Why the Saugatuck Police Department Have my Eternal Gratitude

I didn't see the broken glass at first. We were still flushed and smiling from our beautiful walk through the Lake Michigan Dunes and it seemed like the car passenger window was just reflecting the sun in a funny way. It wasn't until we rounded the corner that we realized the car had been broken into while we walked in the forest.

The girls started crying immediately, traumatized by the reality of a bad guy rifling through our lives. Steve picked the rest of the glass carefully out of the window pane, and I kept a crazed Jack from picking up the shiny pieces with his bare hands. His reaction to the drama couldn't have been more different than the girls. He was giddy with excitement and kept pushing up against my restraining arm, drawn to the evidence of the crime like a moth to the flame.

The robber had shattered the window and grabbed only my purse before running off. He left behind our GPS and my camera bag with the macro lens. He also appeared to have ignored the trunk with my laptop and our iPad. We looked around nervously, wondering if he was watching us from a nearby bush, getting ready to pounce with a gun or a machete. Then, as an afterthought, I told Steve to call 911.

We almost didn't make the call. I was so freaked out, making a mental list of the contents of my purse: my cell phone, credit cards, and most painfully, my writer's notebook with a year's worth of work. I remember thinking, as Steve dialed, that the call was probably a waste of time, that there was nothing the police could do.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Within 20 minutes, a sergeant arrived, notebook in hand. Our case was already being worked on, and looked promising.

• We had a suspect! Another deputy was on his way to interrogate him at his home. The team had tracked down the license plate of the driver of a pick-up truck who had been reported by another park visitor for acting suspiciously around empty cars. 
• Cell phone tracing is not just for movies. When I mentioned that my cell phone had been stolen, he immediately got on the phone with Verizon to trace the signal to see if they should be pursuing another lead.
• Next he spoke to American Express to get more details on a suspicious charge at BP, ready to call the nearby gas stations to pull their video records.

Twenty minutes later, we had an update.The suspect, found wearing women's lingerie, confessed to a long list of crimes, including our car break in. The deputy told us to sit tight while they went to look for my purse and belongings.

So we headed to a nearby Burger King and waited while a team of policemen searched under leaves in a ditch in the dark to recover our Flip video camera filled with irreplaceable birthday candle blow-out moments, my notebook with the beginning of my historical fiction novel, and my wallet with all our insurance information.

As I write, we're waiting for the police to arrive, getting updates every thirty minutes or so, wondering what the police will have found, incredibly grateful that this story of a beautiful walk gone bad may have a happy ending after all.

Update: At 9:30PM, the police escorted us to the station to retrieve some of my belongings, my precious writing notebook, a few credit cards, my wallet, and some cash. The suspect, a registered sex offender, was in custody. My Flip video cameras, my car keys, my iTouch, and my purse itself, were still at large, tossed in the leaves of a hunting reserve.

I couldn't believe the police had even found anything. They, on the other hand, seemed to think they hadn't done enough, and promised to get right back out into the woods to search at first light.