By AMY CALDER
Staff Writer Saturday, March 24, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

A pesky mouse has eluded capture at Bill Exner's Waterville home and has started to fight back by stealing Exner's lower dentures. Exner says he had to open up a hole in his bedroom to retrieve the teeth after a mouse carried them off.

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Exner, 68, of Oakland Street, said he doesn't want to kill the mouse; he just wants to take him for a ride to the country.

Exner went to bed Tuesday night and instead of putting his lower dentures in the bathroom as he usually does, he was so tired he took them out and laid them on his nightstand, he said.

The next morning, the false teeth were gone.

Exner said he knew exactly who had taken them: a mouse he had trapped and placed in a gallon-sized pickle jar, three times -- but each time, the mouse escaped.

"The first time, I left the top off the pickle jar -- I figured there's no way this guy can get out," Exner said Thursday. "But he escaped, so the next time I caught him, I put the cover on loosely so he could breathe, and he got out again."

Exner got a trap in the first place because the mouse was making scratching noises in the walls. It's a trap that doesn't harm the mouse. All Exner has to do is put peanut butter inside it to attract the rodent. He said he planned to trap the mouse and drive it somewhere else.

"He likes peanut butter," Exner's wife, Shirley, said Thursday in the couple's bedroom, where the alleged heist occurred.

After the dentures disappeared, the Exners said they scoured the bedroom looking for them.

"We moved the bed, moved the dressers and the nightstand and tore the closet apart," Exner said. "I said, 'I knew that little stinker stole my teeth' -- I just knew it."

In a corner behind the nightstand, the couple found an opening in the wall between a baseboard heater and a structure that covers water pipes. Exner called his daughter's fiancé, Eric Holt, to help, convinced the mouse had spirited the dentures into the opening.

"He brought a crowbar and hammer and he sawed off a section of wood and pulled up the molding and everything," Exner said. "It was quite a job. We pull it out and he looks down and he goes, 'I don't believe it -- there they are!'

"The dentures were inside the wall, lying right there. They were not damaged. The mouse didn't bite them or anything. It's like he was saying 'I'm going to get even with you for putting me in that jar.' "

Holt said Thursday that he did not question Exner's assertion that the mouse took the dentures because when he (Holt) was a boy growing up on a farm, his father's dentures disappeared one day and they all assumed a rat took them because there were a lot of rats on the farm. Friends used to joke that there was a rat running around the farm with a pretty smile.

"The odds of getting Bill's teeth back were pretty slim," Holt said. "It was like hitting the lottery when we found them."

Sometimes, the mouse appears out of nowhere and just sits and looks at Exner, according to his wife.

"He's taunting him -- I swear he's taunting him," she said. "He's adopted us; we haven't adopted him."

Exner says he doesn't plan to put his dentures anywhere at night until he catches the mouse, which has a gray head with some brown, and a white belly.

"I got 'em right in my mouth and that's where they're staying," he said.

Meanwhile, people who deal with mice say it's entirely possible the mouse snatched the dentures.

Lori Perkins, a cashier at Petco in Augusta, said she has owned animals all her life -- including mice -- and Exner's mouse was likely interested in the food particles on the dentures and took them to where his house is -- inside the wall.

"If it has to do with food, mice will do just about anything," Perkins said. "They will eat through boxes; they'll try to eat through plastic."

After learning about Exner's mouse incident from the Morning Sentinel, Patrick Faucher, animal control officer for the town of Oakland, who is the former animal officer for Waterville, paid the Exners a visit.

Faucher said afterward that the droppings in the pickle jar and near the wall are definitely from a field mouse. Field mice are like packrats and will spirit away seeds and other food, he said.

He said there is more than one mouse in the house and that two may have actually hauled the dentures inside the wall.

"It's like in the cartoons -- one pushes, one pulls -- type of thing," Faucher said. "They're pretty ingenious in what they do and I'm sure the smell of food on the dentures had something to do with it."

Meanwhile, Holt said he told Exner to make sure he cleaned the dentures really well before putting them back in his mouth.

"I suggested he boil and soak them in peroxide and anything else he could get," Holt said.

Faucher said he asked Exner to call him when he captures the mouse and he will help him relocate the rodent.

"I want to see it," he said. "This is really quite unique, I'll tell you."

Amy Calder -- 861-9247

acalder@centralmaine.com