It was a hot August night, and I was all alone. My husband had taken the kids to Niagara Falls for a few days, to escape the heat as well as the constant hammering and chaos of our ongoing kitchen renovation. I shut the first-floor windows against any intruders and jiggled the handle of the new back door, still not quite sure if I had locked it or not.

But I wasn't worried: While my East End neighborhood has had its share of break-ins, stolen bicycles and other petty crimes, I had lived there for 14 years in relative peace, my kids attending a good elementary school a few blocks away, in a leafy city neighborhood with diverse characters, great restaurants, shops, museums and green space.

Shortly after 10:30, I was dozing off, the air conditioner on full blast, when, suddenly, lights arced through the window blinds and across the wall of my bedroom. I opened the window and saw several men with flashlights striding purposefully through my garden, past the lilies, the tomato plants and the dahlias. As they aimed the lights under the stairs of our outdoor fire escape, I called out, "What's wrong?"

The man who answered sounded slightly annoyed to be asked what he was doing in my yard. "Police. We're chasing a car thief," he said brusquely.

I sighed. It was just another summer night in the big city.

Actually, it's been a busier-than-usual summer. A month ago, our house nearly burned down on the weekend of the Fourth of July when some otherwise well-meaning folk, perhaps emboldened by a new city ordinance allowing "consumer" or backyard fireworks, set off some still-illegal bottle rockets too close to our wooden fire escape. A wayward spark may have ignited the clematis vines or drifted down into our compost -- who knows?

Either way, by 12:15 a.m., the flames were licking up eight feet under the fire escape. Had our night owl neighbor Kent not seen them, we (and our new kitchen) would be toast. Literally. As it was, Superhero Kent had doused the flames with our garden hose by the time the fire trucks arrived.

A good thing, since we were in the middle of putting on a new roof and, after 14 years of saving and planning, finally renovating our tiny, pathetic kitchen, with its '70s-era drop ceiling, rotting cabinets, jerry-rigged plumbing and walled-up windows. Since mid-June, we've been camped out in the dining room with the refrigerator and a hot plate, washing our dishes in the tiny powder room sink, while Lloyd, our colorful, efficient contractor with a great command of Yiddish ("Do you really want the bupkis faucet or something better?") and his team work their magic. My charming, shabby 110-year-old house is, at last, well on its way to becoming my dream sanctuary, a place where I can cook and garden and raise my children, a place where I can blissfully shut out the outside world.

Not.

Instead, on this hot August night I'm standing out on the sidewalk with my worried neighbors, watching and wondering -- this time not about my house, but about a car thief who or may not be hiding under a hydrangea bush in my yard. This wasn't just any car theft, either. Apparently two young men, one age 15, the other 20, had stolen a car, the police gave chase, and they abandoned it -- but not before throwing two assault weapons out the window. The police, after finding a Hannibal Lecter-style mask in the car, chased the suspects on foot and tackled one of them in a narrow alley one house up from mine. The other escaped through one of our back yards and had disappeared into Homewood Cemetery.

Never a dull moment around here, my neighbors and I joked, a bit uneasily, while the police continued to look under every bush, every crawl space. Adding to the sense of unreality was the presence of a camera crew from the TV show "Cops," which has been in Pittsburgh for the past month -- their first visit in 15 years. Great, I thought, they finally show up for some action and it has to be in my back yard.

I went back into the house and sat at the dining room table, trying to calm my nerves, when I heard someone turn on the garden faucet.

"Uh, I'm just giving my K-9 a drink," said a police officer sheepishly as the dog lapped up the water.

Whatever. I went up to my room in search of an uneasy sleep.

It must have been around 1 a.m., when, over the racket of the air conditioner, I heard a commotion downstairs. I got up and opened the door, my heart racing. Was the car thief hiding in my house after all?

As I ran down to the first floor and towards my wreck of a kitchen, I heard deep voices shouting "Police! Police!" I encountered an officer sweeping his flashlight across the dusty floor. Did I know, he demanded, that my back door was unlocked?

"Uh -- well, I'm having the kitchen redone, and I guess the workmen forgot to lock it," I lied, knowing full well that I had been the careless one.

Grimly, the officer and his partner walked through my front hall -- assuring me they were there for my safety -- and opened our hall coat closet, peering inside with the flashlight and then into the living room where, on the sofa, my husband had deposited some sleeping bags after deciding at the last minute not to camp out at Niagara Falls. They checked under them, too.

"By the way, what was with that video camera earlier?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood a bit.

"They're filming for 'Cops,' " said one of the officers, shrugging. He looked like he could have cared less.

"Really? When will it be on?"

"I don't know, six months maybe. Well, we're done for tonight. The guy is probably long gone, in the cemetery."

Clearly, these two officers, spurred on by the weapons and the Hannibal Lecter mask, weren't taking any chances, trying every back door on the block. When they were able to open mine, they had reason to think the worst.

Their thoroughness was commendable, if a reminder that no home is ever really a sanctuary. The outside world always finds you, in the end.