The Night Sister Page 20

  She opened the next box. This turned out to be full of photos and papers from her grandfather’s days as a pilot in the army. There were lots of letters from his parents on the farm back at home; Amy skimmed through some of them and read bits aloud. They told about how much milk the cows were producing, what a good helper Clarence’s young cousin Fenton was turning out to be, the scrap-metal drives being held all over Vermont; they were peppered with gossip from town—Violet Stafford finally got a marriage proposal from Hank Ritter, Mr. Erickson had to close the local branch of the bank, little Richie Welks won the fishing derby last Saturday.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t get bored to death by these letters,” Amy complained, tossing them back into the box.

  “Nah,” Piper said. “I bet it was kind of comforting to get all that news from home. To see things back there were just as dull as ever. If I was up in an airplane getting shot at by the Germans, I’d want to know that back at home things were quiet and calm, and there were cows still waiting to be milked, and a plain girl waiting for a marriage proposal.”

  “I guess.” Amy shrugged.

  Margot dragged a metal file box out of the closet and popped open the clasp.

  “What have you got there?” Piper asked.

  Margot started flipping through the papers. “Looks like your mom’s stuff, Amy. Birth certificate, high-school diploma…Wait a sec, there’s something down at the bottom.” She pulled out a stack of letters in worn envelopes held together with disintegrating elastic bands.

  “Check it out,” Margot said, handing them to Amy. “It’s more letters to that movie-director guy from Sylvie!”

  Amy took them and thumbed through. “You’re right. They’re all addressed to Alfred Hitchcock, and they’ve got stamps, but it looks like they were never mailed. See, no postmark.”

  “Weird,” Piper said. “Why go to the trouble of writing the letters, putting stamps on them and everything, if you’re not going to send them? And what’s your mom doing with them?”

  “Beats me,” Amy said, tossing the letters back into the metal box. “But they’re not helping us with the plans for the motel.”

  She rummaged around in the closet again and pulled out a brown leather folder with a clasp. “Bingo!” she cried, as she opened it up and peered inside. “Sketches for the motel!”

  Piper moved close against Amy and looked at the papers Amy was eagerly pulling out of the folder. Clarence’s careful renderings of the motel he imagined were drawn in pencil on yellowing paper. There were structural drawings that showed the framing with measurements and elevation drawings from every angle.

  The girls studied them, searching for some sign of a secret passageway or hidden door, perhaps a room between rooms.

  “There’s not a damn thing in either building,” Amy said at last. “There are the twenty-eight motel rooms, the office, the laundry area and boiler room underneath the office. That’s it.” She blew out an exasperated breath, making her pink bangs puff out.

  A framed drawing of the tower was propped against the side of the desk. Piper picked it up. Also done in pencil, it showed the outside of the tower: the door, the windows, and the battlements. She looked at it carefully, noticing the attention to detail—each rock a different shape and shade, the shadows in the open doorway seeming almost alive somehow. Amy’s grandfather was a talented artist.

  Then she noticed it: there, in those shadows, was something else. Faint writing; ghostly unfamiliar letters she could barely make out. She pulled the picture closer and squinted down at it, finally understanding what the problem was.

  The writing was backward.

  “There’s something written on the other side of this drawing,” she said. Amy snatched it from her, immediately flipped the frame over, and went to work bending the wire brads that held the cardboard back on. Soon she’d pried one edge out; then the whole piece of thin black cardboard was in her hand, the drawing on top of it. She carefully pulled them apart and turned the tower drawing over.

  On the other side was the original sketch for the tower. There were dimensions for its diameter and height, and the plan for the floor joists and rafters. In the right-hand margin were calculations for the amount of cement, lime, and sand that would be needed.

  The drawing showed the three floors the girls had all explored: ground floor, second floor, and the rooftop surrounded by the ring of battlements.

  But there was something else: a fourth floor, a basement room that looked as if it was accessed by a trapdoor in the floor above. This room was labeled with Amy grandfather’s careful lettering: “oubliette.”

