Night Night, Sleep Tight Read Free Page A

nearly twenty years ago. Maybe that real estate ad should include the chipper warning: Fixer-upper .
    Not that everyone fixed up Beverly Hills houses these days. Parcels of land had become so much more valuable than the houses on them, why bother? Buyers tore down and started over, erecting new houses that looked like they were worth the million or more you had to shell out to get an address with a 90210 zip.
    Case in point: Across the street from her father’s house, where there had once been a gracious, one-story Spanish colonial, there now sprawled a house worthy of a southern plantation. Two-story columns and Palladian windows flanked a magnificent pair of coffered front doors: Tara with vertical blinds, and badly out of scale for its third-of-an-acre lot.
    Several more properties on either side of the street had been similarly perverted, and another was in process. Her father’s house, once typical for the neighborhood, had turned into an anomaly.
    Deirdre popped the trunk and slammed the car door. She eased her arm through the crutch’s cuff and grasped the grip to which she’d duct-taped an extra layer of foam padding. She stumped to the back of the car and pulled a small duffel bag from the trunk. She’d packed light.
    As she crossed the lawn she felt the rubber tip of her crutch sink into the grass. It made a little popping sound as she pulled it out. The courtyard was a tad cooler, shaded by a leaning olive tree. The ground under it was awash in rotting olives, some of them squashed and bleeding red slime on the gray stepping-stones. Deirdre knew from experience they could be treacherous to her crutch, so she picked her way carefully around them.
    Many of the blossoms on the pair of camellia trees, one planted when Henry had been born and another about a year later for Deirdre, had turned brown and rotten, their season ended, though Deirdre’s tree still bore white camellias. Once smaller than she was, the tree was now about ten feet tall. It was probably the only thing she wanted to take when the house was sold. She hoped it could survive being dug up and transplanted in the backyard of her little bungalow in Imperial Beach.
    Deirdre tried the front door. It was locked, so she had to ring, which set off Henry’s dogs. She didn’t have a key to the house because Arthur kept forgetting to send her a set. That was his way, everything always and forever at his convenience.
    When still no one answered the door, Deirdre knocked again, then rang some more. The dogs were going bananas. None of it roused anyone. Now what?
    She dropped her duffel on the front step and walked back across the courtyard, trying not to slip on the olives or get the tip of her crutch stuck in the pillowy moss that grew between the stones. On the driveway the air was fifteen degrees hotter. A shovel was lying behind Henry’s car. Deirdre picked it up, leaned it against the two-car garage, and peered in through one of the little windows in the overhead door. Motorcycles, at least two of them, were lined up in one bay. Her father’s car was in the other. Which meant he had to be there, too. He was probably in his office up on the second floor of the garage.
    Deirdre tried the overhead doors. They were both locked. Then she tried the regular door that led to the stairway. It was locked, too. She knocked. Hollered. Whistled. Was he asleep? She ought to just go over and bang on Arthur’s bedroom window. It was nearly noon, for heaven’s sake.
    She was crossing the yard when she noticed the gate to the pool was open—wide enough for a pet or a child to easily slip through and fall in. Keeping that gate secured was one of the few things that her parents had agreed upon. She was about to go over and shut it when the dogs started up again. There they were, on the other side of the living room’s sliding doors to the patio, their claws scratching the glass.
    Deirdre went over to them. “Hi there, knuckleheads,” she said. Bear whined and