icy leaves

At 9:00 am Morgan was home and received a text from her dance partner, “China said she can’t come on Saturday.”  Morgan answered, “I think we should reschedule. There’s a huge storm warning all weekend. 🙁 .”  Her friend answered, “Okay. I might not be able to go any other time.  I have to go pick up Ian, regardless, so that kinda drains my money for pointe shoes.”  Morgan felt bad, “Shit. 🙁 .”  And her friend told her, “Yeah. I mean, if you don’t feel comfortable with driving, I totally understand. This is not an attempted guilt trip, pinky promise.”

The weather is bad, a storm arriving as scheduled.  Morgan leaves for her classes, and gets a text message from her dance teacher, “I am running late from Aspen.  Weather, and roads.  Can u plz let everyone know!  Thank u!  XoXo  can you have everyone start warming up…ask Emily Bennet to see if Abbie will let you in the room.”

I see my therapist for the first time today, and she is great.  We talk and work on a plan to de-stress.  I explain about the stalker, tell her that I feel he is hiding in the bushes in front of the house by the garage, under the window (I had seen shoe prints behind the bush under the window), hiding in the shadows where the cameras can’t see him.  I explain how after all the cameras went in we sat back and looked at the front of the garage, which has no coverage, and the rear yard, which has a few blind spots.  We had put the wildlife camera out front, but it stopped working completely and was now retired.

Together we work on a plan to take away the front of the garage as a possible hiding spot.  It was a simple plan that only required moving half of the stuff in the garage so I could look out the garage window to observe, and although I thought he would be really grumpy at best Steve did not complain at all and after a major reshuffle of the contents the garage was ready for plan “B”.  I was excited. I would wear dark clothes, turn off all of the lights and stand near the back window.  From there I could see most of the front yard, and all along the front side yard to Rhonda’s house.  Camera’s had the side yard covered, and I had a big mag light to shine out the window in case I saw anything.  It was kind of warm, and safe and I could come and go as I pleased, undetected from outside.

I spent two long stints in the garage patiently watching the yard, scanning from side to side.  I thought about the sheriffs and their stakeouts here.  It was not so bad at first, but it would get cold, and boring out there in the elements.  The wind was bursting outside and snow started and stopped, enough to keep a good cover on the ground.  The stalker would certainly avoid conditions like this, he would leave tracks, and be easy to follow.

The snow became heavier and I decided to stop for tonight.  The set up was a good idea and was working well, I did not expect to catch him the first time.  In fact I had to coordinate a plan with Steve for how I should alert him when I did see something on a future stakeout, and how he should react.  Based on our stalker so far we should not expect more than one chance, so we had to make it a good one.  I thought about the detectives too, they hadn’t had a chance to do one of their stake outs yet, things kept coming up.  I feared they had better hurry because winter was coming, and before long it would be very unpleasant out there.  But then that might mean the stalker would be closing up for the winter, wouldn’t that be nice!!!