  “What’s ‘oubliette’ mean?” Amy asked.

  Piper jumped up, went to the desk, and got the heavy dictionary she’d seen there when they first entered the office. She thumbed through the alphabet until she got to “O.” Otter. Ottoman. Ouabain (Piper’s eye caught on this a moment—a poison).

  “Here it is,” Piper said. With her finger on the word, she blinked down at the definition; her voice shook as she read it out loud: “ ‘A concealed dungeon with a trapdoor in the ceiling as the only means of entrance or exit.’ ”

  “Holy crap!” Amy exclaimed. “A dungeon? There’s a hidden dungeon at the bottom of the tower?”

  “We don’t know that,” Piper said. “I mean, it’s here in the drawing, but—”

  “Come on,” Amy said, already on her way out of the office, “we’ve gotta go find it!”

  2013

  Piper

  Piper dumped the flowered duffel bag in her car, her hands trembling.

  She knew what she’d typed.

  How, then, did the page get filled with 29 rooms over and over and over?

  She started the engine, yanked the shifter into reverse, and hit the gas; gravel spat out from under her tires as she backed up, spun around, and headed down the steep driveway.

  Was she going crazy? Had she typed the words herself in a sort of fugue state?

  She remembered Amy’s obsession with hypnosis—with that damn book she’d found that had belonged to Sylvie. Amy would say that it was possible to do just about anything in a trance state. Even to receive messages from the dead.

  “Damn it,” Piper said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. Just then she was passing the tower, and she glanced inside, through the doorway blocked by two boards forming an X. Danger, warned the dripping red spray paint above.

  A shadow moved across the floor inside.

  There was someone in there!

  Piper slammed on the brakes, heart hammering, palms sweating.

  Maybe there had been someone in the house with her after all. Someone who had replaced her paper with another. (But how? When?) Improbable as it seemed, Piper clung to this new idea. It felt far better than believing that either a ghost or Piper herself had typed the message.

  She jumped out of the car, went around to the rear, opened the hatchback, pulled up the carpeted panel, and grabbed a tire iron. She wasn’t going in there unarmed.

  She stood, looking at the great crooked tower before her, the metal tire iron clenched in her hands. This was a stupid idea and she knew it. She should get right back in the car, lock the door, and call Jason at the police station to tell him someone was sneaking around at the motel. But that would mean having to admit to him that she was at the motel. He’d probably ask her to pack her bags and get on the next plane back to Los Angeles. And what if whoever was in there got away—sneaked out through some opening in the wall of the disintegrating tower—while she hid quaking in the car, awaiting rescue like a fairy-tale damsel?

  She stepped toward the doorway, eyes searching inside the decrepit tower for any sign of movement. Outside, the cement was crumbling, and the whole structure leaned a good ten degrees toward the house.

  It looked like an accident waiting to happen.

  She peeked in over the X of boards nailed over the doorway. The floorboards looked rotten, and the ladder that led up to the second floor was mi
ssing several rungs. Above her, the word Danger seemed to glow like the once-upon-a-time motel sign must have.

  Tower Motel, 28 Rooms, Pool, Vacancy.

  She took a breath. Heard Amy’s voice in her ear:

  “Don’t be a chickenshit.”

  1989

  Piper

  “I am not a chickenshit,” Piper said, her whole body rigid as she stood before the open door to the tower.

  “So—let’s go,” Amy said, sweeping her arm grandly toward the entrance in a you-first gesture. “We’ve got a dungeon to find.”

  Piper’s shin throbbed out a warning, a Morse-code message of pain, as she remembered falling through the floorboards. She didn’t want to go in there. Didn’t want to go prying at the edges of floorboards, shining the flashlight Amy had taken from the kitchen drawer into the shadows, like some wannabe teen sleuth. If there really was a dungeon down there (Surely there couldn’t be? Why on earth would Amy’s grandfather have built a dungeon?), she sure as hell didn’t want to see it. She didn’t think Margot should, either.

