I was back from disposing the rubbish for the day, and just happened to look next to the shoe rack. Something just looked different, I counted the number of shoes on the floor.
One, two, three… Eh? Three!?
There was supposed to be four shoes there. Worried I might have counted wrongly, I did another count…
Still ended with 3! I touched the empty space to make sure my shoe didn’t just turn invisible or something. Nothing. It wasn’t under the rack either.
Took the shoes out of the shoe rack to check. Still nothing. Panicking inside (those were new shoes ), I stared at the remaining shoe of the pair, now that one is missing I would need to buy a new pair. Sigh.
Ah, there is still another place! I looked at the window ledge (I air out my shoes there sometimes), cluttered with the foldable clothes hangers on grills of the window, I lifted the clothes that were put out to dry. Nothing again.
Gathering all the people in the house, I questioned if any of them saw my shoes. One said he saw it earlier went he went for work (that morning) but didn’t see it when he returned. The other said she didn’t really take notice of the shoe, but was very sure she did not air that particular pair that day.
It wasn’t possible that the shoe managed to disappear into thin air… That would meant one of them lied, or didn’t tell the whole truth. It couldn’t be stolen by a stranger (who would want just one shoe?), and the house was locked at all times.
A closed-room mystery. These words popped into my head.
So I recapped what I knew:
- Only 3 of us have the keys to the house
- Person A was out at work till evening, saw the shoes in the morning and didn’t see them when he came back
- Person B was in the house whole day, didn’t go near the shoes except when she took down the hanged clothes when it was raining
- I saw the shoes in the morning after Person A went out, but it went missing when I took out the trash (night time)
The only possible period where the shoe went missing is from morning to evening that day (it was such a big gap!), I tried to recall the order of events earlier :
- Person A went out for work (Shoes were still there)
- Person B hanged up the wet clothes to dry
- I did my homework in my room
- Started to pour heavily
- Took down the shoes that were on the window ledge
- Person B came by and said she will take down the clothes
- I went to close the other windows in the house
- Rain stopped
- I fell asleep
- Person B went out for lunch
- Woke up and had lunch
- Nothing special happened, fast forward to night time
- Realized shoe was missing after disposing of garbage
It’s unlikely Person A or B lied, so the few possibilities I could think of is that either someone broke into the house (but still why take only 1 shoe?) or somehow I had sleepwalked and hid my shoe.
A search throughout the whole house turned up nothing. Getting annoyed that this was leading nowhere, I looked once more at the “crime scene”. The shoe had not turned up there, was I supposed to believe some house elf took my shoe as a trick?
Feeling defeated, I sat down next to the shoe rack, and found myself looking at the at the clothes hanging on the window grills… And what do you know, I saw my shoe hanging at on the sides.
After an hour of search, I finally found my shoe! I could have sworn I didn’t see it there when I was looking through the hanged clothes, but since the clothes around it was dark in color too, it blended in.
How did it get there? I figured that Person B dropped the clothes hanger near the shoe when she was in a hurry to get them out of the rain, the shoelace hooked up to the side of the hanger, not realizing that, she hung them back when the rain stopped (including the one that the shoe hooked on).
Smiling at how it was just pure coincidence, it’s very much true how life sometimes is indeed stranger than fiction :D
Case closed.
