What We've Lost Is Nothing Read online

  She didn’t answer, but Arthur knew that by morning’s end he’d be downstairs helping his sister hang the sheets. For starters, Bobbi was five feet tall. Without a ladder, or Arthur’s help, she had little hope of a sheet’s actually catching on a rod.

  “What brings you here so early anyway?” Early mornings were inconvenient, not only for the terrible light, but because Arthur had become, over the years, nocturnal. He rarely rose before noon, and now here she was in a midmorning frenzy.

  “Do you know how many burglaries we have in Downers Grove every week, Arthur? Do you?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, do you?”

  He sat down, elbows on knees, face in his hands. He could feel a migraine coming on. “I assume your inquiry’s rhetorical.”

  “The point is that you have to lock your doors, Arthur. The point is that you have to live with the appearance of a normal person. You have to use curtains. You have to turn lights on and off. You have to know what’s in your house and who’s in your house!”

  Arthur and Bobbi had had this discussion in many forms. She’d long wanted him to have a live-in “companion,” as she’d called it. A maid/cook/cleaner/nurse all in one. But Arthur felt fully capable of taking care of himself. He operated at night. He wore his glasses. He worked. Yet his way of living offered no reasonable defense to Bobbi. To her it was a life of hardship that he’d endured alone far too long.

  “You have nothing to prove,” she told him over and over. Nothing to prove to anyone. Arthur wasn’t at all sure he agreed with her.

  As she put down the sheets, she gasped in a sort of horror. It made Arthur jump. “The dictation machine! Oh, no, Arthur. They took your dictation machine? Oh, dear Lord.”

  Bobbi had bought him the machine some years ago for verbal notes. In his list for the police, Arthur hadn’t even written it down. Hadn’t so much as noticed its absence.

  “Insurance should cover that,” Bobbi said. “Have you checked? Have you even spoken with your insurance agent?”

  Of course, he hadn’t.

  Arthur rose from his seat in the living room and walked upstairs. Bobbi followed, dropping the issue of the dictation machine temporarily. He settled into the auburn leather chair in his office, whose fabric was worn down on the arms and the seat cushion was indented and welcomed his form perfectly. His headphones lay at his feet. He hadn’t listened to a thing since the police had left his house the day before. He envisioned his notebooks in some ­Dumpster, buried under rotting lettuce and Styrofoam packing peanuts and thought he felt an actual skip in his heartbeat. He could not bear to have the headphones on, to remind him of so many years of lost work. A dim night-light glowed from the wall, but the room was otherwise dark. Still, Arthur found himself squinting slightly at his sister as if the circumference of her human force was too much for him.

  The phone rang. Bobbi picked up and launched into a conversation as if the call had indeed been meant for her. Arthur felt as if he were being “handled.” He found he had to quell the urge to pull the phone cord from the wall altogether. Bobbi hadn’t said a thing about the lost notebooks.

  “That was the police. They offered to come and get you and take you to the station for your fingerprints.”

  “I’ll go later myself. I don’t need the escort.” At the end of the meeting at the McPherson house the night before, Michael had suggested a few of them go to the police station together and Arthur had agreed.

  “That’s what I said. I told them I’d take you myself.”

  “Bobbi, I don’t need an escort from anyone.” He couldn’t decide who bothered him more—his sister or Michael McPherson. At the moment, his neighbor had a minor lead.

  “You don’t even know their hours.”

  “It’s a bloody police station, Bobbi. It doesn’t close.”

  Outside, Arthur heard a dog barking, and it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t heard his neighbors’ dog in quite some time. At the McPhersons’ last night, he’d learned that his neighbors’ names were Dan and Alicia Kowalski, and that they were on vacation in the Florida Keys. Up until that point, he’d known them as the owners of the large black dog named Chester. Chester’s barking kept Arthur awake. Arthur had never much liked dogs, and even less so as his hemeralopia progressed. They were unpredictable, occasionally deadly. And they offended his sense of olfactory decorum. He knew immediately when he’d entered a house with a dog. It was a musty, dank smell. Dog. A smell that Arthur associated with moldy dairy. Clearly, Chester had returned to the home front.

