Night Night, Sleep Tight Read Online Free PDF Page A

and jotted a few notes. “The victim’s name?”
    “Arthur Unger,” Henry said. “He’s our dad.”
    “He lives here?”
    “Yes. I live here, too. Deirdre lives in San Diego.” Henry gave the officer his name and phone number. Deirdre gave him hers.
    “Can you tell me what happened?”
    “We don’t know what happened,” Henry said. “My sister got here and found him floating in the water.”
    Not really floating, Deirdre thought. Arthur had been barely suspended above the bottom of the pool, beneath the surface, like a fly in amber. She choked at the memory.
    “How long ago?” the officer asked.
    “Not long,” Henry said. “Fifteen, twenty minutes maybe.”
    “I called it in right away,” Deirdre said.
    The officer drew a rectangle on his pad, and around it a larger dashed rectangle with a gap that Deirdre realized was meant to represent the chain-link fence. “Can you show me approximately where your father was when you found him?”
    Her hand trembling, Deirdre pointed to a spot near the edge in the deep end.
    The officer drew an X. “Then what?”
    “My sister called 911.”
    “You’re both wet.” The officer squinted at Henry, then looked over at Deirdre. “I’m guessing one of you went in after him.”
    “Of course,” Henry said, looking more annoyed than chastened. “I did. I thought . . . Actually, I didn’t think. I mean, it was just a gut reaction. He might have had a heart attack or a stroke. Or fallen in and hit his head, for all we knew.”
    “I see.” The officer gave Henry a long look. Deirdre had the distinct impression that he didn’t think Arthur had just fallen in. “Thank you. That’s all for now. I need you both to wait in the house until we finish up our investigation out here.”
    Henry hesitated a moment, then turned and started for the house.
    “And I need you to leave that where you found it,” the officer said, indicating the tumbler that Henry had picked up from the table.
    D eirdre sat at the dining table, watching the activity through the sliding glass doors. Investigators had constructed a makeshift tent over Arthur’s body. To protect him from what, she wondered. A photographer took pictures—not just of Arthur but of the entire pool area.
    “You want anything?” Henry called out from the kitchen.
    “No thanks.”
    He came out with an open bag of potato chips and set it on the table in front of her. “I found this on the floor in the front hall,” he said, snapping a business card down on the table. “You know anything about it?”
    Deirdre picked up the card. It had Joelen’s name on it. “She was here this morning.”
    “I didn’t know you two kept in touch.”
    “We didn’t. Did you?”
    “Why would I?” Henry said. “I barely remember her.”
    Deirdre let it go, but she knew that Henry remembered Joelen Nichol. Remembered her well, and not just because she’d made headlines. Henry, who’d never wanted Deirdre within fifty feet of him and his friends, used to hang out with her whenever Joelen came over. Once she’d discovered the pair of them making out on the musty sleeper sofa that her parents stored in the garage.
    Sometimes, on nights when she was sleeping over at Joelen’s, Henry would show up late and toss pebbles at Joelen’s bedroom window so she’d come down. One night Henry’s pebble missed Joelen’s window and hit Bunny’s instead. Bunny’s boyfriend, Antonio Acevedo—the man everyone called “Tito”—had come whaling out of the house, armed with a baseball bat. Lucky Henry had ridden over on his bicycle and could get the hell out of there before he got hurt.
    “She wasn’t here to see me,” Deirdre said. “She was here to talk to Dad.”
    Henry’s look darkened. “Why’d she want to talk to Dad?”
    Deirdre pointed to the setting sun logo and SUNSET REALTY above Joelen’s name. “Just guessing. She’s a Realtor. He’s selling a house.”
    “I thought he already talked to a Realtor.”
    Deirdre