  “Maybe you should go home,” she said to her sister, who was marching along with purpose, looking more like a little adult than a ten-year-old kid walking into a death trap.

  “I’m not scared.”

  Maybe you should be. Maybe we should all be.

  “Yeah, come on, Piper,” Amy groaned. “Take a hint from Little Sis here. Let’s go.”

  Piper followed Amy into the tower. She walked slowly, testing the boards beneath her feet with each careful step. They felt springy, flimsy. How had she not noticed this the other day?

  Margot stood in the doorway, eyes wide as she watched.

  Amy was walking without care, stomping down on the boards, trying to pry up the edges of them with her fingernails. “I don’t see anything that looks like a trapdoor,” she said.

  “Remember upstairs,” Margot said. “There were two layers. The actual floor, and then the boards below for the ceiling.”

  “Right,” Amy said. “So maybe the door isn’t right here. Maybe it’s just a couple of loose boards. Come on, Piper. You start at that side; I’ll start over here. Check every board to see if it’s loose. We’ll keep going until we meet in the middle.”

  Piper nodded. “Margot, you stay outside and watch. If we fall through or anything happens, you run up to the house and get Amy’s grandma, okay?”

  Amy laughed. “If you go get Gram, you better make sure we’re dead first. Because we totally will be if she finds out we’ve been in the tower.”

  “Just be careful,” Margot said, hovering in the doorway.

  Piper thought it was way too late for that.

  She got down on her hands and knees on the wide knotty-pine planks that made up the floor. She imagined Clarence Slater, a young man then, having the boards milled, laying them down himself, pounding nails, building his wife her own Tower of London.

  A tower with a secret dungeon.

  “Doesn’t the real Tower of London—you know, in England?—have a dungeon and a torture chamber and stuff?” Piper asked.

  “I think so. I dunno,” Amy said, thumping and prying at the floorboards.

  “So maybe he just added one to this tower to make it more like a real replica, you know? To be authentic.”

  “Maybe,” Amy said. “But why keep it a secret, then?”

  Piper had begun at the door, following that board to its end on either side, checking the boards that butted up against it. Row by row, she studied the floorboards, working her fingers into cracks, trying to pry them up, but the old rusty nails held fast. Across the tower, Amy did the same on her side, scuttling crouched-over, pinching at the boards like a crab in flip-flops.

  They moved closer to the middle. Amy groaned in frustration. “It’s got to be here,” she said.

  “Maybe there is no trapdoor, no oboe—whatever,” Piper said, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “You guys sure about this?” Margot called from the doorway.

  Amy was staring at the ladder in the center of the room. “Of course!” she said, leaping to her feet so hard and fast that Piper could see the boards sinking beneath her.

  “Watch it!” Piper warned.

  You’ll fall straight through the floor and end up in hell.

  “The ladder,” Amy said. “It’s not attached, right? It’s just kind of held in place by little stoppers at the bottom.”

  Amy grabbed both sides of the ladder and lifted; the whole thing moved. It wasn’t all that sturdy: only a couple of two-by-fours making up the side rails, with short pieces of the same lumber cut for rungs. It rested on the floorboards, held in place by two sets of cleats made from strips of wood. Amy heaved the ladder up and clear of the cleats.

  “I could use a little help here,” she grunted. Piper stepped forward and grabbed the right side. Together, they lifted it up, then angled it sideways, brought it down awkwardly, and laid it on the floor.

  “Be careful,” Margot warned.

  Amy crouched down, fit her fingers along the edge of the board the ladder had been resting on, and gave it a yank; it wiggled like a loose tooth.

  “Come give me a hand,” she called to Piper. They both began to pry up the board that had been under the ladder, and soon discovered that it was attached to the board just behind it—these came up together in one solid piece.

  “They’re nailed together,” Amy said, as they flipped the piece over, setting it to the side. On the underside, four strips of wood were nailed crosswise, holding the boards together. “They acted like one big piece. And with the ladder on top, none of it moved. No one would know they were even loose unless you got the ladder out of the way!”

