“We lived out in the country in backwoods Missouri. We had very few neighbors and they weren’t within walking distance, nor was it walking distance from town. Our rental house was an old historic farmhouse.
I was home alone and was showering upstairs. The stairs led directly into the master suite and were old, hardwood, and creaky. The bathroom itself was directly over the front door and you could hear the front door open and close while in the shower.
So, I’m in there doing my shower thing, and I hear the front door open. My husband is a cop and sometimes stops home for lunch while he’s out patrolling. I assume this is him coming home. I hear someone walking up the stairs and it sounds off. My husband is 6’ tall and weighs about 250 pounds. He has huge feet. He’s just a huge man. His arms are the size of my legs and he’s not fat. These footsteps do not sound like a huge man ambling up a set of stairs. Still, I write it off as maybe him trying to sneak in and surprise me.
I hear the footsteps stop at the top of the staircase. I wait for them to proceed into the bathroom where I will feign surprise that my husband has come home from work early. I continue to wait for another thirty seconds or so. The footsteps continue but seem to walk opposite the bathroom door and farther into the bedroom. Then, the footsteps approach the bathroom door. There’s a pause and I hear someone say:
‘Hello?’
AND IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT MY HUSBANDS VOICE.
This is not the voice of an older, pack a day, grizzled, former marine, police officer that is built like a brick house. This is a younger voice. This is a STRANGER IN MY HOUSE.
I jumped out of my skin. I immediately put my hand on the shower controls to turn the water off and then think better of it. I leave the shower running, hoping that the person on the other side of the door might think I didn’t hear them over the noise of the running water. I very gently, as quietly as I can, open the shower door and tiptoe to the bathroom door. I reached out and as quickly as I can and turn the lock on the doorknob. Seconds later, I see the doorknob give a few quick shakes. As I stand on my side of the bathroom door, barely breathing, afraid to move, I hear footsteps walking away from the door; they move down the stairs, and towards the back bedroom of the house. I ran out of the bathroom, slammed the bedroom door shut, grabbed my husbands loaded weapon from the nightstand, snatched my cellphone off the dresser, and fled the house out of the second-story balcony. There I took the (thank god it was there) staircase to our backyard, ran across the driveway and into our detached garage where I locked myself in and called my husband to tell him that someone was in our house.
He arrived a few minutes later, cleared the house, and yelled at me for not locking the front door.”
