, Janet?" into the breeze as she walked rapidly toward the truck.

The men in the truck saw her coming and clearly didn't want to talk. They quickly backed out of the driveway and sped away. She hung up the phone and called the Sheriff to report the odd behavior. Soon thereafter, she had to leave the house to go to work.

I talked to the 911 dispatcher later in the afternoon and asked if they would send a car by the house to make sure that nobody had returned in our absence. They agreed and suggested that if there was ever another similar occurrence, we should remain in the house and call them so they could try to pull into the drive behind the intruders before they could get away.

We have many problems with break-ins in our area because so many houses are left isolated and unprotected. Our home even shows signs of such an event in the past with a metal back door that still carries the scars left by vandals who pried it open long before we had bought it. I had been meaning to get a monitored home security system installed for some time and today's incident seemed the perfect motivation to get it done. We are now scheduled for installation over the next few days and we will be able to set that worry aside.