Chapter 1: Thief in the night

You could hear the clock tick. It was that quiet.

The dust of my uncles’ climbing the stairs to bed had settled more than an hour earlier, but I remained still, waiting, listening to their breathing change from rough coughs of half asleep to the thick snores of unconsciousness.

Still, I did not move.

I clutched the wrinkled sheets of my bed and shivered.

The clock ticked on from the dresser, counting off the early morning hours like cadence. Soon it would count itself into daylight and my chance would be gone.

I had planned this thing for more than a month and knew this had to be the night. In the morning the money would be gone, transferred from the safe downstairs to the inaccessible vault of a bank, waiting months for the cash to accumulate again.

I did not want to wait months for another opportunity. It was now or never.

I stuck a foot out into the cold air, shivering not from the chill, but from sheer terror, snatching the foot back at the sound of a snort from my uncle’s bedroom next door.

The calm resumed and I tried again, bracing myself against the November chill the old house’s antiquated heating system could not suppress.

I wondered if things would be different in Denver, how much colder it might be.

When my uncle snorted again, I froze, too far exposed to retreat back to the safety of the covers. I simply waited for the breathing to settle again, and when it did, I crept across my small room to the closet.

My Class A uniform still hung there, a painful reminder of the last year I had spent in service.

Although tempted, I would not be taking that along on this trip. Instead, I selected the brown suit my mother had purchased for me the previous Christmas.

It sort of fit, still it was better than nothing. I took a white shirt, a tie and my good black shoes out of the closet as well, then carrying these, I stepped into the attic hall.

Here the sounds of my uncle’s breathing increased, more like that of a sleeping animal than anything human, sucking in the dusty air in sobs.

I had reached his door when he snorted again, his large body tossing in the dark room. I could barely see his single bed against the far wall but could not tell if he was asleep. The dim light from the hall did not allow me to make him out clearly.

He might have been pretending sleep, watching me as I reached in towards his pants hanging from the doorknob of his closet.

This was part of the plan and without the keys which the pants contained, I could not get into the safe downstairs.

I heard the keys jingle as I lifted the pants, then I froze again as my uncle turned in his bed, then rose up onto his elbows. He moaned something, then fell back.

My heart beating madly, I withdrew with his pants into the hall, where I leaned against the wall, desperate to slow down my breathing.

I could not. My heart had a will of its own, ticking the way the clock in my room ticked, as if ready for the alarm to sound.

So far so good, I thought. The plan was working. All I had to do now was get the money and then get away.

Still clutching my uncle’s pants and the clothing I intended to wear in my getaway, I crept down the two short flights of stairs from the attic to the second floor, where other sounds greeted me – the groans of my grandmother from the large master bedroom just ahead, the moans of my mother from her small room to the left at the end of the stairs down. A hacking cough sounded from my other uncle’s room down the hall from too many cigarettes – the smell of which permeated this whole floor.

Other uncles in other rooms lay in peace as if already dead, soundlessly asleep.

But it was Ritchie, my smoking uncle, that worried me most. He often got up in the middle of the night drawn out of his dreams by need of cigarette or even a drink.

I prayed that this one night he would stay asleep.

I crept down the rest of the stairs, the old wood of each step groaning under each footfall, even though I stepped near where the stair met the wall, away from the dangerous middle.

The sound went unnoticed, letting me reach the downstairs hall without raising alarm.

I flicked on the overhead light, three dim bulbs from a dusty chandelier casting deep shadows.

This was a dark space, old wall paper from before my grandfather’s time, framed by dark wood, with a doorway to the right leading to the kitchen, a double doorway – missing the glass French doors across from me leading to the living room and TV, and a double set of doors with beveled glass and space between for boots and coats leading to the front porch to the left. More to the left stood my grandfather’s desk overloaded with scraps of paper, messages left for my uncle Ritchie’s carpentry business, and the boat store business my uncle’s ran out of the one-time garage next door.

The safe near the desk stood out because it seemed so out of place with the rest of the Victorian surrounding, a cold gray metal cabinet my uncles had installed after the death of my grandfather, when they thought keeping cash in a small, locked box was hardly enough.

I headed straight for the safe, the key opening the outside lock, letting the door swing open to reveal the safe itself. This was where the real challenge came. While I had looked over my uncle’s shoulder a number of times when he had dialed the combination, I remained uncertain that I had collected the numbers right, while pretending I was not paying attention to what my uncle did.

My fingers shook as I turned the knob to each number as my other hand clutched the handle when I put the last of the numbers in, turning it, hearing the tell-tale click that said it was open – a click that echoed far too loudly in that silent hall, forcing me to glance back towards the stairs, expecting Harry or Ritchie or Ed come tumbling down.

None did.

Inside the safe was my grandfather’s metal box to which I had another key from my uncle’s pants pocket. I slid the box out of the safe just as I heard Ritchie’s hacking cough from up the stairs. I put the box down, closed the safe door, and then the outer door, waiting for the coughing to subside, only to realize Ritchie was making his way down the stairs.

I grabbed the box and ran, flicking off the light as I did, cursing myself for turning it on in the first place.

What a stupid act! Had the light roused Ritchie?

