The Night Sister Page 21

  Amy gasped sharply, breathed, “Oh, no. Oh, shit.”

  Piper wanted to close her eyes and feel her way back to the ladder, up the rungs, and into daylight, to forget all about what she had seen. She certainly did not want to see whatever it was Amy was looking at.

  “Look,” Amy said, putting her hand on Piper’s arm, tugging, pointing. Piper reluctantly turned and saw what the flashlight’s dim beam was illuminating.

  On the opposite side of the room lay what looked like a pile of clothes. Then she saw the yellow-white gleam of a skull, dried strands of wispy hair, empty black eye sockets.

  “It’s Sylvie,” Amy said, voice shaking. “We’ve found her.”

  2013

  Piper

  Piper thought of that hideous skeleton face as she stepped into the tower: its jaws yawning open beneath the two empty eye sockets that had looked up at them and seemed to say, You’ve found me at last.

  Those eyes had stayed with her all these years, had followed her everywhere she’d gone. They were a part of her, something she would never forget.

  After they saw that skeleton, with its awful death-grin, nothing had ever been the same again. It was the last afternoon the girls would ever spend with Amy, the last time they’d ever go to the tower or even the motel. Everything changed when they climbed down that ladder into the twenty-ninth room.

  And here she was again.

  What might she find this time? Another body? Not likely, she thought grimly. The police had found all the bodies up in the house.

  She thought of the blood-soaked carpet in the upstairs hall. What if whatever had gone up to the house had started here, at the tower?

  What if it was here still?

  She stood as still as she possibly could, listening, the tire iron heavy in her hands. Slowly, she moved forward, testing the floor with each step for places that were rotted through. She knew that if she stayed right on top of the joists she’d be okay. Like a tightrope walker, she followed the line of nails that marked a sturdy joist underneath (at least, she hoped it was sturdy).

  The ladder leading to the second floor was gone now. She looked up at the inaccessible opening in the ceiling. Daylight from the upstairs windows was streaming down through it, and Piper suddenly remembered the feel of Amy’s lips on hers…and the pain that followed her long-ago fall through the floorboards.

  She still bore a scar, a jagged white line that ran along her left shin. The wound had become terribly infected, turning her whole lower leg a hot, red, swollen mess. In the end, when she’d finally shown her mother, she’d been rushed to the ER, where she was admitted and put on IV antibiotics. By the time she was out of the hospital, school had begun, and her mother had forbidden her two daughters to go to the motel ever again—it was “a death trap.”

  If only she knew how accurate her description had been.

  Hadn’t Grandma Charlotte used the exact same words to warn them away from the tower? If only they’d listened.

  Of course, it turned out to be easy to avoid the motel: Amy didn’t want anything to do with Margot and Piper. While Piper was in the hospital, Margot said she had sneaked in a few phone calls to Amy, but Grandma Charlotte made vague excuses, claimed Amy couldn’t come to the phone but she’d be happy to take a message.

  Now here Piper was again, back in the tower, one word loud and clear in her head: Run.

  Chickenshit.

  “Am not.”

  There on the floor, where the base of the ladder once stood, was the wide board bearing the familiar cleats that marked the entrance to the secret dungeon below. She took in a breath, got down on her knees, and began to pry up the board with her fingers. It moved easily, and was still attached to the adjacent floorboard—although the whole unit felt lighter than she remembered. She easily lifted the boards up and out of the way, revealing the trapdoor, its rusted hinges, and the heavy bolt that was meant to keep all of its secrets locked up tight.

  She put her hand on the deadbolt, hesitating. The metal was cold, covered in a thin crust of orange-brown rust.

  Before she could think any more about it, she slid it open. Keeping her right hand on the heavy tire iron, she eased open the trapdoor with her left.

  The smell of damp cement came wafting up—no stink of rot or ruin, only the smell of a wet basement. And there, just below the opening, was a folding metal stepladder. That wasn’t there in 1989. Someone had been in the basement since.

  “Okay,” she said out loud, finding comfort in hearing her own voice. “What now?”

  Go down, Amy whispered in her ear. Or are you…?

  “I am not chickenshit,” Piper said aloud, and, to prove her point, she swung her legs over, down into the opening, feet finding the rungs of the metal ladder, while she kept the tire iron clenched in her right hand. Slowly, she descended—all alone, not even a flashlight to guide her.

  At last, her feet found the floor.

  And something touched her.