  Piper was only half listening. She was looking down into the hole left in the floor. There, between two heavy floor joists, was a trapdoor on rusted metal hinges. A large, sliding metal bolt was latched on the other side.

  “Hand me the flashlight,” Amy said, scooting forward on her belly so that she could reach the latch.

  “Wait!” Piper said suddenly. It was clear that the heavy metal bolt had one purpose: to keep whatever was down there from getting out. “Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe we should get your grandma or something?”

  “Just get me the damn light, will you?” Amy said, then wiggled the bolt. It slid open with the sickly scraping sound of metal against metal. Piper brought the red flashlight to Amy just as Amy heaved the trapdoor open.

  The first thing that hit them was the smell: cavelike, damp, and dusty. It was the smell of lost things, of decay. Amy shone the flashlight down into the hole. The batteries were low, and it cast a dull, orangey glow.

  “What’s down there?” Margot called from her post outside. She really was a good sister, Piper thought with a pang of something like regret.

  “Hard to tell,” Amy said. “I think there’s furniture. A bed, maybe?” She leapt up, shaking the floorboards again. “Let’s get the ladder. We can use it to go down.”

  “Amy,” Piper said, “I really don’t think—”

  “You don’t have to come. You can stay up here and hold the ladder.” Amy’s words were taunting. Chickenshit, they seemed to say.

  “Of course I’ll come,” Piper said, thinking, I go where you go.

  Together, they got the ladder and carefully lowered it down into the darkness, leaning it against one side of the trapdoor.

  “I’ll go first,” Amy said. “Hold the ladder.”

  She climbed carefully down, testing each step before she put her weight on it.

  “Crap,” she called once she was down all the way. “I forgot the light. It’s pitch-black down here. Bring it, okay?”

  “Okay.” Piper tucked the plastic flashlight into the waistband of her shorts and positioned herself to start climbing.

  “Don’t go,” Margot said from the doorway.

  “It’ll be okay,” Piper said, meeting her sister’s eyes. “I’ll be careful. And I’ll be right back. I promise.”

  No way was she stay
ing down there long.

  Amy held the ladder for her, and, slowly, she made her way down, shin throbbing with each step, until her feet touched the hard cement floor. Amy put her hand on Piper’s back, and Piper jumped.

  “Got the light?”

  “Yeah.” Piper handed it over, without turning it on. Amy would do the honors.

  “Ready?” Amy asked.

  Piper swallowed.

  “Sure.”

  The light came on suddenly, illuminating the room with a dim orange-white glow.

  “Oh my God,” Amy stammered.

  Piper couldn’t speak. Couldn’t make a sound, even though she felt a silent scream building somewhere deep inside her, coming out through her open mouth in just a sad, moist puff of air.

  “What is this place?” Amy’s voice was squeaky and strange, totally unfamiliar to Piper. Then she realized: it was the first time Piper had ever seen Amy truly frightened.

  “Everything okay?” Margot called from up above. “What’s down there?”

  Piper looked around, scanning the small circular room from right to left. Just to her right was a pair of heavy chains, their ends embedded in the cement wall. Each chain ended in a rusty shackle.

  And Amy was right—there was a bed. It was wooden and covered with leather straps and buckles. A mildewed blanket was balled up at the head of the bed.

  It’s a torture chamber. Piper wanted to say the words out loud, but couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think clearly. Your grandfather built a torture chamber.

  She thought of the serious-faced man she’d seen in all the photos—the army pilot with the Purple Heart medal, father and husband, a man of vision, who had built a motel with a tower.

  But the tower had a secret room in the basement.

  A secret room for doing terrible things.

  Had he taken motel guests down here—salesmen far from home, who would never see home again? She knew there were men who did stuff like that, people like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy. But they were just bogeymen she’d heard about on television, not much more real to her than werewolves or zombies.