Goodreads asked K.D. Edwards:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

K.D. Edwards A year or so ago, I was sitting outside my coffee shop, and needed to run to the bathroom. On my way in, I realize my phone wasn't with me -- and I'd just looked at it about 1 minute before. By the time I got back to my seat outside, someone had already stolen it.

Worse, they turned the phone off IMMEDIATELY so that I couldn't track it. But I waited, read up on iPhone security features, and figured out how to remotely lock and track my phone the minute it was turned on again.

WHICH IS WAS! At 12:10am that night. And it even pinpointed the location, about 10 minutes out of town, in the woods near a residential street address.

So the next morning, I put on my winter coat, which looks a little like a trenchcoat, and went off to find my phone in the woods. The first thing I pulled up at the location the GPS pointed me toward was:

1. There is indeed lots of woods around me.
2. There is also a house in the woods.
3. I am not a brave person, but I'm angry, and I've watched a lot of Scooby Doo episodes.
4. There is a pink tricycle in the front yard, and surely anyone who owns a pink tricycle wouldn't shoot me.

So I go up and ring the doorbell. After a while, I hear all sorts of whispering and hullabaloo. I knock. And I knock again. This lasts a while. And just when I realized someone might have thrown my phone out of their car window and it's sitting by the side of the road, and that I may just be causing extreme alarm to a very nice church-going family, the door opens.

The guy who answered was weightlifter-big and tattooed. He had a sleepy look on his face -- but not the sort of sleepy look that sleepy people have, it was more the sleepy look I used when I was telling my mother that no, really, I was sick, the thermometer was wrong, look how tired and sick I am.

But me? I was wearing a trenchcoat. There's a power to such things. I was not backing off.

So I start out casual. "My phone has been tracked here. I--"

And literally, literally, I am not shitting you, this gushed out of his mouth: "My wife found it, the battery was low so she turned it off, we were going to contact you, the battery was low so we didn't want it to die, I was looking for a charger, and she said something about a reward." And then a hand sticks out from behind him, holding my phone. I never get a look at the wife.

I turn it on, and notice that the battery has a 20% charge. This seemed to indicate story inconsistencies. I think about the most clever way to trap him into an admission, because, at that point, it never occurred to me that I had my phone and it was okay to just go. So I say, "The battery has a 20% charge, you picked it up and turned it off, what kind of a person DOES THAT."

And at that exact second, all the voicemails and texts I'd been missing start pinging through, so I hold the phone up and say to him, menacingly, "These are my people." I'm still not entirely sure why I said that.

The rest of the conversation is rather anticlimactic. He batted out a few weak lies and then asked about the reward again. I told him the reward is me canceling the police report. (Lie. I never filed one yet.) And then--- because it still hasn't occurred to me that it's okay to just leave -- I decide it's a good moment to unload all my grievances from the last 12 hours, and how many passwords I had to change, and how many accounts I had to disconnect, and I hope you've learned a good lesson about Apple security, Mr. Thief.

That is my mystery.

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