Heather Woodbury was going about her day at her bakery when she got a text she never wanted. Her car’s rear window was smashed. She felt disbelief. She felt frustrated.
She drives for work. She cares about her business. She cares about her town. She wondered what she might have done. She saw the broken glass and feared the worst.
She called the Massachusetts police. They came. They examined the damage. They circled the car. Then one of them asked a strange question: Do you have a hard-shelled clam in your car?
Heather opened the back door of her car, and what she saw next shocked her completely.
What Could That Be?
The world can be full of surprises sometimes, and they are not always pleasant ones. For Heather Stevens Woodbury, it happened when she got a text from one of her employees about her car.
She told The Dodo: “It said my rear car window was shattered. “I’m like, ‘Why would someone throw a rock or smash my window? I’m a nice person. I do a lot for my community. Our business is successful and people like us.”
Woodbury called the Massachusetts police immediately, and they arrived shortly after. She was still confused as to why this happened.
Two of the officers examined the car, and they had a surprised look on their faces. What they saw perplexed them.
Woodbury said: “Between all of the cars are all these shattered shells. Then he looks in my car and looks at me and says, ‘Is there a reason that you would have a whole quahog in the back of your car?”
She got a closer look and then realized that they were right. She did have a quahog in her car. But how did it get there?
Did someone intentionally throw it at her car? She asked the officers, and the answer was simple: it was probably thrown by a seagull.
It was a freak accident that hit her car, but things like this happen. Considering the damage on her car, it was probably thrown from a high altitude as well.
How Will She Explain It To Insurance?
This presented a problem for Woodbury. How will she explain to the insurance company that a seagull dropped a quahog on her car? There was no footage of it.
She asked the officers for help, but they explained to her that because it wasn’t a crime, they had nothing to log in their police report.
Just as this was unfolding, Woodbury remembered that a seagull had stolen someone’s wallet from a shopping cart a year back.
It was an unusual incident, but she thought that it might have been the same seagull. She put the quahog on the display at her bakery, only to find shortly after that it was missing.
Woodbury said: “My assistant came in about an hour later and told me it was missing. Either someone heard about the story, was very excited, and took the quahog home themselves, or we are imagining that the seagull returned to the scene of the crime and took the evidence so that he couldn’t be prosecuted.”
I have to admit, I will entertain the possibility that the seagull was actually just going to pick up what was his. Either way, this short story shows us how surprises can be around the corner, and they can be pretty funny sometimes.