The Best of Reader's Digest

by Editors of Reader's Digest

  “Jones tried to run out the back door, but only made it a few yards into the garden,” recalled Jamie Day.

  * * *

  Presented with the recordings, the CCTV footage, and other digital evidence, Reader, Perkins, Jones, and Collins felt they had no choice but to plead guilty. The others charged in the heist—Carl Wood, Hugh Doyle, and William Lincoln—were found guilty at trial in January.

  The seven were sentenced in March 2016 to a total of 34 years’ imprisonment, most receiving sentences of between six and seven years (with the exception of Doyle, who received a suspended sentence).

  Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. went into liquidation in September 2015, unable to recover from its damaged reputation.

  The mysterious Basil is still at large, as is more than two-thirds of the haul, worth over £10 million.

  The thieves had disabled the CCTV cameras and stolen their hard drives inside the actual building and its basement vault. “What they forgot, or didn’t know,” said the prosecutor, “was that one little camera in that walkway outside the back of one jeweler was still working and recording what they were doing.”

  Said Spindler, “They were analog criminals operating in a digital world, and no match for digital detectives.”

  Originally published in the 2017 Reader’s Digest international editions.

  Basil’s real name is Michael Seed. The 58-year-old electronics expert was arrested in March 2018 after London police found 143,000 pounds worth of gold ingots, gems, and jewelry in his apartment. He was convicted a year later and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

  The rest of the gang served their jail sentences and were released, except for Terry Perkins, Hugh Doyle, John “Kenny” Collins, and Danny Jones. Perkins died in prison in 2018. Doyle received a suspended sentence. Collins was released, then sent back to jail when he failed to repay a share of the haul. Jones is still serving his sentence.

  My Mamma’s Letters

  by Octavia Capuzzi Locke, from Johns Hopkins Magazine

  One woman’s letters help families pulled apart by the call to war feel a little closer together.

  I still remember to this day my Mamma’s letter-writing. It began in the winter of 1941. Every night she would sit at the big kitchen table and compose a letter to my brother Johnny, who had been drafted the preceding summer and hadn’t been heard from since Pearl Harbor.

  I couldn’t understand why Mamma kept writing when Johnny never answered.

  “You’ll see—we’ll get a letter from him,” she insisted. Mamma said there was a direct line from the brain to the written word that was as powerful as any God-given light. She was counting on that light to find Johnny.

  Whether she said this to reassure herself or Papa or all of us, I don’t know. I do know it helped hold us together, and one day a letter did arrive. Johnny was alive in the South Pacific.

  It always amused me that Mamma signed her letters “Cecilia Capuzzi,” and I teased her about it. “Why not just write ‘Mamma’?” What I had not known was that she always thought of herself as Cecilia Capuzzi. Not Mamma. I began to see her in a new light, this petite woman who in heels scarcely measured five feet.

  She wore no makeup, and no jewelry except for a yellow-gold wedding band. Her hair was fine, straight and black, tied in a bun that she refused to cut or “Americanize” with a permanent. Her tiny spectacles with the silver frames pinched her nose.

  After she finished a letter, Mamma gave it to Papa to mail. Then she would put on the coffeepot, and we would sit around the table, talking about the good times when there were ten of us sitting there—Papa, Mamma and eight children. Five boys and three girls. It didn’t seem possible that everyone had gone away to work or to war or to get married. Everyone except me.

  By springtime, Mamma had added two more sons to her letter-writing list. Every night she would compose three different letters, then pass them to Papa and me to add our greetings.

  Bit by bit, news of Mamma’s letters traveled. One morning a little woman with gun-metal gray hair knocked on our door. Her voice trembled when she asked, “Is it true that you write letters?”

  “I write to my sons.”

  “And you read too?” the woman whispered.

  “Si, si.”

  The woman opened her shopping bag and pulled out a stack of airmail letters. “Read… read to me, please.”

  The letters were from the woman’s son fighting in Europe, a boy with red hair who, Mamma remembered, used to sit on our front steps with my brothers. One by one, Mamma read the letters, translating them from English to Italian. The woman’s eyes misted and sparked. “Now I must answer,” she said. But what words to use?

  “Make some coffee, Tavi,” Mamma called to me, as she led the woman to the kitchen and a chair at the table. She took out her pen and ink and airmail paper and began to write. When she had finished, she read the letter to the woman.

  “How did you know I wanted to say that?”

  “I often stare at my boys’ letters, the same as you, and I wonder what to write.”

  Soon the woman returned with a friend, and another and another—all with sons at war, all in need of letters. Mamma had become the neighborhood letter-writer. Sometimes she would spend a whole day writing.

  Mamma placed great importance on people signing their names, and the little woman with the gray hair asked Mamma to teach her. “I want to learn to write my name for my boy to see.” So Mamma took the woman’s hand in hers, and led it up and down and around on paper, over and over, until she could do it without help. After that, whenever Mamma wrote a letter for her, the woman signed her name and smiled.

