Lileks: Things that go beep in the night, and day

Whenever I leave town, a smoke alarm dies, and my wife has to find the one that's making the noise. This time she couldn't. She texted me to note that the beeps could not be located, and it was driving her daft.

As soon as I got home, I heard the beep and knew what it was. We have an old alarm system that was replaced by a much better one with cameras, night vision, noise and motion detection, sirens, sleeping gas, space-based laser systems that incapacitate intruders, etc. The old one is wired into the house. It still worked, reporting open doors and busted glass — it just didn't call the home office.

When the power goes out, it beeps upon revival, just to say, "Hey, the power was out." Thanks, never noticed. But I did wonder why the ice cream is soft and the microwave's blinking like granddad's VCR.

The sound was coming from an old wall-mounted motion detector. I got out the proper screwdriver, a tiny Phillips, thinking, "Tiny Phillips would have been a good name for a pool player, or ragtime piano player in the '50s." I unscrewed the faceplate and disconnected the wires.

Whereupon the beep sounded again, from elsewhere.

OK, then it has to be the main keypad downstairs. I went downstairs, looked at the display: "LO BATTERY." Like some cop from the Bible describing a beating. "Lo, thou hast committed battery." I entered the cancel code, and the pad bonged to indicate it understood.

Whereupon the beeps sounded again, from upstairs.

Silence. Success! Ah. Went outside to have a refreshing beverage. Then, faint, through the open window:

"Beep, beep, beep."

It was not a smoke detector. I know that sound. That's a brusque metal chirp, short enough to tell you something's wrong, but not constant, so you can't figure out which one's in trouble and have to wander from room to room, at 3 a.m. No, it was the alarm. I opened the panel, and found the wires powering the system.

Here you always think: "Will this hurt? What if I touch the wrong wire and my fillings melt and my toenails burst into flame? Nah, it's UL Approved. That doesn't stand for Undertakers Laboratory, does it?" OK, disconnecting the black wire ...

All the displays for the system went dark. Whew. Well, now we have to cap this wire, or it'll leak electricity all over the place. You'll pet the dog, and he'll yipe and spit sparks out the backside. I left the boiler room to get some caps and tape ...

Impossible. The system was dead. Unless there were backup batteries in the keypads, sending out an emergency message. That was likely. I pried the keypad off the wall and unscrewed four wires that gave it power. Disconnected the line from the circuit board to the speaker.

Silence! Well, time to make dinner. About four minutes into meal prep:

"Beep, beep, beep."

Let's jump ahead an hour. I have worked my way from upstairs to downstairs, eliminating every room as a source of the sound. I put a Post-it note on the door to indicate it had been cleared. I eliminated every room but the kitchen.

"Beep, beep, beep."

"Beep, beep, beep.

"It moves!" I said.

"That's what I was telling you," my wife said. "The house is possessed. The sound moves. It's never where you are, and then you go where you think it is, and it's not there, either."

"What if we go to different places? Maybe we can herd it if we work together. No, it'll just go in the attic. Hold on — did you listen to the coffeemaker?" I asked, and she gave me a look: Of course I listened to the coffeemaker. After three hours, she had suspected the piano, so there's no doubt she would have checked the coffeemaker.

"Maybe it's the fridge. It might have some warning feature. It's telling us we're low on milk, even though we're not. Great, now I have to get someone to recalibrate the milk sensors. I wonder if that's under warranty.

"It's the lights under the cabinet!" My wife said. I scoffed: Lights don't beep. But we stood by the cabinet, silent, waiting.

From across the room:

"Beep, beep, beep."

It was then that the answer popped into my head: "Several days ago, while cleaning out some items from downstairs, I may have put an old carbon monoxide detector in the garbage."

I pawed through the kitchen trash, found it, held it up.

Whew. How the device managed its ventriloquism, I cannot say, but now I know that I don't have the echolocation ability of a common bat. Oh, I'd always suspected, but you know how men are. Vain about such things.

All that remained was reinstalling the batteries in the smoke detector. But wait: Why not install new batteries in all of them? That way, the next time I leave and there's a beep, my wife won't wonder which one's the problem.

They'll all be the problem.