Part 3 — Four Blocks Away
The address on the detectives laptop was a gray house on Elm Street, four blocks from my front door. I had walked past it a hundred times on my way to bingo. There was a flower box in the window, and a cheerful wreath on the door.
The woman who lived there was named Kayla Mercer, thirty-one, and she had been using the name Brianna for a year. Her late father-in-law had installed garage door openers all over Idaho Falls for thirty years and kept every customers code in a spiral notebook. She found it in a box after he passed.
My code was in that notebook. He had installed my opener in 1998, and he wrote the four numbers beside my name in blue ink. I never wrote them down, but he did, and that is how they traveled.
Detective Alvarez let me and Hal sit in the kitchen while she planned the next step. Thursday was bingo night, and Kayla expected the box to be opened. Trevor texted her, Got it. Thanks for the cards. Grandma just left for bingo.
I never went to bingo. I sat with Hal and a pot of coffee in the kitchen of my neighbor Dorothy, who had lent us her window. Right after seven, a woman in a dark coat walked down the alley toward my garage with a small flashlight. She typed four numbers into the keypad.
The door rose, and three officers who had been standing behind my car stepped out. Kayla did not run. She simply sat down on the garage step and put her face in her hands. Her pockets held nothing but a glove, a flashlight, and the flip phone from the box.
She was taken to the station quietly. The detective told me later that she had cried and said she never meant to hurt anyone, she was behind on rent and found the notebook. Needing money is a reason, but it is never a permission.
Kayla was charged with burglary, fraud, identity theft, and exploiting elderly victims. The three break-ins since June were all traced to her. A judge ordered restitution, and the court sold the notebook to the evidence room, where it will stay.
Trevor was cleared by the end of the week. The gift cards he had bought were traced as part of the scam, and he had never spent a cent of the money. The detective said she wished every young man would bring his phone in the way he did. He gave a full statement and testified at the hearing.
Hal and the detective visited every person on the list, Mrs. Hadley, the Navarros, Ruth Gamble, and the others. They changed locks and codes, installed cameras, and sat with each of them to say it was not their fault.
We changed my code the same night. Trevor picked the new one, and he wrote it down nowhere. Then he made us pancakes at ten oclock at night, because he said that was how he wanted to say he was sorry.
I told him no apology was needed. He asked me to sit on the porch with him, and we watched the lights of Elm Street come on, four blocks away, one window at a time.