Three Days of Mystery

For almost three days, my husband and I have been going crazy. There has been a mystery at our house that’s completely taken over our lives.

The other morning at 6 a.m., my husband Dale was in the driveway putting his things in the car to go to work. He came back in to get one last cup of coffee for the road, and I asked him if there was a firetruck in front of our house. He said no, left for work and I thought no more about it.

Well off and on (mostly on) all day I kept hearing this really loud siren. It was a wind-up siren followed by three loud beeps. Every time I heard it I ran outside to see where it was coming from. I saw cars going up the street and people leaving for work, but no apparent sign of a firetruck.

After several hours of it, I thought it must be someone’s alarm either on their car or in their house. All day I just kept thinking how stupid it would be to have that kind of alarm. I ran from my front yard to my back a million times because I couldn’t tell if it was coming from out front or from the block behind me. In the house it echoed and bounced off walls so I couldn’t tell the direction it came from.

When Dale came home, it continued throughout the entire night. It woke us with a start several times. The next day we walked the neighborhood looking at everyone strangely and looking at all the cars to see if perhaps it was a motion detector being set off every time a car went by. We asked our neighbors and they said no, they hadn’t heard it. Now we were on day three and going crazy.

We ran like fools trying to chase down this sound. Now mind you, this wasn’t a soft noise. It sounded like a firetruck in your driveway kind of noise. After two days and two nights of it, we had gone mad.

On the third morning I told Dale that I didn’t know, didn’t care, was not going to use up one more brain cell trying to figure out the mystery. I tried very hard to ignore it, but some things you just can’t. I was about to call the police and ask for their help. This had gone on at intervals of from every 5 to 15 minutes the entire time.

Over and over we had the same conversations, “Which way is it coming from? Did you hear it from upstairs? Could you hear it from the street? Did you see anyone leaving? Do you think it’s on the block behind us?” In the street it sounded like you had your hand on the truck, it was that loud. By this time we thought that the both of us must be crazy because no one else heard it.

We sat in our recliners totally stumped and half mad that we were living in this nightmare and couldn’t get out of it.

All of the sudden, Dale jumped up and ran across the room. He opened the cupboard under the wet bar and pulled out a toy fire truck. This truck hasn’t been looked at or played with in about three years. Dale pushed each of the 4 sound buttons and none of them had the right sound effect. We were immediately stumped and disappointed that we had not found the culprit.

Dale made sure the switch was flipped to off and just set it on top of the wet bar. As we sat in disbelief at our inability to track the noise, we sat shaking or heads. A few minutes of silence were followed by “SIREN…beep beep beep” a random noise, not one of the four programmed noise effects on the toy. He took out the batteries.

We were driven to the brink of madness. Besides being easily amused, apparently, we are just as easily confused.

Gail Earl is a member of the writing class at Norwalk Senior Center.