  Arthur tried to ignore the insistent barking as Bobbi began to thumb through his mail, zeroing in on his unpaid property-tax bill, which was now a month overdue. “A month! Arthur! My God.”

  Arthur had no real excuse for this oversight. He’d received the bill in time. He had the money in his account, but he generally paid his property taxes late simply because he couldn’t abide the idea that so many of his own tax dollars paid for area schools when he’d never had children himself. He understood the point, that the tax burden was shared equally, that he utilized resources that schoolchildren perhaps didn’t and vice versa, but something about the school in particular irked him, something about his never being given the opportunity to have children. He told himself he was far better off than those poor families such as the McPhersons who’d dig their own graves of debt getting their kids through college. But he wasn’t sure this was true. After all, children had given him his life back, had given him something to work for again. The voices of children.

  “Listen, Arthur.” Bobbi had come round to face him, and now she was bent over before him, her hands on his knees. “You’re not going to like this, but just hear me out.”

  “No, Bobbi.”

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

  “I will not have a live-in, Bobbi. We’ve discussed it and I won’t talk about it again.”

  “Stephen and I talked it over. Just hear me out.” She had a smile in her voice, a glow almost. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it. Perhaps she was going to tell him she was a grandmother. She’d waited years for one of her three children to have a child, but so far no luck. Arthur wished someone would shut up the damn dog.

  “We’ve decided to redo our basement. Gut it, the works. Stephen’s at home right now going through boxes, seeing what we can get rid of. Just organizing it, you know? And we’ve already called an architect. We don’t want something halfway, something just done on the surface. We want a fabulous new apartment down there. Something that’ll really dazzle.”

  “That’s wonderful, Bobbi. Sounds like a good project.” Why wouldn’t she get her hands off his knees? Why was she so . . . hovery?

  “Kitchen, bedroom, full bathroom, dining area . . . we’re hoping to use the whole footprint of the house if we can.” She was almost giddy now, encouraged by Arthur’s approval of the idea. “We might even be able to get two bedrooms out of it.”

  He wondered if this was the beginning of her retirement plan, rehab the house to make a little rental income. Perhaps she’d work up the curiosity to travel a bit now?

  “And we want your input on the whole thing, Arthur. Design. Colors. Lighting. Everything.”

  “What on earth for? I haven’t any interest in that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, but you should.”

  “Do you hear that dog? It’s my neighbor’s dog. Thing drives me batty.”

  “We’ll do it any way you want it, the design I mean. Whatever suits you.”

  “Have I got a window open up here? It does seem unusually loud.” He looked around, but nothing seemed different. His office window had long been blocked by a bookcase, filled to overflowing.

  Bobbi stopped for a minute and looked around. “I think the windows are closed. Anyway, what do you think?”

  “It’s a fine idea.”


  “It is?”

  “Well, yes, Bobbi. You and Stephen can do whatever you like. It’s your house.”

  “But about you, I mean. You’ll do it?”

  “Do what?” Arthur felt his stomach begin to churn. Bobbi stood up and stretched her legs. She was wearing knit trousers and a gray College of DuPage sweatshirt that had to have come from his days teaching there.

  “Live there. In the new basement. With us. You’ll do it, Arthur?”

  Arthur noticed, in that moment, that Chester had gone quiet.

  Chapter 19

  8:36 a.m.

  Michael rose early and called Detective Wasserman at eight thirty. Under the circumstances, Michael felt the sheer volume of homes involved ought to elicit some useful evidence, maybe even a lead or two. Who knew what could turn up overnight?

  “Look, Mr. McPherson,” Wasserman said, “I know it’s frustrating. It seems like it ought to be easy, but what we’re dealing with here—scale aside—is pretty typical stuff.”

