"Okay."
She could hear the woman typing rapidly. Then, she heard the wail of a siren just up the street.
"The officer is almost here," Dylan said.
"Good. Please stay on the line with me until he arrives."
"Okay. I'm in my neighbor's place right now. My front door is probably standing open."
"I'll make sure the officer knows."
A few seconds later, two squad cars pulled up in front of the duplex and both officers got out and walked toward the house. She and Sylvie were glued to the window and watched as the man and woman walked up the front steps They went through her door, weapons drawn, and came out five minutes later.
The female officer knocked on Sylvie's door and Dylan answered it.
"Are you the one who called 9-1-1?" she asked.
Dylan nodded. "That's my place," she said, gesturing toward her still-open front door.
The woman nodded. "We'll need to take your statement. And you'll need to board up the window in your back door. It looks like he broke out a pane of glass to unlock it. Do you know if anything is missing?"
Dylan shook her head. "As soon as I saw him, I ran out. He grabbed my arm in the living room and—" She realized she was about to tell the officer that she asked her plants to hold him back and stopped talking abruptly. After she cleared her throat, she continued, "I shoved him down and ran outside."
"Let's go next door and you can take a quick look," the officer said, her expression sympathetic.
Dylan nodded and followed the officer out. The male officer stood just outside her door.
"Can I come with you?" Sylvie asked. "I'm invested now."
For some reason, her comment made Dylan want to smile. "Yeah. Thanks for the rescue," she said.
"Anytime. I hope you'd do the same for me."
Dylan winced when she saw the state of her plants and let a small stream of magic out to help them. The man had torn them up in his efforts to escape. Leaves scattered the floor and a few of the vines were broken. Once she was alone in her duplex, she would work on healing them.
Her television was exactly where she left it and her purse was still by the front door. She walked into her bedroom but everything appeared to be in place. Her jewelry box was still in her closet and the envelope of money she stored in her fire-proof box was still there even though she rarely locked the box.
"It doesn't look like anything's missing," she said.
"Maybe he didn't have time to take anything before you got home," the male officer said.
"I don't know," Dylan replied. "When I walked into the bedroom he said, 'You're finally home.' It was like he was waiting for me. In my bedroom. And he told me to wait when he grabbed me, as though he didn't want me to leave."
The thought freaked her the hell out. Based on that information, it sounded as if he'd been waiting on her rather than a burglar who'd been interrupted.
"Did you recognize him?" the female officer asked.
Dylan shook her head. "No, he was wearing a ball cap and I was so scared. As soon as he talked to me and I saw him standing there, I turned and ran away."
The woman nodded. "That was probably the smartest move."
Then, Dylan thought about the texts. "I don't know if this is related, but I've been getting all these texts from strange numbers." She unlocked her phone and scrolled through her text messages, finding the first from a couple of weeks ago. She turned it toward the officer.
The other woman took it and asked, "Can I scroll through?"
Dylan nodded and watched as the two officers read them.
"Are these your only messages?" the male officer asked.