  One day she came to our house, and with one look Mamma knew what had happened. All hope had gone from her eyes. They sat together for a long time, their hands touching and their hearts locked as one. Then Mamma said, “Maybe we’d better go to church. There are some things too big for people to understand.” When Mamma came home, she couldn’t think of anything except the boy with the red hair.

  After the war Mamma put away pen and paper. “Finito,” she said. But she was wrong. The women who had come to her with their sons’ mail now returned with letters from their relatives in Italy. They also came to her for help in becoming American citizens.

  “There are some things too big for people to understand.”

  Mamma once confessed that she had always dreamed of writing a novel. Why didn’t she? I asked.

  “Everyone has a purpose in life,” she said. “Mine seems to be letter-writing.” She tried to explain her zeal for it.

  “A letter pulls people together like nothing else. It can make you cry or shout with joy. There’s no finer caress than a love letter, because it makes the world very small, and the writer and reader, the only rulers. Girl, a letter is life!”

  Mamma’s letters are all gone now. Yet the recipients still talk of her, carrying memories of her letters next to their hearts.

  Originally published in the June 1992 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Humor Hall of Fame

  Cartoon from the book They Can Talk, published by Ulysses Press

  Uncle Bart was a city boy whose familiarity with wildlife began and ended with pigeons. One time he joined us at our cabin in the woods. In the evening, he opened the door to let our cats in. The first cat walked in; then the second. Bart stood there coaxing the third cat to come, which we found strange—we had only two cats. The third cat was a possum.

  —JONATHAN HAKULIN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  My cat just walked up to the paper shredder and said, “Teach me everything you know.”

  —TWITTER@NICCAGEMATCH

  The Stranger Who Taught Magic

  by Arthur Gordon

  Perhaps you stand to learn the most from the most unlikely friendships.

  That July morning, I remember, was like any other, calm and opalescent before the heat of the fierce Georgia sun. I was 13: sunburned, shaggy-haired, a little aloof, and solitary. In winter I had to put on
shoes and go to school like everyone else. But summers I lived by the sea, and my mind was empty and wild and free.

  On this particular morning, I had tied my rowboat to the pilings of an old dock upriver from our village. There, sometimes, the striped sheepshead lurked in the still, green water. I was crouched, motionless as a stone, when a voice spoke suddenly above my head: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?”

  I looked up, startled, into a lean, pale face and a pair of the most remarkable eyes I had ever seen. It wasn’t a question of color; I’m not sure, now, what color they were. It was a combination of things: warmth, humor, interest, alertness. Intensity—that’s the word, I guess—and underlying it all, a curious kind of mocking sadness. I believe I thought him old.

  He saw how taken aback I was. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a bit early in the morning for the Book of Job, isn’t it?” He nodded at the two or three fish in the boat. “Think you could teach me how to catch those?”

  Ordinarily, I was wary of strangers, but anyone interested in fishing was hardly a stranger. I nodded, and he climbed down into the boat. “Perhaps we should introduce ourselves,” he said. “But then again, perhaps not. You’re a boy willing to teach, I’m a teacher willing to learn. That’s introduction enough. I’ll call you ‘Boy,’ and you call me ‘Sir.’ ”

  Such talk sounded strange in my world of sun and salt water. But there was something so magnetic about the man, and so disarming about his smile, that I didn’t care.

  Ordinarily, I was wary of strangers, but anyone interested in fishing was hardly a stranger.

  I handed him a hand line and showed him how to bait his hooks with fiddler crabs. He kept losing baits, because he could not recognize a sheepshead’s stealthy tug, but he seemed content not to catch anything. He told me he had rented one of the weathered bungalows behind the dock. “I needed to hide for a while,” he said. “Not from the police, or anything like that. Just from friends and relatives. So don’t tell anyone you’ve found me, will you?”

  I was tempted to ask where he was from; there was a crispness in the way he spoke that was very different from the soft accents I was accustomed to. But I didn’t. He had said he was a teacher, though, and so I asked what he taught.

  “In the school catalogue they call it English,” he said. “But I like to think of it as a course in magic—in the mystery and magic of words. Are you fond of words?”

  I said that I had never thought much about them. I also pointed out that the tide was ebbing, that the current was too strong for more fishing, and that in any case it was time for breakfast.

  “Of course,” he said, pulling in his line. “I’m a little forgetful about such things these days.” He eased himself back onto the dock with a little grimace, as if the effort cost him something. “Will you be back on the river later?”

  I said that I would probably go casting for shrimp at low tide.

  “Stop by,” he said. “We’ll talk about words for a while, and then perhaps you can show me how to catch shrimp.”

  So began a most unlikely friendship, because I did go back. To this day, I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was because, for the first time, I had met an adult on terms that were in balance. In the realm of words and ideas, he might be the teacher. But in my own small universe of winds and tides and sea creatures, the wisdom belonged to me.