  An insectlike buzzing, the rapid flutter of wings against her backside.

  And there was music.

  Madonna.

  Her phone! Only her phone vibrating in the back pocket of her jeans. She grabbed it and answered.

  “Can you pick up some saline nasal drops?” Margot asked.

  “What?” Piper said, trying to steady her breathing.

  “And a bulb syringe. I don’t think I put them on your list. It’s in case the baby catches a cold or is too stuffed up to nurse. Are you finding everything okay?”

  “Yeah, fine,” Piper lied, swallowing hard. She was sure that she felt eyes on her—that she wasn’t alone down here. “No problem.” She peered anxiously into the darkness, tried to make out shapes, any sign of movement. The room didn’t feel long abandoned to her. The air smelled damp and musty, but there was something else mixed in with it—something sweet and fruity that reminded her of the smell of Amy’s lip gloss.

  Piper’s stomach tightened, as did her grip on the tire iron.

  Was the skeleton still there, lying where they’d left it?

  Amy had ordered Margot and Piper, made them promise, never to discuss what they’d found in the oubliette that day in 1989. “If you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll kill you,” Amy said. “I swear it.” And, what with Piper’s hospitalization, her mother’s banning the girls from the motel, Amy’s telling them to stay away, and the start of school, it was easy to keep the secret, even convince herself that maybe it had never happened. Through the years since, Piper would sometimes catch Margot looking at her funny, and she imagined her sister was thinking about Amy and the motel and everything that had happened. A few times, usually when she was drunk, Piper herself almost brought it up, but could never quite find the words. The sisters kept their promise.

  “Piper?” Margot said now, voice suspicious. “You are at the drugstore, right?”

  Damn. Margot knew her too well. But if Margot even suspected Piper had gone into the tower, she’d freak, probably call Jason and the whole London Police Department to come escort her out safely.

  “Of course,” Piper said, smiling, concentrating as hard as she could on sounding like she was actually in a brightly lit drugstore, perusing the aisles for new baby paraphernalia. She closed her eyes and imagined she was there, visualized herself standing in front of a display of thermometers. “Working my way down the list. It’s taking a while, though—I didn’t realize I’d have so many decisions to make. Do you have any idea how many kinds of rectal thermometers there are?”

  “Piper—”

  “Gotta go. It’s crazy in here, and I can hardly hear you. I’ll get the nose drops—can’t have Junior being all stuffed up. See you soon.” She hung up before Margot could say anything more.

  Then she turned her phone around so that she could use the faint firefly glow it gave off to see what she could. She held it out and waved it around, scanning the dark landscape of the twenty-ninth room.

  To her great relief, there was no skeleton cur
led against the wall.

  The bed with the straps was still there. On top of it, Piper made out a sleeping bag and a flashlight. She moved toward it slowly and reached for the flashlight. When she flicked it on, she expected that the batteries would be dead. The sudden brightness hurt her eyes.

  So the light hadn’t been sitting down here for twenty-odd years. She did a quick sweep of the room to reassure herself that she was alone. The heavy chains still hung from the wall. But there at the ends, where the shackles were, she saw that each cuff had a new addition: a small brass padlock that was run through the ends. Piper moved closer for a better look. The brass shone in the light, not even slightly tarnished.

  Someone had added these locks recently.

  She pointed the beam of the flashlight back at the bed and saw that the sleeping bag looked nearly new, the quilted nylon covering not the least bit frayed or dingy. But it had a strange lump in the center, like a boa constrictor that had just had a large meal. She patted down the outside and felt something definitely hidden inside. Slowly, she unzipped the bag; the pull-tab moving down the metal teeth was incredibly loud in the silent room.

  Once the bag was unzipped, she shone her light on the objects that had been tucked away inside.

  Piper recognized the old book on top right away: Mastering the Art and Science of Hypnotism. And she knew without looking that there would be an inscription on the first page, “To Sylvie, the world’s greatest chicken hypnotist, with love from Uncle Fenton, Christmas 1954.” And in the margins she’d find Sylvie’s careful notes recording her experiments with hypnosis.

  Below the hypnosis manual was the battered old leather-bound scrapbook they’d found in Sylvie’s suitcase, full of pictures of movie stars from the fifties and sixties. Sylvie’s scrapbook, her book of dreams and wishes. Beside all this were three packs of Juicy Fruit gum, one of them opened, the wrappers crumpled up and tossed in the sleeping bag. This was the source of the sweet, fruity smell that seemed to fill the room.