  Michael asked how that could possibly be so. How could a whole truckload of stuff just vanish?

  “Daytime robberies, for one. They’re much more common than night. People work. Criminals know it, and unfortunately I don’t have to tell you thieves don’t tend to hold nine-to-five jobs like the rest of us.” Burglars didn’t often carry weapons—they were, in Wasserman’s experience, a nervous bunch whose lives were generally not going well, and home invasions were often just a crime of opportunity. Michael’s house was a case in point. Thieves probably got into the office, started grabbing stuff, heard Mary, and dashed out. Given how much of each house was undisturbed, Ilios Lane was a relatively quick hit, despite the sheer number of residences involved.

  “Look,” Wasserman said, “all these things you’re thinking: barking dogs, vans parked on the street. They’re pretty ordinary during the day. You hear a dog barking like crazy in the dead of night, you see a van with dark windows parked in the middle of the alley at night, they’d mean something to you. But during the day, people operate under the assumption that they’re safe. I’ll tell you something. You know what keeps people safe from break-ins? Safer than all the sophisticated alarm systems and fake yard signs? Tire swings keep people safe. Playhouses. Tricycles in the yard. Signs of little kids. A house with little kids is a house with people in it, going in and out all day. You want to increase your safety on Ilios Lane? Hang a couple of tire swings. Build a tree house with your neighbors.”

  “You know, I’m sure I’ve seen some west-side kids hanging around here. City kids, I mean. Young men.”

  “There isn’t a border, Mr. McPherson. So unless you have something a little more solid—”

  “Suspicious, I mean. I see a lot of suspicious people. There’s some young gangbanger kids, the nephews of the Cambodian family, you might want to check out. One of them looked at me very suspiciously yesterday. Really made my skin crawl.” Michael noticed the greasy pizza box from last night’s dinner still on the counter, two slices gone hard. He had to stop himself from reaching for a slice. He heard a thumping over the phone, as if Wasserman was pounding on a stapler.

  “Mr. McPherson”—Michael thought he detected impatience in the detective’s voice—“I promise you we are on top of this. I have a whole team devoted to your street, and we’re going to use all the resources at our disposal to figure out who did this and why. Just let us do our job.”

  Michael rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes for a minute. Upstairs, he could hear Susan turn off the shower. Mary had already left for school. “These neighbors, we’ve formed a kind of group, you know. A collective.”

  “I’ve heard. That’s good. You need to support each other.”

  Michael ground his teeth for a second. “I need to be able to tell my neighbors something. Media’s camped out in front of my house and they’re charging at me every time I walk out the door.” This was not, technically speaking, true. When Michael looked out his bedroom window, only one reporter was still lingering.

  “Keep it simple, Mr. McPherson. Short and sweet.”

  “Can you at least update me about the case? Even something minor?”

  “I can update you about your case. Confidentiality laws don’t entitle you to hear about your neighbors’ cases.”

  Michael could feel his heart pounding, his blood heating up. “You know, Detective,” Michael said, taking a different tack, “I’m not sure if I told you what I do for a living. I sell bridges. Modular bridges.”

  “Listen, Mr. McPherson—”

  “They use them at Ground Zero. Compact modulars. You can put them up in a day, then break ’em down and take ’em with you. They’re ugly as hell, but they’re exactly what you want in times of chaos. Minnesota? Remember that bridge? That was what you call a critical bridge failure. Critical. We assume infrastructure stays structurally sound forever.”

  “Mr. McPherson, I do apologize, but—”

  “What I’m saying, Detective Wasserman, is that I’m your bridge here. To my neighbors, to this community. We’ve had a critical failure, and we need—you need—a compact modular.”

  “Mr. McPherson? I hear you.” The detective went silent a moment while someone spoke to him in his office. Michael couldn’t make out what was said. “I promise you, I’ll give you an update when there’s one to give. Don’t forget you all need to come in here and do your elimination prints.”

