A door, a key, a lock and a thief... an unsolved mystery

Garry arrived in Winnipeg Wednesday evening, safe and sound, no empty seats on his planes, so he could have been happier with more leg room, but I picked him up at the airport and got home around 1:30 am. We made the mistake of stopping for the new spicy teen burgers at A&W on the perimeter just after midnight, and service was a little slow.... but they were tasty. I will post some more about the wedding last week, as soon as I find his camera with the photos on. He is helping the boys with haying, cutting until 2 am Thursday night, when he ran out of fuel and had to walk home a couple miles with the mosquitoes.

 Meanwhile, here is a story he told me while we were driving home.


Did I mention that in the last months we have had money disappear from the money drawer in the desk in Ukraine? There is a place we keep cash flow- everything is paid for with cash, the milk buyers pay in cash, so there is a book where amounts are written down to keep track of where the money goes. Of course, it is sort of petty cash, not all the money is kept there, but in Ukraine, you just don't write a check (cheque) - it's a cash economy. As time has past, more and more people know where this money is kept over the last three years, and it seems this spring, someone decided to help themselves to some cash.

First there was 500 grivna (remember one dollar = about 8 grivna) missing.... had someone forgotten to write a payment in the book? Sometimes that can happen. Then one weekend at least a 1000 went missing. It was obvious that there was a thief coming into the house, maybe a neighbor, one of the students, who knew? So new rules, keep less than 1000 in the drawer, be more careful about locking the doors....

Then a couple weeks a go, I could not find the key to lock the kitchen door. There had been two keys for it, originally about six, but they had disappeared- people had them for different reasons, lately we were down to one key, which was often used to lock the door, and set somewhere for the next one in the door to use. We got back from a weekend away, and I kept trying to remember to ask Andrei and Max if they knew where it was, locking the door with the extra thumb bolt at night. Often at night, we would go to bed with the door unlocked because Andrei was still out with friends and if it was locked and he had no key, we'd have to get up in the middle of the night to open the door for him. But when I finally talked to them, no key.... where had it gone?

Garry figured Victor must have one, but he didn't, so around the time I left for New Jersey, they decided to change out the lock on the door so it could be locked properly. They started by getting a new lock set for the outside door to the porch/mudroom, since it did not latch well (and the keys to it had disappeared too) and then planned to replace the inner kitchen lock later. Now they could lock the doors, anyway.

So last Saturday, the day of the wedding, apparently no one locked the mudroom door to the house. When They got home, they unlocked and went in the door on the other side of the house, and discovered the next morning that the kitchen door (the one that they had no key for) was now locked .... and a 1000 grivna had gone missing from the drawer. Now they couldn't unlock the door, so Victor was going to have to change the locks now.

Too bad the thief didn't know that they had the only key left for the door, and they didn't remember that the door was unlocked when they came in. Maybe they were worried someone else would steal something from us. Next time they will have a more trouble getting in, with a new lock on the door. I think maybe we are changing the other lock, it is down to one or two keys, too..

So if we could find the key, we could find the thief...