Project Sweet Life (10 page)

Mrs. Shelby lived alone. Every day she went out for an early dinner. That’s how she had ended up in that coffee shop in the first place, the day she’d stolen our reward money. Since she apparently ate alone too, her dinners only took about forty-five minutes.

“We should be in and out of her house in thirty
minutes just to be safe,” Curtis had decided.

At 4:27, Mrs. Shelby left for dinner. That meant we had until 4:57 to pull off our heist.

At 4:30, once we were sure she had not forgotten her purse, we moved in.

Mrs. Shelby had a burglar alarm, which we knew she employed faithfully upon leaving her house.

“That means we can’t enter through any of the downstairs windows,” Curtis had said. “They’ll all be hooked up to the burglar alarm. We could cut the window open with a glass-cutter, but I’d like to leave no evidence of the actual burglary. Studies show that when there’s no evidence of a burglary—no broken windows or kicked-in doors—people wait much longer to call the police, either not noticing what was stolen or thinking that they must have somehow misplaced it.”

“Impressive,” Victor had said.

At 4:31, we entered the backyard. We’d brought an old metal ladder that we’d found that afternoon at Saint Vincent de Paul and had to carry more than a mile from the store; since we were still broke, we’d had to scrounge the four dollars for the ladder from under the seats of our families’ cars.

We placed the ladder up to one of the second-story windows. We did not do this cautiously or in any way furtively. After all, we were dressed like window washers, and as long as we acted like window washers, we would be invisible to anyone who saw us—even to any of our moms or dads if they happened to drive by.

Or so Curtis said.

“Who’s to say the second-story window won’t be alarmed, too?” I had asked the night before.

“It won’t be alarmed,” Curtis had said. “Ninety-six percent of alarmed houses don’t bother to alarm the upstairs windows. It’s a way of cutting costs, and people assume, stupidly, that a ladder would be too obvious to the neighbors.”

“But what if the window’s locked?” I had said.

“It won’t be,” Curtis had said. “Eighty-two percent of houses leave their upstairs windows unlocked. That figure rises to ninety-four percent in the summer.”

“
Very
impressive,” Victor had said.

By 4:33, we found that the first upstairs window we checked was unlocked. We slid it open. Getting inside the window would be the one tricky part, since window washers did not usually crawl into the windows they are
washing. But Mrs. Shelby’s backyard was pretty secluded. We glanced around to make sure the coast was clear, then slithered inside.

You know what it’s like to enter someone’s house for the first time and smell its unique smell or see the way the light angles through the hallways? It’s even more pronounced when you’ve
broken and entered
that house illegally. My senses felt incredibly heightened, able to distinguish between all the lesser smells: baby powder and rosewater and Ben-Gay and cat pee. Somewhere upstairs, a clock ticked. The glow of the afternoon sun suddenly seemed even softer, more yellow, almost sepia-tinged, and I wondered if it was because I was seeing it through rooms filled with glass kerosene lamps and lace doilies on antique dresser tops.

We’re really here!
I thought.
Someone else’s house!
Suddenly Mrs. Shelby became real to me in a way that she hadn’t been before—despite the fact that I’d just spent the last three days watching her every move. The inside of this house looked completely and totally different than it had from the outside.

“Wait,” Victor said. “What are we going to steal?”

Why hadn’t we thought about this? After all, it wasn’t
very likely that she’d have seven thousand dollars in cash lying around.

“Let’s see what she’s got,” Curtis whispered, leading us toward the stairs.

The hall floorboards creaked under our feet, a high-pitched whine. At one point, I glanced in at the master bedroom. There was an open jewelry box on the bureau, and I caught the glint of gold and gems—fake from the look of it all.

At 4:35, at the top of the stairs, I said, “Wait. What about a motion detector on the burglar alarm?”

“She won’t have one,” Curtis said. “She has a cat, remember?”

“I thought they made motion detectors that didn’t detect pets,” I said.

“They do,” Curtis said. “But they work like total crap, so within six weeks, seventy-six percent of people either routinely bypass them or replace them completely.”

Victor started to speak. “Impres—”

I interrupted him. “Yeah, yeah, impressive.” I turned to Curtis. “Look, how do you know all this about burglar alarms and breaking into houses anyway? I mean, you even know statistics? Don’t take this the wrong way, but
you’re not exactly known for spending all day with your head in a book.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I’m actually just making all this up as we go along.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re joking. Right?”

He shrugged guiltily. “Kinda not.”

He turned to go, but I reached out and stopped him. “Wait. Really?”

He winked at me. “Really. It just goes to show that if you sound like you know what you’re talking about, people will think you do.”

It took me a second to process what Curtis had just told me.
He’s just winging all this?
I thought. Behind me, I heard Victor wheezing, like he was choking on this new information.
Not so impressed now
, I wanted to say to him,
are you
?

“Don’t worry,” Curtis said calmly, starting down the stairs. “Everything I’ve said was just common sense. And hey, I’ve been right so far, right?”

“Saint Duplicitous,” Victor muttered, but we had no choice but to follow. And in spite of everything Curtis had said, I still
wanted
to follow. There was something I
had
to do, or at least something I needed to know, even if
I still wasn’t quite sure what that was.

Mrs. Shelby’s stairs must have been built with a different kind of wood than the upstairs hallway, because they creaked in a totally different way—lower, more of a groan. The downstairs smells were different too: more dust, maybe from the ancient furniture, spoiled fruit from the kitchen, and the faint scent of perfumed soap.

At 4:37, we reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but it definitely wasn’t this.

The floor of the living room was covered with stuff.