  “I’ll get us all together,” Michael promised. “We’ll all come in at once so you don’t get interrupted all day. This afternoon, we’ll be there.”

  He hung up and leaned against the kitchen counter. The first twenty-four hours of an investigation were critical, and he wanted to keep the pressure on, let the department know there was more at stake than just stuff—it was the sense of safety in their whole community. Behind him, the smell of a burning pot of coffee began to waft through the kitchen, and he heard Susan turn on the blow-dryer upstairs. He poured himself the dregs. Through the window he could see a cluster of tulips emerging near the alley. He’d never been a gardener himself. Maybe this summer he’d get out there, plant a bit, do some weeding. He wondered if Wasserman had really listened to him at all.

  Chapter 20

  1:20 p.m.

  Susan did a double take behind the wheel of her gold Honda Accord. She thought she saw Michael’s Ford Focus in the driveway as she drove past Ilios Lane. Why wasn’t Michael at work? His commissions had gotten so small that he hadn’t received a bonus in five years, and Susan had had to go full-time at the Oak Park Community Housing Office. The month before, he was passed over for promotion to a guy who’d been with Lowry Brothers only three years. There was talk of layoffs, but then the talk flittered away, and Michael, chastened, continued in the same job with the same title and territory he’d had for years.

  “Ilios Lane!” the client in Susan’s car yelled. “I didn’t know we were so close!”

  Susan had just shown her an apartment on Austin and Augusta. “Well, the next property is a good four, five blocks away still.”

  “I mean, you must be able to practically see Ilios Lane from the apartment, no?”

  “No.”

  “It seems like you could. Like you should be able to see it.” The girl was looking at Susan suspiciously, the diamond in her nose sending strobe flashes across the dashboard. The two had just finished looking at a mint-condition, rehabbed one-bedroom on Austin Boulevard with parking, and Susan was annoyed that the young woman had not immediately recognized this as a rare find.

  “No,” Susan said, a little more firmly than she should have. “Really, you can’t.” Susan knew what always sealed the deal for her clients was her own life. “I’ve lived on the east side for sixteen years,” she’d tell them. “I raised my kids here,” she’d add, even though her own street did not have a single black family and never had in the years she’d
lived there.

  They used to work, these aphorisms of hers. The family, the kids on the east side. But things had been tough lately. There were the assaults by the three black boys who’d come over from the west side, there were the muggings, first in the bank parking lot on Madison, and then in the alleyway behind Ace Hardware. And now these burglaries on her very street, in her very house. Already, she’d had two clients today and the burglaries had concerned them both.

  Now this twentysomething girl, with the pierced nose. The kind of funky young adult who’d have moved into the east side without a second thought back in the nineties. Today, driving through the neighborhood, she was vacillating, eyeing Ilios Lane in the passenger side mirror as it fell behind them.

  Susan had fallen into her job at the Housing Office largely by accident. Almost to the day after she graduated college she met Michael at a Jessie and the Jawbreakers concert at the Hideout. They waited eight years to marry, waited so long that it seemed in equal proportions both inevitable and entirely unlikely. Yet a month into their marriage, she found herself pregnant, and when Thomas was born, she’d had to quit grad school and her job as a social worker’s assistant to care for him. From that moment, she recognized in her own life a cliché she’d always worked hard to avoid. She vowed to return to school, but of course never did. After a few years with Tommy, just when a return to grad school seemed possible, she got pregnant with Mary and kissed away another four years. Eventually she found work at the Housing Office as an escort, taking people around the town, showing the highlights: the Lake Theatre and Barbara’s Bookstore, the little diners and gift stores, Petersen’s Ice Cream parlor and Erik’s Deli. Lately, it had gotten harder and harder with all the chain stores moving in—the Gap and Borders and Trader Joe’s. But mostly her job was to show them apartments on the east side, encourage them to be part of Oak Park’s diversity, be part of the wonder of this unusual village.