My sister and I live basically alone together. My fiancee is a long-haul trucker and isn’t home often for long. We suspect that we’re being watched and fear they have been in our home. We do not live in the safest of areas and cannot afford to move or to buy expensive home monitoring equipment like a ring doorbell or simply safe. We are renters. I live in a duplex with a fenced yard on my side of the property. I get along well with all my neighbors as I am big on community. A few months ago my sister moved in and we both began hearing taps from outside on our windows (this has happened 2/3 times). The tapping is coming from the side of our fenced-in yard. There is a chain on our fence and when it opens we can hear it loudly; we have trees but they do not reach anywhere close to the windows. Some of the tapping has had intentional patterns and rhythm but we do not see anyone when we go outside and check. This usually happens early morning 6-8 am when the sun has been up. Our windows have trash bags taped to them for insulation except for my room. This could be in our head, except for one little detail. I rearranged and deep-cleaned our living room this past week. I removed a small corkboard that I had hanging and pressed firmly to the wall was a cigarette. Almost glued to the wall from the pressure. It was perfectly intact and removed easily, it was pressed in place. Nobody in my house smokes. My neighbors have not been in my house as most of them are disabled and partly housebound (this wasn’t any of their brands). My landlord does not smoke, I occasionally do work on his other properties for rent reduction so I know he’s not coming into my home. We do not know how it got there. This makes us believe that someone has been inside our house while we’re not home. I can put bars on my door for when I am home. What do I do to protect my home when I am not there?

We have 2 medium-sized dogs. One is typically locked in my sister’s room when we leave and the other is an elderly dog who is mostly blind and deaf, she isn’t hard to sneak around and she is too sweet to be a guard/attack dog. Homicide isn’t uncommon here, recently a young woman my sister’s age was murdered and this morning there was a shooting at the local park with 1 fatality. We do not have a gun, yet, but intend to after I get some basic training on safety.