Corduroy Falls awoke Thursday morning to alarming news: five businesses along Merchant Street and the surrounding blocks had been broken into overnight, their locks forced and cash drawers emptied while the town slept. The victims — Corduroy Falls Hardware & Supply, Mabry's Shoe Repair, the Corduroy Five-and-Dime, Treadwell's Tailor Shop, and Ernestine's Diner — reported combined losses estimated by Sheriff Clayton Boggs at somewhere between four hundred and six hundred dollars, with additional damage to door frames and display cases still being tallied.
Sheriff Boggs confirmed that his department discovered the first break-in shortly after five o'clock Friday morning, when Floyd Everett Nance arrived early to take a delivery and found the rear door of the hardware store standing open. Within the hour, four more calls had come in. "Whoever did this knew the layout of these buildings and knew when folks wouldn't be around," the sheriff said, standing outside the shattered rear entrance of Nance's store. "This was not a crime of opportunity. This was planned."
Nance, tight-lipped and visibly shaken, lost an undisclosed amount of cash along with a tray of pocket knives from the display case near the register. At Mabry's Shoe Repair on the corner of Clover and Second, Jesse Cord Mabry arrived to find his front window cracked and his small lockbox pried open — the sum of a week's receipts, gone. Mabry, twenty-three years old and only in his second year of running the shop, stood in the doorway for a long moment before he could speak. "My daddy built that lockbox himself," he said quietly.
Across the block, Curtis Leroy Hayes discovered the Five-and-Dime's back storage room ransacked, with the register drawer left hanging open like a slack jaw. Alma Jean Treadwell of Treadwell's Tailor Shop reported the loss of her petty cash tin and, more distressingly, a bolt of imported silk she had been holding for a customer's wedding order. While the cash losses at Ernestine's Diner were modest, Ernestine Polk told this reporter that the violation itself was what stung. "I've fed half this town for thirty years," she said, pressing a dish towel between her hands. "To think somebody crept through my kitchen in the dark — I can't hardly stand it."
No witnesses have come forward, and Sheriff Boggs stated that his office is pursuing several leads he declined to specify. Deputy Harlan Fitch has been assigned full-time to the investigation. Notably, retired deputy Vernon Cassius Lott, who spent twenty-two years walking these same streets, has reportedly been in contact with the sheriff's office, though the nature of his involvement remains unclear.
Callie Rue Fontaine, who works the early morning telephone exchange on Depot Road, told the Gazette she fielded an unusual number of calls in the predawn hours of Thursday — though she declined to elaborate on the nature of those calls, citing her professional obligations.
Opaline Voss, who operates the boarding house on Elm Street and currently has three long-term lodgers, could not be reached for comment before press time.
Leland Taft Goode, whose barber shop sits directly across from the Five-and-Dime, opened his doors Friday morning to find his waiting chairs full of men with more on their minds than a haircut. "Every one of them had a theory," Goode remarked dryly, snipping the air with his scissors, "and not a one of them had any evidence."
Sheriff Boggs urged residents to secure their premises, report any suspicious activity to his office on Court Street, and resist the temptation to act on rumor. An arrest, he said, was his department's business. The investigation is ongoing.
