James Patterson - Murder House

“Deal?” he repeats.

Dede stands up, leans on the railing. “We have to behave? That’s no fun.”

Annie stands up, too. “So what’s your story, guy?”

The man gestures upward with his chin. “Me, I’m just patching up the flat roof. Not having as much fun as you, looks like.”

“That’s not fair,” Annie says, which sounds close to an invitation. She gets an elbow from Dede. “So what’s your name?”

“Noah,” he says.

“Are you going to turn us in, Noah?” Dede asks.

He considers them a moment. “Well, that wouldn’t be very nice, would it?”

“It sure wouldn’t.”

“Just don’t make a mess while you’re here,” he says. “I’ll have to clean it up.”

He starts to climb. Both girls can’t help but enjoy the view. Straight or gay, this guy is hard not to admire.

“And one more thing,” he says as he reaches the flat roof. “Don’t go in the basement.”

“Why’s that, Noah?”

“Didn’t you hear? This house is haunted.” The man hauls himself up on the roof and disappears.

Annie’s beater VW Bug pulls up to the gate of 7 Ocean Drive. The sun has fallen now at nine o’clock, so all is clear. When they use their car, which isn’t very often, they prefer to enter and exit under the cover of darkness.

Dede gets out to push open the massive gate, using all her weight to do so. Once it’s open, she turns back, squinting into the car’s headlights.

Beyond the beams, across the street, she sees someone, standing flat-footed, looking at her. She does a double take, shields her eyes with a hand — which doesn’t really help — and moves away from the blinding beams to get a better look. It seems as if... the figure moves along with her, and then disappears — maybe into the shrubbery? — leaving Dede with spots in her vision from the car lights.

Dede rushes back to the car and gets in.

“What’s the matter?” Annie asks.

“I thought I... saw someone. Across the street. Staring at us. Watching us.”

Annie strains to look behind her. “I didn’t see anyone when we drove up.”

“I know. Me either.”

“What did he look like?”

Dede lets out a shudder. “Couldn’t really see. A man, looked like. Kind of — you’re gonna laugh — like a scarecrow, sort of? Like, his hair was all stringy and sticking out. He had a hat on, too, I think.”

“A scarecrow?” Annie looks at Dede with mock horror. “You don’t think... the Tin Man might be out there, too?”

“Stop.”

“Not the Cowardly Lion!” Annie brings a hand to her mouth.

“Just drive the car.”

Annie pats Dede’s leg. “You’re paranoid, girl. We’re not supposed to be here, so you think everyone’s looking to bust us. I mean, someone walking down Ocean Drive in the summer isn’t exactly unusual.” She puts the car into gear and drives through the gate. Dede closes the gate behind them, taking another look across the street and seeing nothing.

“That’s the thing, though,” she says when she reenters the car. “He wasn’t walking. He was just watching us. I mean, I think. With the headlights, I couldn’t really see. It could just be my eyes playing tricks.”

Annie pulls the Beetle onto the grass next to the massive detached garage, hidden from sight. She lets out a sigh. “Good to be home,” she says. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like—”

“Would you shut up?”

As they walk toward the back entrance, they see the ladder the hot tool-belt guy used yesterday, broken down and lying in the grass. “Noah was cute,” Annie says.

“Was he? Was he cute? ” Dede throws another elbow.

“Now, now, dearest, I only have eyes for you.”

Inside, they unpack their groceries. They’ve found a place in Montauk that sells lobster tails and oysters at nontourist prices, and Dede apparently looks old enough to buy champagne — the cheapest they had. Tonight is an anniversary of sorts, exactly six months from the day they met on campus.

Annie gets the food ready while whistling that Wizard of Oz song “If I Only Had a Brain.” Dede keeps punching her playfully in the arm, but it only emboldens Annie. As much as it gets under her skin, it’s one of the reasons Dede loves her.

Yes, she thinks, I do love her . Dede has no trouble opening her heart to Annie. She’s accepted her sexual orientation for years now. She came out in high school, and she grew up in Santa Monica, where they practically throw you a parade for doing so. Annie, though, had never been with a woman before meeting Dede. Of course, she knew, on some level, but growing up in rural Michigan, she didn’t acknowledge her sexual preference to her friends or her devout Catholic parents, or even to herself. You’d think, by 2007, people would have loosened up enough, but Dede knows as well as anyone that discrimination doesn’t evaporate overnight but slowly fades over time.

Dinner is great. The dining room is over-the-top ornate, full of all kinds of detail on the walls, little statuettes perched around the room, tall windows with ornamental trim, an enormous chandelier hovering over a big five-sided dark oak table that’s surrounded by high-backed chairs with leather cushions. It’s like Henry VIII meets Count Dracula.

On their jam box, they play some symphonic music that Annie, the violinist, chose; she plays maestro, conducting the music with her fork. And the lobster and oysters are delicious. The cheap champagne is like Pop Rocks in Dede’s mouth. It goes to her head quickly, enhancing her euphoria. Annie is it, she thinks. She is my one and only.

The window rattles and Dede turns to it. The wind, surely. But still, she walks over and cups her hand over the glass to block the interior reflection, looking out onto Ocean Drive.

“Is the Scarecrow still out there? I’d be more worried about him, if he only had a brain.”

“You’ve been waiting to say that, haven’t you?” Dede looks back and finds Annie sitting on the windowsill on the opposite side of the dining room. “What are you doing?”

Annie has her Swiss Army knife open, carving into the wood.

“Annie, you can’t do that! This place is, like, three hundred years old. And it’s not like you can just erase that.”

Dede walks over to get a look at what Annie is doing. As Dede suspected, she is carving their initials in jagged letters:

DP + AC

“I don’t want to erase it,” Annie says. “I want it to be here forever.”

Dede puts her arm around Annie and draws her close, breathing in her shampoo. “Forever?” she says tentatively. Her heart is pounding. This is one of those moments when she feels so vulnerable, her heart laid bare to be embraced or trampled.

“Forever.” Annie looks up at Dede. The champagne tastes even better to Dede the second time, on Annie’s tongue.

The girls staying at 7 Ocean Drive are now on the second floor of the mansion, the southwest bedroom. The purple-and-gold bedroom, with the canopy bed and the velvet. The master bedroom where, over two hundred years ago, Winston Dahlquist once slept.

They are naked, and they are doing very fun things to each other. Their young bodies are shapely and athletic and limber, fueled by lust and maybe love — who can say? — and helped mightily by the two bottles of champagne they’ve drunk. The alcohol has undoubtedly lowered their inhibitions, and also impaired their judgment a bit — which is probably why they’ve forgotten to pull the bedroom drapes.

Now, to be fair, the bedroom window looks south, toward the beach and ocean, with only one house in between, which is not nearly as tall. A reasonable person would thus believe that, even with the drapes open wide as they are, she would not be visible to anyone.