a bloody mystery
I... sort of... found out what the deal was with the gunshots incident two weeks ago. Our downstairs neighbor, a very sweet, middle-aged woman named Shirley (she's wheel-chair bound due to MS), sent me an email today that read:

Hi Kat, I have a question for you that no one but you can answer. Please call before you come down - just because I can't always get to the door quickly with no advance notice.

'kay?

I'm thinking... okay... what did I do? What personal question does she want to ask me that I'll be too uncomfortable to answer?
So I called her when I got home and went down to see her. She promptly launched into a tirade of sympathy, "Oh! I'm so glad you're OK!" and so on... it took me several minutes of waiting for her to calm down until I could get a concrete story out of her. Apparently, here's what happened.

In the early morning May 10th, the day I drove Justin to Corvallis and later came home to find the police note, around 1:55AM, Shirley says she was lying awake in bed working on turning over. Turning over, she says, takes her almost 10 minutes due to the MS and she has to be fully cognizant to do it. At that moment, she heard exactly five gunshots, ear-splittingly loud, from the room above her head, followed by silence and then the sound of someone getting up and using the toilet but not flushing. She says she shook, cried, and trembled in fear so much so that she couldn't remember to call 911... thankfully, because if they'd showed up at 2AM I'm sure we'd have not only been irritated but would have had no idea what they were talking about. The next day Shirley called the police and they came to do a welfare check and found me out, hence the note.

I honestly have NO IDEA what she's talking about. I believe her because she's so convinced she was awake and that it was true but I CANNOT RECALL *ANY* noise, inside our house or outside, that would have befitted such a ruckus. Justin and I both sleep like the dead (no pun intended) but we aren't DEAF. At that time of night, we were most definitely asleep or had just fallen asleep. The person peeing in the middle of the night was me; I'm always the one to get up (and yes, I avoid flushing in the middle of the night because it's just so... loud... and it disturbs my sleep-zen), but I didn't hear a damn thing. Something may have woken me up but it certainly wasn't gunshots in my bedroom. So while I don't doubt Shirley heard something, I cannot, for the life of me, confirm her story.

I'm so confused.