Train Ride Robbery

It was time to start our long journey. A clamor could be heard but it was only from the sounds of the wheels and gears starting to turn on the underbelly of the train. There were a lot of noises coming from people finding their seats and running after young ones. No one noticed them but me.
Two men with a furtive look to them were walking down the hallway of the train. One was tall and seemed gaunt while the other was short and stout. Each man eyed the cabins of the train as they walked by each passing glass door. They seemed suspicious and made me keep my eyes on them. As they walked, they looked like they were planning a collusion with serious countenances. My attention focused on the two men for quite sometime until a loud guttural made me jump and realize that I’d been staring. One of the conductors on the train was standing above me as I had managed to peak around the corner of the door to our cabin.
“Tickets please.” The man in uniform asked. I handed him my ticket and my mothers since she was already asleep for the long ride.
We were on our way to New York City where my grandmother would be waiting for us to arrive. Train was the only choice we had from our small town of Mooresboro since our car was so old it wouldn’t be able to handle the long ride north. The train ride would be about 4 hours until we arrived in New York, so my mother and I planned on sleeping for some of it.
The conductor took our tickets and punched two holes to mark our two way ride and then continued down the train. After he left I curved my head back around the door to see if the two men were still there but they were out of sight. I shrugged and decided not to bother. I sat back down and opened the book my mom had been reading. However, as much as I tried to concentrate on the book I couldn’t keep my attention. My mind kept buzzing with what those two men could have been looking for or wanted. I checked my watch. We had only been riding for 14 minutes so I decided to take a walk along the train. I left a note for my mother telling her I had left that way she wouldn’t think something awful happened to me while she had been sleeping. I promised that I would be back in an hour or so.
Since the men had gone up the train towards the engine, I decided to go that way too. Walking by all the doors, I passed many different types of people. Some small families with little children playing in their parents laps, others like old men just sitting reading newspapers. I had just reached the car where lunch was being served and people were enjoying their meals, and I scanned the room for anyone that looked like the two men or anything that could give me an inkling of why they were so suspicious. And then I saw him. The shorter of the two was creeping up to a woman with her seat turned away from him. I stood behind a planter nearby that way he wouldn’t see me watching. Her purse was on the back of her chair. As the woman went to take a bite of her food, thus making her back separate from the chair, the man grabbed her bag without her even noticing. I looked around the rest of the cart and no one else seemed to notice that he had just robbed that benevolent looking woman.
I looked back at him from where I was and he was just casually walking out of the room. I was about to tell the woman that a man had just stolen her purse but I decided to keep following him and see if he committed more acts of avarice. I kept my distance behind him so as not to give away my detective acts. The chubby man scanned the other cabins like before. He came to a halt at a particular one. He looked side to side to make sure no one had been following him. I jumped into the closest room before he saw me. I came out when I thought he hadn’t noticed. He had gone into the cabin and had been rummaging around someone’s things since the owner or owners weren’t inside. I glanced through the glass window door. He was taking the goods deftly and with swift legerdemain.
He came out of the cabin with his hands full of stolen goods. I hid again and the stout man ran down the train. I followed him again and this time he met up with his partner in crime who also had his hands full of things that definitely wasn’t his. I had to tell someone about this. I watched for awhile more to see where they were putting the goods and I noticed them put them in an empty cabin.
I started walking my way back to where my mother was so I could think about how I could tell someone about the two kleptomaniacs. I was almost to our room when I heard someone yell, “All my things are missing!” An old woman was coming out of her room and looking for a conductor. The same one that punched my ticket came over.
“What seems to be the problem miss?” The worker asked.
“Someone has stolen all my things!” The old lady yelled.
“Do you know anything about this?” I was asked by the man in uniform.
“I do! I saw two men steal things from other people.” I explained to the two adults about how I saw the two thieves go into cabins and take what isn’t theirs.
After describing the two men we decided to find them and catch the two men. Luckily we found the thieves in the act. When we caught them, they told us how they were planning on taking the goods to a shelter where they would give out the goods to those who were less needy. We concurred that they were fibbing and put the conductor in charge of punishing them.
“Save your lies.” The conductor said somewhat deriding him. He made them give back all that wasn’t theirs and they were sentenced to lock down in one of the first cabins until we arrived in New York.
The old lady thanked me for being suppliant and very altruistic. I said it was no big deal but realized what I had done was something I would never think of doing back home. I walked back to my cabin to find my mother still sleeping. Only an hour left and we’d be at grandmas.

Second Quarter Outside Reading Book Review

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Back Bay, 2004. Genre: Fiction

This story takes place in a small town where 14 year old, Susie, gets murdered by her creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Throughout the book, Susie lives in "her heaven" where she can live the life she wanted but can visit and see the lives of her family, friends, and the rest of the world. Her father alongside his wife and their friend who is a detective try to figure out the mysterious murder of their daughter and who and how they committed it. As the book goes on, you learn about the struggles of losing a loved one, the strengths it takes to solve a crime, and how life can go on even after a hardship interrupts your life.

"Deeply affecting...A keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time." -Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times (Outside Back Cover)

Alice Sebold portrays Susie as your average teenage girl but adds more curiosity and love to life itself though hers was ended at such a young age. Her killer, Mr. Harvey is also a pedifile and a murderer. As Susie walks home from school, he catches her on her way and commits his horrific acts. Susie lives in what seems to be her heaven after she dies and can live alongside the people living on Earth.
From the books perspective, first person, you can view the thoughts and eyes of Susie and the horrible and confusing time she lived and the life after she died.

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.” (p. 320)

I think The Lovely Bones is one of my new favorite book yet. Though there were some dry and dragged on parts, it is still one of the best books I've read and would recommend it to anyone. However, most of the book is sort of girly since its from a teenage girls point of view so it gives off the vibe of a girly highschooler. I also really enjoyed Alice Sebold's way of describing the scenes so vividly and dramatically but also realisticly. I liked this because these things really happen so she wanted more people to realize how awful rape and murder really are.