Free Zipper Fall by Kate Pavelle

heat was still oppressive, and the Barnaby neighborhood was humming with straining air-conditioning units. The neighbors were inside, eating dinner and getting ready to watch their favorite TV shows before they had to get ready for the upcoming workweek.
    Dusk fell as I parked my bicycle in a copse of trees two blocks away. I wore simple, long black biking tights and a loose, black cotton button-down shirt over my neon-green cycling tee. My concealed waist pouch contained all I needed.
    The neighborhood was deserted as I ghosted through the backyard shrubbery. The minutes I spent to reach the Barnaby backyard seemed endless. I jumped up, grabbing one of the beams of the pergola, and walked my feet up the wooden pillar. I hooked my knee around the top beam and hoisted my body up, crouched, and looked around. The neighbors were still inside. There was no traffic in the street. I balanced on a beam and walked to the second-story windows and inspected them. Sure enough, there was no sign of an alarm system—and none of them were unlocked. I sighed. I hated to leave a calling card, but there was no help for it. With gloves on, I pulled an egg of silly putty out of my pouch and I stuck it to the bathroom window. Using a diamond-tip scribing pen, I drew a careful circle around the putty, then pressed in. The windows were double-pane; the first circle fell between the two sheets of glass, leaving me with a blob of silly putty in my hands. I repeated the process on the second pane, producing a tidy opening just big enough for my slender hand. I reached in and up, unlocked the window, and made my way into the house.
    The air on the inside felt stuffy. The homeowners must have turned their air conditioning off while they were gone. The bathroom window, just like the rest of the upstairs, didn’t show any wiring and I figured it wasn’t hooked up to their security system. I drew the blinds and closed the curtains before I clicked the lights on.
    The house was amazingly cluttered. It must have been decorated professionally some years ago, but strata of various objects were deposited onto the formerly elegant surfaces over time. Only a few of these objects were of value, but I was fine with that. My job was to find Janet Barnaby’s secret hiding place. Almost everyone had a special place where they put their valuables while they were away. I wasn’t disappointed. The master bedroom was upstairs. Its closets were full to bursting with predominantly women’s clothing. Child-sized access panels connected the bedroom to a number of little crawlspaces. It took me two minutes before I pried the stuck doors open. I found two pieces of luggage the Barnabys chose not to bring along behind the first door. The second door opened onto a cache of round hatboxes. Some of them still had price tags on—she got them on sale at Marshall’s, mostly. I looked through their contents with care, trying not to disturb the carefully arranged surface of old gloves and scarves. There were no hats; she apparently used the pretty boxes as storage for her Hermès scarf collection. Each scarf could fetch around three hundred bucks on eBay—but I didn’t feel like dealing with the process of selling them and leaving a trail. I was after smaller, denser stuff.
    Sure enough, four rectangular shoeboxes on the right side of the crawlspace contained anything but shoes. Just the fact that Janet Barnaby chose to store these particular pieces of jewelry piled in shoeboxes was telling of the fact that she rarely, if ever, wore them. I selected quickly, avoiding unique, easily recognized pieces. Soon, my quart-size Ziploc bag was full of chains and earrings and bangles. Not one of them had stones; her good gemstones would reside in her real jewelry box, which was probably in a safe under the bed. I didn’t feel any desire to crack a safe that evening. Satisfied with a pound of gold, I arranged her boxes back the way they were, replaced the crawl space cover, dusted my