I felt hysterical and searched the hall for a hiding place, then rushed into the kitchen, which even in the dark seemed too exposed. My mind raced with visions of the living room and dining room and saw no place to hide in either of them either.

Only the downtowns bathroom remained, and I rushed across the kitchen to the cubby hole that contained more coats, a closet and finally the bathroom.

My uncle coughed again from the landing between the first and second floor, his step sounding even louder on the stairs than mine had.

I shut the bathroom door and struggled to push the bolt lock into place, feeling the metal scrape as I shoved at it, getting it fixed just as I heard my uncle reach the kitchen.

The florescent light in the kitchen went on, the glow of it showing under the bathroom door. He coughed again then opened the refrigerator, its motor coming on as he did. Bottles clinked and I imagined him drinking from the milk bottle (it was too late at night for him to be guzzling beer).

He slammed the refrigerator door, pulled out a chair from under the table – legs moaning across the tile floor like a wounded hound, sounds that scared me because they might have woken one of my other uncles and brought them down to the kitchen, too, if only to see what the ruckus was about, and repeated when he rose again from the chair, struck matches several times before one lit. I smelled the sulfur and then the gas as he lit the stove, followed by the scent of coffee as he heated the pot always waiting on the stove.

I sat in the dark on the closed toilet seat, impatient for him to leave, the box I’d taken from the safe sitting on my lap. Carefully, I turned on the bathroom light, fit the key into the locked box and opened the top, moving as noiselessly as possible with my uncle still only a few feet away. Bundles of bills filled the box, wrapped up, already counted and waiting to be deposited in the bank, all of them mine if I could somehow managed to get passed my uncle with them.

My uncle’s cough from the kitchen reminded me of how vulnerable I was and tempted me to put the money back in the safe. Yet I had already gone too far, crossed some mental barrier I could not return from, knowing that the old house, all of the things I had known all my life were a trap for me, something I would have to escape – if not now, then later – or else die in the attempt, and it would be better for me to leave with money than without.

I had a vague destination in my head, to follow the trail of the girl I had met less than a year earlier, who I had sought out after my leaving the army only to discover she had moved west, leaving me smitten with a love potion I had no way to cure.

This stirred in by blood even as I listened to my uncle sip his coffee in the kitchen beyond the bathroom door. I needed to get to her and to do that, I needed the money.

My best friend Hank had sensed some of this going on inside me when we’d last seen each other in Washington Square Park, asking me what was wrong, why I wasn’t my old cheerful self – the one with whom he had sung songs in the streets of New York in search of the happy hippie life. I could not tell him, as if ashamed, as if Louise needed to remain a secret even from Hank – at least, until I could find my ticket to reach her, the ticket that sat inside that box on my lap.

Then, while I sat lost in these thoughts, the bathroom door handle rattled!

I nearly dropped the box. It was Ritchie trying to get into the bathroom with me trapped inside.

This was not like the second-floor bathroom with large windows, one of which led out onto the porch roof I could have climbed out onto and made an escape. This room was just wide enough for a bathtub along one wall, a toilet on another and a small sink situated next to the door. The window on the remaining wall provided air, and a bit of light during the day, but I could not have crawled out of it or managed to climb down the scrawny rose bushes just outside of it if I had. Even then, I could not have run far with the box under my arm if my uncle saw me.

“I’m in here, Rit!” I said raising my voice which sounded shrill even to me.

The man continued to twist the door handle.

“I’m in here!” I said, a bit louder.

Ritchie grunted. “What? Who? Is that you, Danny?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m using the toilet.”

There was a pause. I could picture the sleeping face struggling to make sense of this, wrinkled from his nightly fight with his pillow, a once-handsome Dean Martin look alike, squinting at the door as if to envision me on the other side.

“Are you going to be long?” he asked.

“I just got in here,” I said.

There was another pause. His hand still griped the half-turned handle.

“Why didn’t you use the bathroom upstairs?” he asked.

I answered slowly, “Someone was in it.”

“Oh?” he said, then went away.

Again, he coughed, briefly turned on the water in the kitchen sink, then made his way upstairs, each footfall releasing me gradually from my freeze.

But I was in a panic now.

I grabbed bundles of cash from the box and stuff these into the pockets of my suit jacket, leaving as much in the box as I took, dumping the box into the hamper before I pulled open the bolt on the door, and then in the kitchen, changed into the suit.

Outside the kitchen window above the sink showed the first glow of pre-dawn. I moved back into the front hall, looking for the shoes I had failed to carry into the bathroom with me. I found them on the floor in front of the still open safe!

Had Ritchie stopped to look into the darkness, he would have known what I was up to and the whole plan would have halted there and then.

I sat in the chair by the desk, my hands shaking as I put on and tried to tie the laces of my shoes. After three attempts, I managed the feat.

Then with a strange satisfaction, I glanced once more around the old house, a house filled with memories and sometimes pain, then I threw open the front door and walked through it into the November night. Nothing could stop me now, I thought, mapping out the rest of my plan in my head, a plan that would eventually bring me to Denver and the girl I loved.

I glanced back from the front porch and saw that the kitchen light was still on. I left it, plunging down the front stairs to the street, and then up the street, headed towards the bus that would take me to the Port Authority building in New York – not a long walk, but a terrifying one with my pockets bulging with stolen cash.