Free For Love by Sue Miller

police move to
their next questions: about the sequence of events, about what Cameron saw, what he noticed.
    Lottie gets up, leaving the letter on the wooden trunk that serves as Cameron’s coffee table. She strides across the big open room into the bedroom again. She goes directly to the
answering machine and pushes the message button. How quickly, she thinks, she’s gotten used to feeling she has a right to do this – to read his mail, to listen to his messages. She sits
down on the bed.
    The first voice is male, loud. ‘This is a message for Cameron Reed from the Cambridge Police Department. You left your wallet and keys with us, Mr Reed. Repeat: we have your wallet and
keys. And we have just a question or two we’d still like to ask you. Please get back to us. This is Officer Scott, at a little after midnight.’ A fumbling noise. Then a click, and the
buzz of the dial tone.
    Another beep, then Elizabeth’s voice, husky and urgent. ‘Cam, it’s me. It’s . . . it’s around five.
A.M.
Pick up, darling. I’ll wait.’ A long
pause. ‘Pick up, Cameron.’ Then, ‘Oh, God, where are you?’ After perhaps ten more seconds, she whispers, ‘Cameron: don’t call me. I’ll call you back,
sweetheart.’
    A buzz, and then Elizabeth again. ‘Cam, it’s sixish now. I don’t know what to do. I’ll keep trying, off and on, when I can. If you’re there now, darling, please
pick up the phone.’ She waits. ‘I’m so worried about you. I’ll call again.’
    The next message, Elizabeth too. ‘Cam, Char moved your car for me, and I’m coming over, darling. Don’t go anywhere, if you get this message. Stay right there. It’s about
six forty-five or so. In the morning. I’ll be right over.’
    Then Lottie’s own voice, sounding little-girl-like and slightly midwestern after Elizabeth. ‘Cam, it’s Lottie. I’m concerned about what happened at Elizabeth’s last
night. Give me a call when you get back.’
    Then a male voice again. ‘Mr Reed, this is the Cambridge Police. We have your wallet, which you left behind last night. We have your keys. And we have a few questions for you, of no real
consequence. Paperwork. Please call when you get in. And ask for Officer Danehy.’
    Another call from her, the one she’d made after she read about Jessica’s death in the paper.
    Then several hangups, including one that she knows was her own. Finally a long, fuzzy silence.
    Lottie turns the machine off. No news here, then. She gets up and drifts slowly back out into the open space. She crosses to the big wooden dining table. There’s a long bookcase on the
wall behind it, and for the length of one whole shelf, Cameron has arranged pictures and memorabilia: drawings by friends, notes, bits of pottery, poems, wind-up toys, photographs, postcards.
Cameron’s life, as he’s constructed it. The first night she arrived in town, they had dinner here, in front of these objects, and they talked about their lives, how they both felt
they’d been mother and midwife to themselves. Lottie remembers that he spoke of Elizabeth that night, a remote Elizabeth, an Elizabeth who was, for him, still just a distant memory –
neither of them knew then that she was already back in her mother’s house. He compared her role in his life to Derek’s in Lottie’s. ‘You use the tools that come your way,
don’t you?’ he had asked. There were candles burning on the table between them, and his face seemed suffused with light. She was happy for him in this apartment, this self-constructed
universe. ‘And they weren’t bad tools, as these things go. They were interesting people, they had a lot to teach us about the world. You got Ryan out of it, and what else I can only
guess at. And from Elizabeth I got a certain sense of life as . . . I don’t know. I suppose a romantic thing, a rich thing, a complex thing. I’ll never think of her unkindly, as badly
as it ended.’
    ‘Did it?’ Lottie asked.
    He waved his hand over