Blogfinger

By Mary Walton

“Cheep…”

I was standing in the living room when I heard the sound.

Then it came again. “Cheep.”

I waited for the sound to go away.

It did not go away. Sixty seconds later, “cheep.”

I first thought the telephone battery had gone dead. I picked up the phone. Dial tone.

“Cheep.”

All right. It wasn’t the telephone battery, it must be the smoke alarm. I wrestled the ladder up from the basement, positioned it just outside the kitchen, took the alarm down, opened it up and removed the battery. Then I waited.

“Cheep.”

I did likewise with the smoke alarm in the basement stairwell, with the same result. “Cheep.” Next, I took the ladder up to the second floor and went through the process again. Again, I waited.

“Cheep.” Sixty seconds went by. “Cheep.” Sixty seconds. “Cheep.”

I removed the batteries from the three TV remotes. I knew better. Double As don’t audibly complain when they go bad. I don’t even know what all the remotes do. But ours don’t cheep. The high-pitched sound persisted. It was making me nuts.

Could it be a baby bird? Nah. Baby birds don’t cheep every 60 seconds like clockwork. My grandson had been visiting two days earlier. Had he left behind an electronic device — one that cheeped? But he brought only a cell phone with him, and I knew he had left with it. I checked my own cell. Nada.

I tried to interest my husband, Charles, in the problem. He was in his second-floor office. He couldn’t hear the cheeping. Nor did he seem to care. “I’m not going downstairs until this is fixed,” I told him. That would make dinner a challenge. He came down and listened. “I think it’s the smoke alarm,” he said. He went back to his office.

Friends, I actually took down the alarm and dismantled it all over again. To no avail. “Cheep.” We ate in silence, except, of course, for the cheep. Afterward the TV mercifully drowned out the sound.

The next morning Charles determined that the cheeping was coming from the basement and that its source was the FIOS box at the foot of the stairs. “Great,” I said. Never mind that I had already put my ear to the FIOS box and heard nothing. I wanted to be wrong. He called FIOS. They remotely disconnected the service.

“Cheep.”

He called FIOS back. They reconnected the service. We turned on the TV, and the computer, and checked the phone to make sure everything was working.

I revisited the possibility of a baby bird.

Now we were both on the case … and in the basement. With each cheep, we changed direction, as if playing Blind Man’s Bluff. Playing along with us, the cheep itself seemed to move. We easily spent half an hour bouncing from one subterranean section to another.

I began moving boxes. Dust flew up. “We really need to clean the basement,” I said.

Then I peered over a chest-high partition to a space behind some metal shelves, where I saw that some stuff had fallen to the floor. There was a jug I hadn’t been able to locate several months ago. And there, too, I spied a small red light. Loud and clear, louder and clearer than at any previous point in time, I heard a friendly “Cheep,” as if to say, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for you.” It was a vintage smoke alarm whose presence had outlived the memory of how it had come to be there.

I held it up victoriously. Before I removed the battery, it gave one final cheep.

The rest was silence.

The culprit. (Mary Walton photo)