The robber’s hat

It was a bright Saturday summer morning. My sister and I were playing a game upstairs., when we heard sirens. Now we lived in a quiet neighborhood, at the top of a culdesack where we felt free and safe to ride bikes, skate in the street and play hide and go seek. An occasional siren was normal if it was from a distance. But we quickly realized that this one was different.

It didn’t come and go like any normal siren would. Instead, it got louder and louder till we were sure it was right outside our house.

We quickly ran to the east room where we would be able to see out the window. Sure enough, there was a police car parked in the neighbors driveway, lights blaring. Then we realized that the car in front of the police car not only did not belong to the neighbors, but it had run into their house and put a dent in their wall.

Then we heard the hollering! The policeman was chasing someone.

We ran downstairs and fought between running out to see what was happening, or running back upstairs to hide under the bed. We chose to stand there in the hallway and hug each other. mainly because at that moment our heads had created such a story, we had paralyzed ourselves and we couldn’t move. 

It took about twenty minutes for  the police to leave and things to calm down, before we felt like we could go outside. We listened to the neighbors talk, and found out that the police had been chasing a man who had just robbed a convenience store.  He’d driven up our street, ran into the neighbor’s house, but run and hopped our fence to our back yard, ran across our garden, and hopped our back fence to get away!

My sister and I looked at each other, and ran to the back yard. Sure enough, there were huge footprints in our newly cultivated garden. That ran to the back fence. The back fence had been broken  when he had scrambled over it, but that’s not what captured our attention! In the middle of the garden, was a hat, a navy blue knit cap, that had fallen off of his head as he had run! We ran to it, nervous to even touch it. Like it would turn us into robbers if we did. But we quickly got over that.

We never thought that the police might like that for evidence. I’m actually sure that they’d seen it and left it there also. So we adopted the hat, washed it, and used it on our backpacking trips, calling it “the robbers hat.” Guaranteeing that we would always have a story to tell on our hiking trips.