The lights went out and for a moment I didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t even a storm or anything…in fact, there was a half moon. So I gathered my wits about me…I was sitting in my easy chair reading at the time…and after a minute remembered Edward’s flashlight. He always kept it in the magazine rack next to his chair just for these kinds of occasions, so now I keep it next to my chair.”
She paused, her eyes half closing as she thought of her dead husband, a half-smile forming on her age-thinned, lightly lip-sticked lips, her short, snow-white hair framing her heart-shaped face like a cloud, soft and fine. She had almost no lines in her face, which probably indicated she had not spent much time in the sun during her lifetime or else, as they say, she “had good genes.”
She was 92 years old but somewhere in her head was still the girl she had once been, the pretty Austrian fraulein who had married Edward Koch in a small chapel in Wells, Austria so many years ago, just before World War II started. He was an American diplomat and her parents did not approve, nor were they happy when she emigrated with him to the United States, but for her it was a lucky happenstance.
Even after all these years she still had a slight accent, although English had long been her preferred language. She loved it, loved to read books, histories especially, testing herself with words, a dictionary always at hand until it was no longer necessary. She also loved to play Scrabble, word games intrigued her. She was openly proud of her hard-earned command of the language and its many nuances.
“Edward loved flashlights, we had…still have actually…one in every room because, you know the lights do go out from time to time. Usually in storms, of course.”
She sighed now and seemed to return to the present. The early spring sunlight was pouring in through the three long narrow living room windows of the 1930’s two-story house she had lived in since 1946 when she and her then Army Major husband had moved there. His own family had been far away in Minnesota, a strange, cold, distant place that was as frigid as her native Austria, but with none of its mountainous beauty.
“So I reached into the magazine rack for the big flashlight and there it was…my grandson loved to play with it, you know how children are….”
She tended to go off on tangents, obviously enjoying remembering the good times, as a means perhaps of avoiding talking about the horrendous immediate past, about an experience she had finally agreed to talk about for publication only because her good friend Cecilia had prevailed upon her to do so after much cajoling, insisting it was important to get the details down before they faded from memory.
“But I told the police,” she cried, having gone to stay with her long-time friend for a few days after the incident. Incident indeed. That word hardly described what had happened to her.
“Yes, but you need to talk to someone else. Sometimes things come back with the telling and besides, it will make others aware of what can happen if they’re not careful. You know, how they should be on their guard. I mean if such a thing can happen to you, it can happen to others like you,” Cecilia had said, pausing for a moment, frowning, but then obviously deciding to be frank, added, “Especially older people, like us.”
“I certainly hope not, Ceil. He was a rank amateur, and besides, you just want a good story for that paper your grandson is the editor of. I know you, always looking out for your own.”
“Of course, and you would do the same. Your first-hand story would be a scoop for a small local paper like his. And besides, as I said, you’d do the same thing for your grandson if it came to that.”
“Well, it obviously is not going to come to that, my friend. But all right. Only I have no intention of talking to one of those beginning reporters who can’t really write yet, or hear me correctly because they’re so young and inexperienced, too busy thinking ahead to their next question, not really listening to the answers.”
“All right, I will find someone good—or at least I’ll try,” Cecilia had said, which was why Gisele was now talking to this older writer—old, but not as old as she was. Not many people were anymore.
“What did you say your name was again, dear? Anne?” Gisele said, frowning as if she was trying to remember, but what she was really doing was stalling, dreading talking about what had happened.
“Margaret Anne,” Margaret Anne said, then obviously trying to move the interview along, added, “So you had a flashlight at hand when the lights went out, is that right?”
“I will never, never forget that night, no matter what Ceil says,” Gisele said, obviously still lost in her own train of thought. Then, pursing her lips, she seemed to shake herself, running a blue veined, birdlike hand over the arm of her flowered, slip-covered easy chair.
“Yes, yes, I had Edward’s flashlight in the magazine rack next to my chair and I was just so grateful the batteries were still working when I turned it on. It wasn’t a stormy night, you know, so I knew it was the circuit breaker that had somehow shorted out…and of course it is in the basement. I knew that because it had happened before, many times over the years, and Edward was always good about showing me the practical things to do in the house. Especially when he was away during the war and we were living in an old rented house a few blocks away from here.” She paused for a moment, and touched the flashlight nestled in the nearby magazine rack.
“But it’s been a long time, you know, since he passed. Ten years! Still, I sometimes can’t believe he’s really gone. I do miss him…carry him around in my head like a talisman or an old photograph. You do forget the difficult times though, and there isn’t a married couple in the whole world who doesn’t go through some bad times. We are all human after all, but thanks be to heaven we didn’t have many arguments. We were really soul mates, Edward and I, and you can believe that or not,” she said, somewhat defensively
Her surprisingly strong voice had taken on an almost strident quality, as if she felt she had to prove something to this stranger. But there was no reason to hurry her along, it would probably only aggravate her and since the interview was being conducted as a favor to a long-time friend, it had to be done with patience. Questions could come later, when the whole scenario had been sketched. Meanwhile, it was important to take clear notes so nothing would be lost, although Margaret Anne’s shorthand was more then a bit rusty.
