Free What We've Lost Is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder Page B

the numbers into the phone. When she finished, she covered the mouthpiece and said, “Too bad no one died. We could have saved a hundred and fifty bucks on the change fee.”
    They were booked on the last flight out of Miami that night.
    Alicia hung up the phone softly in its cradle and fell backward onto the taupe duvet. Then she covered her face with her hands and started to cry.
    Finally, Dan thought, and reached for her.

Chapter 10
    7:25 p.m.
    A rthur loved to walk at night. The later the better. Tonight, however, with a smattering of news vans still parked outside, Michael McPherson had called a meeting of the neighbors, an action committee he’d said, and Arthur was steeling himself to go. He barely knew his neighbors. There was Étienne, the restaurateur next door. And there were the McPhersons and Mary Elizabeth, of course, whom he knew better than anyone else. There were the couple with the barking dog, the immigrant family, the family recently separated with the father left behind. But they were more or less anonymous people to Arthur.
    Somewhere in an alley several streets over, he detected a garbage truck and the soft whoosh of a car. He could hear ambient talking, a collective of voices—police officers outside, neighbors, newscasters, cameramen, gawkers.
    The police were gone from his house and already a locksmith had installed a shiny, new door lock. He didn’t worry that he’d be burglarized again. And he didn’t care about most of the stolen items—the old speakers and the handheld voice recorder for auditory notes. The half-drunk bottles of rum and vodka. An answering machine that he hadn’t used in years. A handful of CDs and the electronic photo album his sister had made for him several Christmases ago. It was the small stack of Mole­skine notebooks ­fifteen, sixteen years old that he’d kept beside the answering machine on the counter and which represented perhaps five years of speechprint work. He’d always thought of photocopying them, of hiring a transcriptionist in case of a fire. But burglary? Of personal handwritten notebooks? If he were the police, he’d dismiss such an item outright. Who goes into a pawnshop in search of used notebooks? What was the street value for such a personal item? Arthur fought waves of nausea and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He couldn’t even search for them himself, his vision was too poor. They were simply gone.
    He sat on his bed, fighting a growing sense of helplessness, waiting, it might seem, until the sanctity of his haven was restored, the one place he felt he could emerge from his own helplessness. This, too, he had to admit, was what had been invaded. Not his home, but his sense of security. He did not want to walk tonight, and he did not want to go to Michael McPherson’s meeting because he did not want to face the emptiness of his own downstairs, the bleak square where his notebooks once sat.
    Normally, Arthur loved the night. The full silence of it. Cars, birds, sirens, voices, they were all packed up and put away till morning. In all the years he’d lived on Ilios Lane, he’d never had a problem until today. He’d pass the occasional dog walker, or the occasional teenager sneaking home after curfew. But generally Arthur was alone, and he knew the shape of every house, the smell of every garden, every rose and trellis.
    He remembered the first night he met Mary Elizabeth McPherson. He was out for a walk, rounding the corner of Taylor Street, when he knocked into her on the sidewalk. She was carrying a half gallon of milk and a Snickers. She recognized Arthur as the recluse who lived across the street and assumed him to be lost. She offered to walk with him.
    â€œI live across the street,” she told him. “Across from your house.” When he failed to respond, she added, “Michael and Susan’s daughter? McPherson? My name’s Mary