Thou Shalt Not(52)

“This is quite the house for entertaining. I guess if I had a house like this I might invite one or two people over.”

“I bet your idea of a party is having English professors over, smoking cigars and drinking brandy,” she said, playfully pushing my right shoulder.

She was sitting to my right, probably less than a foot away. I didn’t think she was sitting close enough to me, but I imagined if Marco suddenly showed up he might have a different take on it.

“I don’t know. Cigars can be hazardous to your health. We would probably smoke those ridiculous fake cigarettes they sell in the mall.”

“Who the hell uses those things?” She chuckled. “Douchebags, that’s who.”

A slight breeze began to pick up and it started to actually feel pretty cool outside. The weather rarely gave you any relief in September, but tonight had turned very pleasant. I wished I could stay there all night. Damn Marco.

I turned around and was taking in my surroundings, looking up at the backside of the house. The house looked even bigger from this side, dark windows peering down at me from every direction like many eyes on a spider.

“Are your kids okay in the house by themselves?” I asked. I wasn’t used to taking kids into account when I did things, but I was probably dumb to ask a mother like April if she was taking care of her kids or not.

She reached into the right pocket of her pajama pants and pulled out a slender walkie talkie looking device. I had no idea when she slipped it into her pocket, but there was no way it had been there earlier.

“They’re fine,” she said, increasing the volume so the nothingness coming from the radio became even louder. Then she turned it back down. “In a house like this, you need all kinds of contraptions to make sure the kids don’t wander off into some corner of the house they don’t belong. Their corner of the house has sensors that’ll let me know if they get up in the middle of the night and wander outside of where they are supposed to be.”

That sounded very high-tech, and very expensive.

She placed her left hand on my right forearm.

“I will give you a tour of the house sometime, not tonight though. There’s a movie theater and a billiard room. I swear sometimes I feel like I’m wandering through the Clue house.”

“Mrs. White in the billiard room with the lead pipe,” I chimed in.

“Lead pipe, huh? How very brutal. I think I would choose the gun. Much quicker and cleaner.”

“Cleaner? How do you figure? The rope would probably be the cleanest one,” I said, turning toward her. Her hand was still on my arm, her body warmth pouring through her touch.

“I meant it would be cleaner for me,” she said, laughing and leaning forward. It was like we were getting closer by the minute. “Killing someone with a rope would take time to set everything up. The knife and the wrench and the lead pipe would make you get close enough to the person where they could overpower you. Oh, and the candlestick too. And let’s face it, I could outrun them, but that’s probably about it. So, for someone like me, the gun would be the easiest.”

This was a strange conversation to take part in, but I loved it. She was a nerd, that much was obvious to me the day she sat in on my class and helped discuss To Kill a Mockingbird. She was also a thinker, and even with the Clue killings, she was showing herself to be calculated, someone who made decisions deliberately. She probably wasn’t all that impulsive.

This meant that the soup was probably a thought out decision, and saying yes to dinner, and inviting me back for the book. Hell, now that I started thinking about it, the fact that she “forgot” the book here at the house could very well have been thought out.

Or maybe I just overthink everything. That was entirely possible too.

The breeze was picking up and I could see the goose bumps on her left arm as her hand continued to rest on my arm. It felt natural. I wasn’t tense, and neither was she. We both seemed very relaxed and comfortable. But she was getting cold and I had nothing to cover her up with.

“Are you cold?” I finally asked. “Should we go back inside?”

She squeezed my arm.

“No, I’m fine unless you are cold. I come out here all the time to read once the kids go to bed.”

God, I’d be out here all the time at night if this were my house. My backyard is just grass and an orange tree with a view of a wooden fence.

“No, I am comfortable. I just saw the goose bumps on your arm when the breeze picked up.”

“You actually noticed something like that?” she asked, seeming almost startled.

“Well, yeah.”

“God, you are an observant man.”