• • •
Her name was Gisele Koch. She was a small, compact, bespectacled woman whose still bright blue eyes were unclouded by age or any accompanying befuddlement often associated with “old” women. She wore sensible, low-heeled navy blue pumps with stockings and a simple floral polyester dress, pink being the dominant color. A gold link watch with a large face circled her left wrist, small diamond earrings glistened in her rather large ears and a simple gold bracelet adorned her right wrist. She wore no rings and her short, snow white hair curled softly around her smooth-skinned face like dandelion fluff.
“I wasn’t wearing the watch, earrings or bracelet…never do when I get ready for bed, but he took the rings,” she said later. “And thank heaven they were loose or I think he might have cut my fingers off, he was so determined to have them…gold, diamonds and rubies, of course. Edward and I picked them out together in the back of beyond now. not to mention Edward’s 18K gold handled knife letter opener I kept on top of the small desk in the hallway.”
Sunlight flashed across her face as she turned her head now to glance in the direction of the long entrance hallway leading at one end to the front door and at the other to the basement door located where the hallway came to the kitchen.
“Come, I’ll show you.” She grimaced slightly as she stood. “Arthritis,” she said, but the pained look on her face could also have come from the memory of that dark night that was going to be repeated by others in other venues in the months to come, although they could not have known that then.
Gisele walked carefully into the hallway followed by her interviewer who was seventeen years younger, although she moved with less agility then Gisele did.
“That’s where the letter opener was,” she said, gesturing at the narrow mahogany desk in passing, but continued on to a door at the end of the hallway.
“There was a little light from the outside door windows as I opened the hall door , so I could see a little as I stepped onto the landing here at the top of the basement stairs,” Gisele said, but then paused as she held the door open.
“Have you noticed my glass door knobs? They’re original, came with the house. Even when we had work done on the place we kept the glass knobs. I just love them,” Gisele said, as she stepped down into the small entranceway landing at the top of the basement stairs, its windowed outside side door to her left.
“You’d think he would have come in this way, wouldn’t you? But no, he had to squeeze in through one of my narrow basement windows like a…” she trailed off for a minute, frowning, then unexpectedly laughed shortly. “Like a thief in the night, which, of course, is exactly what he was. Didn’t even have to break the window because we always thought, since they’d never been opened, they were rusted shut. Which they are, but if someone worked them enough, they will come loose, obviously.”
She started down the stairs then, a long, fairly steep flight, beige carpeted, a shiny mahogany hand railing on one side.
“We used to have a mean old calico cat and he would lay down at the bottom of these stairs every night like some kind of guardian of the cellar…that’s what we used to call basements in Austria. Cellars. And sometimes he might have a mouse laying in front of him, always the proud hunter. I hated that but got used to it. Anyway, we had the whole basement redone back in the sixties or seventies…who remembers…so now they probably would call it a recreation room. The furnace room is off to the far side. The thing makes great clanking sounds in the winter. Never have been sure why since we put in at least three new furnaces over the years, and of course, air conditioning eventually.”
She slowly, carefully made her way down the stairs, holding onto the railing as she said, “I do miss that cat. He was long-haired and shaggy, so we called him Shags. He wasn’t friendly with anyone but me. Didn’t like men at all. He’d been a stray and I think he’d been abused, but he took to me. When he first appeared at the back porch door, I started leaving food out for him, and water, then, after a while he started coming in, first the kitchen, but once he ventured down into the basement that…this is where he lived when he was indoors.”
She moved around the bottom of the stair well into a wide, elongated carpeted room. “I don’t think he’d done this before,” she said, abruptly changing the subject back to the intruder, gesturing at the room. “I mean, when I saw him I couldn’t believe my eyes, you know? This dark shadow of a man standing in the middle of the room, but when I realized there was someone there, I shouted at him…’Get out!’ but he just made a kind of grunting sound and moved toward me. So I swung my flashlight at him, but I’m not very strong anymore and he just deflected it the way you might swat a pesky fly.”
She stopped now, closing her eyes, obviously remembering. “I mean I was so shocked to find him standing there in the middle of the room, a kind of toothy grin on his dark…face. I could just see his teeth when I flashed the light on him before swinging it at him. Not very sensible I’m afraid.”
She sighed as she moved into the middle of the room, a large black leather sofa on one side, a desk and chair at the far end and an ancient TV parked in the middle of a credenza on the inside wall, which she gestured at now, saying, “It still works. Edward liked to come down here with his pipe or cigar knowing how intensely I disliked smelling them upstairs, although I didn’t mind early on. I mean everyone used to smoke, you know, though it never appealed to me. But anyway, it was right here that it happened. He grabbed my flashlight and swung me around like a rag doll…I’m not very big as you can see. He had some kind of twine or light rope in his hands. I think he’d gotten it from the furnace room over there where Edward kept his tools and such…they’re all still there, I could never bear the thought of getting rid of them after he passed.”