  Almost every day after that, we’d go wherever the sea gods or my whim decreed. Sometimes up the silver creeks, where the terrapin skittered down the banks and the great blue herons stood like statues. Sometimes along the ocean dunes, fringed with graceful sea oats, where by night the great sea turtles crawled and by day the wild goats browsed. I showed him where the mullet swirled and where the flounder lay in cunning camouflage. I learned that he was incapable of much exertion; even pulling up the anchor seemed to exhaust him. But he never complained. And, all the time, talk flowed from him like a river.

  Much of it I have forgotten now, but some comes back as clear and distinct as if it all happened yesterday, not decades ago. We might be sitting in a hollow of the dunes, watching the sun go down in a smear of crimson. “Words,” he’d say. “Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on the page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it. Here!” He would hand me a piece of shell. “Write a word that looks or sounds like what it means.”

  I would stare helplessly at the sand.

  “Oh,” he’d cry, “you’re being dense. There are so many! Like whisper… leaden… twilight… chime. Tell you what: when you go to bed tonight, think of five words that look like what they mean and five that sound like what they mean. Don’t go to sleep until you do!”

  And I would try—but always fall asleep.

  Or we might be anchored just offshore, casting into the surf for sea bass, our little bateau nosing over the rollers like a restless hound. “Rhythm,” he would say. “Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you’ll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Do you know what I mean?”

  My conscious self didn’t know; but perhaps something deep inside me did. In any case, I listened.

  I listened, too, when he read from the books he sometimes brought: Kipling, Conan Doyle, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Often he would stop and repeat a phrase or a line that pleased him. One day, in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, he found one: “And the great horse grimly neighed.” “Close your eyes,” he said to me, “and say that slowly, out loud.” I did. “How did it make you feel?” “It gives me the shivers,” I said truthfully. He was delighted.

  But the magic that he taught was not confined to words; he had a way of generating in me an excitement about things I had always taken for granted. He might point to a bank of clouds. “What do you see there? Colors? That’s not enough. Look for towers and drawbridges. Look for dragons and griffins and strange and wonderful beasts.”

  Or he might pick up an angry, claw-brandishing blue crab, holding it cautiously by the back flippers as I had taught him. “Pretend you’re this crab,” he’d say. “What do you see through those stalk-like eyes? What do you feel with those complicated legs? What goes on in your tiny brain? Try it for just five seconds. Stop being a boy. Be a crab!” And I would stare in amazement at the furious creature, feeling my comfortable identity lurch and sway under the impact of the idea.

  So the days went by. Our excursions became less frequent, because he tired so easily. He brought two chairs down to the dock and some books, but he didn’t read much. He seemed content to watch me as I fished, or the circling gulls, or the slow river coiling past.

  A sudden shadow fell across my life when my parents told me I was going to camp for two weeks. On the dock that afternoon I asked my friend if he would be there when I got back. “I hope so,” he said gently.

  But he wasn’t. I remember standing on the sun-warmed planking of the old dock, staring at the shuttered bungalow and feeling a hollow sense of finality and loss. I ran to Jackson’s grocery store—where everyone knew everything—and asked where the schoolteacher had gone.

  “He was sick, real sick,” Mrs. Jackson replied. “Doc phoned his relatives up north to come get him. He left something for you—he figured you’d be asking after him.”

  She handed me a book. It was a slender volume of verse, Flame and Shadow, by someone I had never heard of: Sara Teasdale. The corner of one page was turned down, and there was a penciled star by one of the poems. I still have the book, with that poem, “On the Dunes.”

  If there is any life when death is over,

  These tawny beaches will know much of me,

  I shall come back, as constant and as changeful

&
nbsp; As the unchanging, many-colored sea.

  If life was small, if it had made me scornful,

  Forgive me; I shall straighten like a flame

  In the great calm of death, and if you want me

  Stand on the sea-ward dunes and call my name.

  * * *

  Well, I have never stood on the dunes and called his name. For one thing, I never knew it; for another, I’d be too self-conscious. And there are long stretches when I forget all about him. But sometimes—when the music or the magic in a phrase makes my skin tingle, or when I pick up an angry blue crab, or when I see a dragon in the flaming sky—sometimes I remember.

  Originally published in the June 1970 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  Runaway Train

  by William M. Hendry

  Tons of poisonous phenol were barreling toward Kenton, Ohio. They had ten minutes to stop the runaway train.

  Looking out the weather-streaked window of the control tower 40 feet above the Toledo rail yard, Jon Hosfeld anxiously scanned the maze of tracks and belching locomotives. Just then a light on the electronic map of the yard’s main tracks flashed white—confirming his fear. A freight train had run a switch and was rolling onto the main line into high-speed traffic. In 31 years with the railroad, Hosfeld had never seen that happen.

  A bizarre sequence of events had set the train loose. There are three braking systems on a train. Leaving the cab, the engineer had set two—but when he reached for the third, he grabbed the throttle instead. After he stepped out, the locomotive hauling 47 cars pulled away. Two of the cars in the CSX Transportation freight contained molten phenol, a poisonous chemical used in making adhesives, dyes and paints. A wreck could release a lavalike flood of the toxin.