Doug Clark: It’s daffodil bandit season in Spokane Valley

You believe this weather? It’s like we’re playing a board game called “Weatheropoly” and somebody picked the card that says …

“Skip winter. Go directly to spring.”

Not that everybody is wild about spring, mind you.

Francie Radecki, for example.

The Spokane Valley resident can’t help but get a bit of a creepy feeling from watching the green stems rising out of the soil in her front yard flowerbed.

“It’s crazy. It’s crazy,” agrees Francie, 56, with a hearty laugh.

She’s right. The tale I’m about to relay does sound, well, a bit unhinged.

Francie, however, assures me it’s true and here it is:

For the past four or five springs, she and Bernie, her husband of almost 34 years, have been victimized by a diabolical daffodil bandit.

“It happens two or three times a season,” she said. “That’s why we started counting our daffodils.”

Francie sent me an email on her posy pilferage after reading my Sunday column updating my recent truck break-in.

To recap, a few semi-valuable items went missing when I dumbly failed to lock the doors. Friday afternoon, however, I was gobsmacked to find my stolen prescription sunglasses on the porch railing at my house.

Did my truck thief have a change of heart?

Keep reading if you’d like to learn the answer. Before we get to that, however, you need to hear more about what Francie has dubbed “the daffodil caper.”

It all began, she says, with a casual observation.

“My husband goes out in the morning, probably to get the newspaper, and comes back saying, ‘Somebody picked some of your flowers,’ ” she recalls.

The woman’s first thought was that bunny rabbits were using her flowerbed for a salad bar. A closer look confirmed that a pest of the two-legged variety was to blame.

“The stems had been cut perfectly diagonally, like with scissors,” Francie said. And “whoever is helping themselves takes them randomly from the flowerbed, not all from one spot.”

“It’s like somebody was right there while I was sleeping, stealing my flowers.”

Francie’s right.

Spring is creepy.

It’s also downright nervy considering Francie’s flowerbed is directly beneath her living room window.

I had a great time chatting with Francie during a telephone interview.

She says if anyone had bothered to simply ask for some of her flowers, she probably would have given away her entire crop.

But nobody asked. And the disappearances continued.

Sometimes as many as 10 daffodils have been taken – but never any tulips.

“We might have four dozen daffodils, so when you take 10 you really notice it,” she said.

Francie naturally spread the word around her neighborhood, which is a fairly short jaunt from the Spokane Valley Mall.

The Radeckis moved there in 1991 and raised three boys.

She laughs. “When we moved in we were the young people. Now, young people are buying houses around us.”

Though no confessions have been made, Francie has received solid advice on how to catch a serial daffodil thief.

Motion detectors, for example. Or set up a camera. Or dose the daffodils with some sort of noxious odor.

I favor landmines, but Francie discounts all the detective stuff as just “too much work” for flowers.

The closest the Radeckis came to a daffodil stakeout took place one night last spring.

They left open their drapes and sheers. They aimed a lamp so it would illuminate the flowerbed. They let Toby, their beloved collie, sleep in the living room, and they went to bed.

Until 2:30 a.m., when Toby started barking.

Bernie “literally flew down the steps,” said Francie, laughing again at the memory. “Just about busted a leg.”

The daffodils, alas, were unmolested.

Toby, Francie figures, “probably saw a squirrel running across the yard.”

Sadly, the Radeckis won’t be able to repeat the experiment. A quick but deadly bout of lymphoma claimed the 7-year-old collie last summer. “He won’t be able to bark at whatever is out there in the dark of night,” she said.

Thanks to our unseasonably warm weather, Francie’s flowers are once again on the rise.

“Maybe it will happen again,” said Francie of the daffodil thievery. “Maybe it won’t. It is so bizarre.”

Which brings us back to the tale of my truck.

In my mind, I had it all figured out wrong. Now I know that whoever stole my checkbook, newspaper ID badge, multi-tool, flashlight and sunglasses did the deed just after I returned from an errand and left my truck parked unlocked in my driveway.

And how do I know this?

Because of an email from a Good Samaritan that arrived Sunday.

“My name is Dick Hanson,” it read. “I have been a faithful reader of your column for many years and enjoy it immensely.

“I am the one who found your sunglasses and put them on your front porch last Friday afternoon.”

Hanson went on to explain that he was on a walk with a friend in an area not far from where I live. The two saw the case “next to the sidewalk in some low grass.”

Hanson spoke to one of my neighbors who was doing some yard work. The more they talked the more Hanson became convinced that the glasses were the ones I had written about.

My neighbor showed him where I lived. Hanson decided to leave the case.

“Sorry this doesn’t solve the entire mystery or who the culprit was,” he wrote, “but at least you know who put your glasses on your porch.”

It’s nice to know that people like you exist, Dick. I’m calling this case closed and counting myself lucky.