I had a student journal meeting on campus around lunchtime. I was driving home after the meeting, talking on the cell to my mom about the progress on the house. I was going to do a quick drive-by on the way to the rental, but stopped and pulled over when I saw a cop car in the old driveway.
“The house looks great,” I was telling my mom. “Its going so fast, and–Uh, I gotta go, Mom, they’re arresting someone in front of the house.” I abruptly hung up.
By the time I got to the front walkway, the cop had pulled off with someone in the back seat. Squatter?

The A/C guy was there, working on installing the ventilation system (on a Saturday!). He said that some guy was there when he showed up, hauling off wood on foot. He told the guy not to take the wood, the guy said it was okay, so he called the cops. The cop and his buddy had gone off to look for the theif who, on foot, most likely hadn’t gotten very far.
David showed up a second later with the camera. I told him he had just missed the hubbub.
The cop showed up with the buddy of the A/C guy and three other dudes who were carrying a 2×4 and utility belts. We asked if there was anything we could do, and he said, “Not really. This is between the two contractors.”
They got Ace on the phone, and our foreman, Scott showed up within minutes. We headed across the street to chat with our neighbors while things were getting sorted out. A cop car generates a lot of attention, I guess. Another neighbor stopped to ask what was going on. A friend that lives around the corner dropped by to see what was up. Finally, we saw the guys with the tool belts head off with the wood.

We asked the cop what had happened. He said that it was all a bizarre twist of fate. The dude’s truck had broken down on his way to installing a fence down the street. He had the truck towed, but put his fencing lumber in our yard until he could come back and get it and had been slowly collecting it, piece by piece. He didn’t speak english very well, so the situation had been difficult to communicate.
In the end, our foreman recognized that the wood he was hauling off (cedar) was not the same as the wood we were using to build (pine).
Poor guy. What a sucky day for him. I almost ran after him to offer my condolences. These days, my belly is just too big to run anywhere.