Valuable
stuff. There were computers and televisions and a Tiffany lamp and a crystal vase. There were bikes and a scooter and
two
game systems and other toys for kids. And on the dining room table, there was a gold watch, a cell phone, two pairs of diamond earrings, and a set of expensive-looking figurines from
The Wizard of Oz
. There was even more stuff we couldn’t identify, things that had already been wrapped up as gifts in colored paper and bows.

Talk about the sweet life!
I thought.

“What
is
all this?” I said.

“All those packages she was getting,” Curtis said.
“Mrs. Shelby must be using the reward money to buy gifts. She’s probably trying to buy back all the people she’d put off her whole life by being such a miserable witch.”

This actually made sense. Mrs. Shelby had to know she wasn’t going to live forever—so why not spend the money now? Now that I thought about it, the jewels in the box in her bedroom had probably been real after all—the part of her reward money that she’d spent on herself.

We kept staring at that stuff—all things purchased with the reward money that should rightfully have gone to us. There were any number of things we could take—things we could easily carry out the window and down the ladder—that were worth at least seven thousand dollars: most of the stuff on the dining room table, for example, or the jewels from upstairs.

But finally, Curtis said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

He turned to leave. He hadn’t picked up any of Mrs. Shelby’s loot, not even any of the easily pocketed stuff, like the jewels and figurines. Victor and I hadn’t either.

That’s when I knew. The perfect crime wasn’t breaking into Mrs. Shelby’s house to steal from her. The perfect
crime was breaking into her house and
not
stealing.

This whole episode wasn’t about getting the seven thousand dollars we needed for Project Sweet Life. It was about something else entirely. Mrs. Shelby had taken a hundred thousand dollars from us. We’d come to her house to prove once and for all that, unlike her, we
didn’t
steal, even when we had the perfect opportunity.

In other words, we were proving to ourselves that we were
better
than she was. This is what I had felt before, but I hadn’t been able to explain. It hadn’t made sense until now, looking at all that stuff, having the opportunity to steal and deciding at that moment not to do it.

It made me proud to know that this was how all three of us saw the world—even Curtis. It was like that time in the coffee shop when we’d all offered to sacrifice ourselves for one another. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so close to my two best friends. But now I felt even
closer
. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever feel this close to another person again. I wanted to believe I’d feel it on the day I got married, if I ever got married. But I honestly wasn’t sure I would.

I glanced down at my watch. It was 4:39. There was still plenty of time to get out of the house.

As I was staring at my watch, a sound came from the back of the house—a sort of quick, soft squeal.

A squeal? Had Mrs. Shelby come home and seen our ladder up against the side of her house?

“It
can’t
be her,” I whispered, wanting it to be true. “She hasn’t had time to eat dinner yet.”

“It’s
not
her,” Curtis said. “We know she always parks in the carport, then comes in through the front door.”

“But who else could it be?” Victor asked. It was too late in the day for it to be another delivery, and they’d all come to the front door anyway.

Whatever or whoever it was squealed again.

“It’s the cat,” I said. “That’s all.” But it didn’t sound quite like a cat.

“No,” Victor said. “It’s someone really washing the windows.”

I relaxed a little. Victor was right; it
did
sound like someone squeegeeing the windows. Sort of.

Something thumped against the ground just outside the back of the house.

That was no window being washed. Something was different
inside
the house: Dust motes whirled in the afternoon sun, and I felt a sudden draft on my skin, like a
window had been opened. But how could anyone open a window without setting off the burglar alarm? I glanced over at the keypad on the wall and saw that, yes, it was still armed.

There was movement, the sound of a body coming through an open window. Feet scuffled on a windowsill, then water gurgled, like someone stepping on the top of a ceramic toilet tank.

Someone was coming in through Mrs. Shelby’s bathroom window? But who? Another burglar? Maybe those squeals hadn’t been someone washing the window, but rather, someone cutting
through
it. Hadn’t Curtis said that was a way of getting inside a house without setting off the burglar alarm?

But another
burglar
? At the same time we’d chosen to break into the house? What were the odds of
that
?

Suddenly I remembered what Curtis had said about burglars observing a house for three days and then, if there was no change in the pattern, breaking in on the fourth. It had just been wild speculation on Curtis’s part, but it definitely
sounded
true. So maybe it was. And today was the fourth day after that article in the newspaper about Mrs. Shelby getting a check for a hundred thousand
dollars. It certainly made sense that the other burglar would strike at the same time we chose to, when Mrs. Shelby was off having dinner.

Then I remembered that plumber’s van we’d seen in front of Mrs. Shelby’s house for three days straight. What kind of plumbing job took three days to finish?

Someone else had been casing out Mrs. Shelby’s house!
And just like Curtis had had us disguise ourselves as window washers, this other burglar made himself invisible by dressing as a plumber. It had worked so effectively that even
we
hadn’t noticed him!

Curtis, Victor, and I stared at the stairs in front of us. I knew what we were all thinking: Those stairs and the second-story floorboards squeaked. If we started up those stairs and someone came in through the back, they would hear us for sure. And since we would still need to climb down a ladder on the side of the house, they might very well catch us, too.

What did a burglar do when he or she ran into another burglar at the scene of a crime? Was there some kind of protocol, a way to call “dibs”? Or would he just kill us?

I didn’t want to find out if there really was honor among thieves. On the other hand, we couldn’t very well
stay where we were.

“The kitchen!” Curtis whispered.

“The kitchen?” I whispered back.

“Just
do
it!”

We ran to the small pantry at the back of the kitchen. It smelled of dry pasta and molasses. I saw why Curtis had demanded that we come here: There was nothing valuable in a kitchen. It also had an exit.

The burglar was inside the house now, moving from the bathroom to the front hall. At one point, he briefly passed by the doorway into the kitchen. He didn’t see us, but we saw him: an older, burly guy with a shaved head. Sure enough, he was dressed in a plumber’s uniform.