House in the Water: Lazy Point Stilt Home Falls
By Dan Rattiner
For the last 20 years, a private home built on the bay beach at Napeague Harbor in Amagansett has been entirely surrounded by sea water, a victim of global warming that has reconfigured the shoreline at that place. It has been something of a tourist attraction. People go out to see it and photograph it there, sitting as it does high up atop its tall wooden stilts which, many, many years earlier, were driven into concrete footings on the sand.
One could see that it was abandoned now, a shadow of its former self, with no indication of what might become of it.
At 2 a.m. on Jan. 24, however, with the harbor totally iced over and a vicious snowstorm assaulting the community, the house began to give way. The wind whistled. The stilts cracked and in the dark the house tipped over sideways onto the ice where one end had gone down into the ice and into the frozen water below. In the morning, neighbors awoke to see it like that, half in and half out with water surging inside into the floorboards. Soon, the temperature will rise above freezing and gravity will push it completely under. From being abandoned it will become gone, just a broken memory of wet wood that washes out into the sea.
And yet, in this interim, crippled condition, the house has a story to tell. Frogmen working in wetsuits and masks for Suffolk County’s Emergency Service have swum out to it. Things are being found. Someone may have died there in the storm. It might have been a suicide. Or even a murder. It may be that two people were out there during that treacherous night. Investigations have begun.
For one thing, morning revealed a 1968 Harley-Davidson FLH Electra Glide Shovelhead Motorcycle parked in the sand opposite where it might have been possible to walk on the ice out to the house. No one has come by to claim it. It remains there, now wrapped in frayed crime scene yellow tape.
Inside an interior wall of the compromised house now, the frogmen found a diary containing handwritten entries. Hundreds of them, all dated going back 11 years. The most recent, written in black ink in longhand, was entered, incredibly, last Saturday. And there is, for the first and only time, an entry made in a feminine hand. It says simply, “I love you.” The other entry has the date and time — all the entries bear the date and time — and consists of the opening sentence of the book Ulysses, written by celebrated Irish author James Joyce in 1922.
Also found inside the house, where one of the pilings had speared through the floor into the living room, is a single man’s boot, caught on a splinter of the piling by its shoelace.
Finally, and most importantly, it seems, hidden between two beams in the living room of this supposedly abandoned home was a zippered waterproof satchel that contained packets of one thousand dollar bills. A local man in town government who wishes to remain anonymous says there were four packets of them, each with 10 bills in it.
All this was brought to the shore by the frogmen. Different investigative bodies have looked at these things. And now it’s all staked out as a crime scene. Eight individual groups are investigating this situation.
One is a team of detectives from the Suffolk County Police Department. Alan Brody, the chief, had this to say: “This man arrived on his Harley with a woman sitting on the back and walked with her out onto the ice and into the house. We think they had an encounter there, and then fell through the hole in the ice. We’re thinking murder, or a double suicide. The investigation continues.”
Chief Richard Haliburton of the East Hampton Village Police added: “We’ve interviewed neighbors. Some say they’ve heard the rumble of the motorcycle in the middle of the night. But only on Saturdays. Not once, but twice, usually an hour apart. We think this was a money-laundering scheme gone wrong.”
That does not jibe with a theory being pursued by Dr. Alouwiches Gonzales, the head of the English Department at Stony Brook University.
“Why the James Joyce?” he told this reporter. “We are circulating a memo to alert all faculty members in our English Literature Department. I believe we will come up with something.”
Following another lead, we spoke to Captain Joseph Berke of the Woods Hole NOAA Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they tag sharks and follow them around the world.
“It’s Angus, one of our great whites,” Berke said. “There was some kind of underwater tussle that Saturday. He was in the area. And when he eats humans, he always leaves behind a single shoe. It’s his trademark.”
Wendy Wallaby, the president of Save Our Hamptons Wetlands, has also opened an investigation.
“The Harley should not have been parked on this beach,” she said. “It is an old motorcycle, and it leaks oil. We’ve confiscated the Harley’s license plate. But it’s registered to someone who died in 1971. We also tore out the yellow crime tape put up around the Harley. It’s been going to tatters. The seagulls are eating it. We don’t know why. But some have been seen to get very sick.”
We spoke to Fred Franklin, chairman of the Amagansett Tourist Bureau.
“This was a very important tourist attraction,” he said. “We are raising funds to rebuild this house where it was once this old one washes away. We can recreate it from photographs.”
Finally, we contacted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and spoke to an individual who would not identify himself.
“It’s a Venezuelan female we’ve been tracking,” they said. “We followed her sitting on the back seat of her lover’s Harley. He’s an Englishman with a green card. Two of our agents knocked on their splintered door. And when nobody answered it was broken down and we arrested our subject. But there was a struggle and, tragically, we lost one of our officers down a hole. The zippered case has been forwarded to President Donald Trump. That’s all I can tell you.”
We await further developments.
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