She took a deep breath now, shuddered slightly and continued. “He just yanked my arms behind me, twisting them…roughly I might add…tied my hands together, shoved me to floor…thank heaven for the carpet, at least it cushioned me… then he strung the twine or whatever it was down my back to my feet which he then yanked together, pulled them up behind me and tied them all together. I simply couldn’t believe what was happening.” She paused again, running a purple-veined hand through her white hair.
“I’ve been a walker all my life. Always believed it helped keep me healthy, you know, not weak, the way some old people get, although I expect I have also been blessed with good genes. I mean Edward walked too but he wasn’t so lucky. Anyway, after the man hogtied me…that’s what the police called it…I complained about the rope cutting into my ankles because I have some arthritis there and, surprisingly, he loosened the rope slightly before jamming a piece of tape he got somewhere over my mouth, none too gently I might add.”
“Then he took my flashlight and went upstairs. I expect he didn’t want to turn the power back on because he didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want me to get a good look at him either, and I didn’t, which may have been just as well or heaven only knows what he might have done to me.” She frowned thoughtfully, standing very still in the middle of the room. “And you know, now I think about it, it seems to me he took something that looked like a gun out of his pocket as he headed upstairs. Maybe he thought someone else might be up there, I don’t know.”
She pursed her lips again and touched a hand to her face, then held out her left hand and scowled furiously. “It’s the wedding rings I am most incensed about. He took them off when he was tying my wrists, just yanked them hard. If I hadn’t lost some weight this year, I don’t know what he’d have done because they had been so tight at one point that I was considering having them enlarged.”
She walked over to the two short windows at the far right end of the room toward the back and lifted a hand toward them. “I had bars put on them afterward, a little like locking the barn door after the horses got out but…well, surely it would never happen again. He didn’t seem like a…professional burglar, I mean someone who was used to doing what he was doing, except for the way he tied me up. And would you believe when he finally came back downstairs carrying Lord only knows what, my flashlight for one thing, and of course, Edward’s letter opener and my rings, he left the way he came in. Never said a word, just grunted a bit, and if he hadn’t loosened the rope or twine on my ankles, I don’t know how long I could have stood laying here before my cleaning woman found me. Both my children live abroad…but wouldn’t you think the neighbors would have heard or seen something? But they didn’t. The police have been all over the neighborhood, including the alleys, and except for my rings and that letter opener and a little money I had in my purse, he didn’t really take much. I keep the rest of my good jewelry in my stocking drawer…in a stocking. Poor fool!”
“Now, I am tired. Let’s go sit upstairs and have a glass of sherry. I need it and so do you after listening so patiently to a lonely old woman who will never be the same. But I am determined not to be run out of my own house by some little pipsqueak who preys on lonely old women.”
She spoke vehemently, but her tone was tired and she moved back up the stairs carefully, slowly, her veined aged hands gripping the railing so tightly her knuckles showed white.
“Never again,” she muttered. “Trouble is,” she said, stopping abruptly midway up the stairs, “is they haven’t a clue, not one single clue. Said he must have been wearing gloves. The impertinence of it all, the absolutely ridiculous impertinence of the rascal. I wish Edward were here to give them all a piece of what for.” She sighed. “But he isn’t and it’s simply the pits.” She shook her head and continued up the stairs, murmuring “I need a glass of sherry. It will calm my nerves.
• • •
Two Weeks Earlier, Newspaper Article in the Metro Section
Serial
Burglar Sought
Man remains elusive on at
least six counts…
At least six houses in the Montgomery County area have been burglarized and the public is being asked to report any strangers or unfamiliar vehicles seen hovering in their neighborhoods, especially the Silver Spring, Kensington and Bethesda-Chevy Chase communities.
No injuries have been reported and little of value seems to have been taken, mostly from unoccupied houses, homes where the owners have been away, out of town, late coming home or, in one case, asleep.
There is a similarity to all these break-ins, they usually occur late at night, although at least one happened in the afternoon when the owner of the house was at work. In most cases, doors or windows have been left unlocked. Locked homes in at least two cases showed signs of pry marks and the thief usually took an odd selection of jewelry, not always valuable, as well as household items like tools, knives and, in one case, binoculars.
The neighbors in each case saw and heard nothing and there seems to be no particular pattern to the break-ins. Gloves seem to have been worn because there has been no evidence left behind.
The public, particularly in the areas mentioned, should be on the look-out for strangers and/or strange cars in their neighborhoods and report anything or anyone whose presence cannot be explained. Do not hesitate to contact local authorities with any unusual sightings. These acts can escalate into violence. One local authority has been quoted as saying, “This is obviously a scary situation and we’re treating it very, very seriously.”