One of Us Is Going Down

Welcome Home?

“I got in,” Ashlyn squealed across the table to her best friend as they ate in the food court of the local shopping mall.

“Ahh! Congratulations!” Leslie squealed back and patted her best friend’s hand.
“When will you have to leave me?”

Ashlyn had been accepted to UCLA, and couldn’t wait to get there. She hated to leave her family and friends behind on one coast as she went to college on another. The family’s private jet would help with visiting though. Ashlyn was going to Los Angeles for design school, where she hoped to finish school and move back home to Miami and open her own clothing company.

“Two and a half weeks,” Ashlyn smiled sadly.

“How did you get in, if you applied so late?” Leslie asked.

“Come on, mom asked Trent and the rest was a done deal.”

Trent was Ashlyn’s stepfather, a very rich stepfather, but that wasn’t the reason her mother had married him, she was a better woman then that. Ashlyn took a bite of her rice and swallowed, just as she opened her mouth to ask Leslie what store they should hit next in the mall, her cell phone rang. She answered to hear her hysterical mother on the other end.

“Where are you?!”

“At the mall with Leslie, right where I said I would be,” Ashlyn rolled her eyes.

“You’re not at home?”

“Nope,” she decided not to get smart with her mother at this particular moment.
“Why?”

“Someone broke into the house and the pool house, the alarm scared them
though, but the police are there now,” her mother cried. “I’m just so glad you weren’t home!”

“Where are you?” Ashlyn asked.

“On my way home to talk with the police.”

Ashlyn sighed after she hung up with her mother. She looked up to see that Leslie’s boyfriend had found them, in the middle of the crowded food court. When he showed up, Leslie’s brain went to mush and thus, Ashlyn realized that the shopping excursion was over. She explained what happened, picked up her purchases and headed for the valet parking.

Once back in her Range Rover, Ashlyn made the drive home, only to be stopped at the gate by two police officers who asked for her driver’s license to prove that she lived there. Once she was allowed past the gates of her own house, she pulled around to the garage and parked the car, seeing her mother and stepfather standing by the pool with a police officer as others combed the area. Ashlyn walked over and stood beside her parents. As soon as the officer was done talking with her parents, he walked off, leaving mom and Trent to talk with Ashlyn.

“Oh, honey,” her mom hugged her, still looking worried and relieved that Ashlyn hadn’t been at home for the ‘event’. “They would like for us to go through the house and make a list of things that are missing.”

This would not be hard, Ashlyn realized. Her parents had everything in the main house catalogued away just in case something like this happened, and she lived out in the pool house now, and knew exactly which of her things were out there, catalogued or not. She walked past a detective as he snapped pictures of the house and things around that had been messed up. Tears welled in Ashlyn’s eyes as she stepped into her home. Sure, the pool house was an extension of her parent’s house, and she had just recently moved out there just for the hell of it, but looking at it now astounded her.

The blinds were askew, drawers in the small kitchen had been pulled out and tossed across the room, the stuff that was once inside them splayed across the room. Her living room was bare of the electronics; the sofas flipped over, the pillows ripped. She bit her lip, mustering strength to go on as she stepped further into her pool house. Her room was quite possibly the worst. Her television and all the entertainment equipment that went with it was gone, her mattress was flipped over and off the bed, the comforter was half hanging out the open window, the drawers of her dresser and beside table were open, her clothes falling out. She looked in the bathroom as well, cabinets had been opened in there too. How many people had been through and seen her under clothes? Her feminine products? Her things? She felt like she herself had been the one defiled.

A detective handed her a legal pad and a pen with a sorrowful look, then left her alone. Ashlyn sighed and set to work. In the end, she wasn’t missing anything too big, mostly some silverware and all of her electronics. The hidden safe in her closet was perfectly fine; they hadn’t found that, so all of her super precious things were still with her. She was suddenly glad that she had been without her laptop this week, glad that it was off having more memory installed; otherwise it wouldn’t be here right now.