“Nothing out there, Kell,” I told her.

“Noise,” said Kelli. And, as if she’d evoked them, that was when I heard the sirens.

Vandals, the police determined. Not robbers. Probably just teenagers. The next day, an officer came to the door to reassure me on this front. He was visiting everyone on the block to let us know, even though we had all come to our own conclusions the night before. I’d stood in my housecoat, part of a loose clutch of similarly housecoated and pyjama-bottomed neighbours — blinking and murmuring at each other — many of whom I’d just met for the first time at the yard sale that day. Now we were all united in the crisis, we were like a single entity, and information and speculation rippled through us like dual electrical currents. How many houses had been broken into? Had anyone been hurt? Did anyone see the guy? Or was it guys?

They broke into a garage, the cop told me the next day. Threw some stuff around, spray-painted profanities. The home alarm system was triggered, he said, and the little buggers fled. Garden-variety mischief. But I’d already gathered this information the night before. A woman named Marilyn, wearing blue rubber gloves (she’d been giving her hands an overnight beauty treatment, she explained), lived next door to the vandalized house and told me that in fact she was the one who heard all the crashing first — her bedroom being just a few feet away from her neighbour’s garage. So really, I was his alarm system! she bragged, pointing at herself with one rubbery hand. I phoned Arun, and that’s when he activated the house alarm to call the cops!

“But how do you know,” I said to the cop on my doorstep, “they didn’t intend to rob the place? And the alarm didn’t just scare them off?”

“The garage was vandalized,” the cop repeated. “All the effort just went into making a big mess.”

“So you think it was targeted?”

The cop tilted his head at this word — and the official mask of benign patience he was wearing briefly slipped. He knew now that I was being coy. He knew that I knew, and I was just waiting to see if he would tell me.

“We do have reason to believe it was targeted, yes.”

He had reason to believe it was targeted because the vandals had spray-painted PAKI GO HOME and similar epithets on the walls of the garage. Noel had told me that. Noel was the excitable, high-voiced retiree who lived on the opposite side of the vandalized house from Marilyn. Noel had heard the husband and wife next door babbling fearfully to one another out on their front step and, intuiting in his gut the sound of crisis, he’d jumped out of bed and rushed down to the basement to get his Remington 870. But the shotgun was locked away in its cabinet and he couldn’t remember where he had hidden the key — all he could remember was patting himself on the back, the day he hid it, for coming up with such an ingenious spot, one he knew his grandkids would have no chance of ever finding.