One wintery morning we were at my mother’s apartment in Kent, CT. and we had gone outside to play since there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground, it was well below freezing and we were bundled up in sweaters, jackets, long johns and snow pants. Although there were no noteworthy hills around, we has a plastic sled with us with a yellow nylon rope tied to the front of it… she sat in the sled and I pulled her around in it. Across the street was an abandoned lot, it was clearly marked no trespassing, but we went inside anyway... Jenn protested but I convinced her we were detectives on the case… we proceeded to go into building after building, looking for “clues” about what had happened to the occupants of the buildings, were they murdered? Kidnapped?... I picked up a long metal rod I found on the floor and accidentally bumped a pane of glass in the window, which instantly shattered due to the subzero temperature… well this was a “clue”… why did the glass break so easily? Was this how the murder / kidnapper was so easily able to enter the building? I intentionally broke out several more panes with the rod to demonstrate how remarkably brittle the glass was. We looked around for additional clues, and determined the culprits were quite clever to make sure they did not leave many solid clues behind, the only other clue we found was a single track in the snow leading out to the side exit to the complex… and we needed to go back inside at home and write down all the “facts” we had uncovered. Right as we were about to exit the no trespassing zone, a cop with lights flashing pulled up and started questioning us about what we were doing in there, our names, where do we live, etc… a nearby restaurant had called the police because they heard breaking glass and suspected the abandoned buildings were being vandalized… the cop didn’t believe we on his side and were trying to help figure out what had happened in there… instead he sent Jenn running home to fetch the adults… so of course, Jenn runs inside the house and frantically explains to our mothers I had been “arrested” and the cops “got me.” We didn’t get into any real trouble, but the cop was pretty stern with me but I’m sure he pieced together that we were simply playing where we shouldn’t have been and left it at that… we were so young and innocent at that point in our lives we spent the rest of the day wondering why the cop didn’t want to hear any of our evidence or hear our opinion about what happened to the people that once occupied the buildings… our theory was a motorcycle gang had kidnapped the people by punching out the easy to shatter glass and snatching them when they got in… and the single track was the only evidence left behind being clever to each ride in the same track to throw off the cops… and since the cop wasn’t interested in our theory, perhaps he was in on the conspiracy!... we wondered if he owned a motorcycle!

The “motorcycle track” by the way was created by a warm day of melting snow dripping off the roof melting a straight track into the snow parallel to the building… the buildings were vacant because there wasn’t enough business for the shops there to stay in business… they weren’t houses, they were old abandoned stores.

The buildings (stores) from the story are still around today, and they seem to be doing just fine…

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.726411,-73.47579,3a,75y,290.55h,91.27t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s0Mkx4NxHteDoGg5Gke5wtA!2e0

… I guess the local kidnapping motorcycle gang couldn’t thwart the dedicated, determined hard working merchants of Kent CT after all!

Perhaps word of the Junior Detectives on the case helped to scare them out of town!