  And tucked under everything, a typed note, neatly folded.

  Dear Sylvie,

  I’m sorry, so sorry for everything that has happened.

  Some things, as you know, simply cannot be helped.

  Please forgive me.

  Your sister forever and ever, no matter what,

  Rose

  Piper pulled out her cell phone and called Margot.

  “Still having trouble with the thermometers?” Margot asked.

  “This baby-preparation business is harder than I thought it would be,” Piper said in what she hoped was a light, rueful tone. “Hey, listen. I was thinking I’d like to pay Amy’s mom a visit. Do you know what nursing home she’s in?”

  “Sure,” Margot said. “She’s up at Foxcroft. But according to Jason, poor Rose is in rough shape. Hardly knows her own name.”

  “I think I’ll give it a try anyway. Maybe I’ll head over—if there’s time, before I see Lou; if not, I’ll stop by after,” Piper said. “Who knows what she might be able to tell me?”

  Like who (or what) was being kept down in this room.

  1989

  Piper

  “Grandma,” Amy panted. “Gram! You have to come quick! Call the police. We found her! We know what happened!”

  They came tearing into the kitchen, Amy in the lead. Piper’s hands were shaking; her legs felt rubbery and strange, and her cut throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Amy’s grandma was standing at the stove, browning a pan of ground beef and onions. She kept cooking, as though she had not heard Amy.

  “Gram, you need to come with us right now,” Amy said, voice desperate, pulling on her grandmother’s sleeve like an impatient little girl.

  “What are you on about?” Grandma Charlotte asked, turning from the sizzling meat to look at the girls. “Come where?” She looked more tired than ever, dark circles resting like bruises under her eyes. She hadn’t put any powder on today, and Piper could see blue veins running under her skin, like lines on a map. Rivers and highways.

  “To the tower. Please. You’ll see.”

  “You aren’t supposed to play in the tower,” Grandma Charlotte said calmly. “It’s dangerous there.”

  It sure turned out to be dangerous for Sylvie, Piper thought.

  “Gram, I’m telling you—we found Sylvie! She never left. We found her suitcase! It’s been hidden in the floor of the tower all this time. And there’s a secret room in the basement of the tower—like a dungeon! And there’s a skeleton down there. It’s got to be Sylvie.”

  Amy’s grandma looked at Amy, then the other two girls. Her eyes were pale and watery. She turned the burner off on the stove. The cooked-meat smell was nauseating.

  “I think it’s time for your friends to go home,” she said.

  “No,” Amy said. “They were there when we found her suitcase, and they’ve been searching for clues right along with me. I wouldn’t have found Sylvie without them, and they want to know what happened as bad as I do. And the police will want to talk to them, right? To all of us.”

  Grandma Charlotte shook her head. “No police. And your friends need to leave now.”

  “But, Gram, we—”

  “No police.”

  “Okay,” Amy said. “You let Margot and Piper stay and we won’t call the police.”

  Grandma Charlotte gave a reluctant nod. “Come sit,” she said, voice firm. They followed her to the kitchen table. She picked up her pack of Virginia Slims and adjusted the big glass ashtray.

  “Come sit”? She was being awfully calm for someone who’d just been told there was a dungeon on the property holding the skeleton of her long-lost daughter.

  She knows, Piper thought. Somehow, she knew about the room and what was down there. What if she was part of it? Some sick husband-and-wife torture team. That’s why she didn’t want them to call the police. Piper should grab Amy and Margot, get them out of the house, run to their safe condo, tell her mother everything. She knew this, and yet she stayed.

  Grandma Charlotte lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke up in the air. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I hoped I’d never have to talk about again, but now I see there’s no choice.”

  “Oh my God,” Amy said, leaning back in her chair so that it tottered precariously on its two back legs. “Don’t tell me you knew? You knew Sylvie was down there, dead, this whole time? Jesus, Gram, she was your daughter!”

  Amy’s grandma shook her head. “That’s not Sylvie down there.”

  “But it’s got to be; we found her suitcase, we—”

  “It’s not her.”

  “Well, who is it, then?”

  Grandma Charlotte drew in a long breath, then let it out. “It’s Fenton. The girls’ uncle.”

  “Fenton? No.” Amy shook her head. “It can’t be Fenton. It’s Sylvie. I know it is. I saw her ghost. She’s been leaving me notes in the typewriter.”

  That gave Grandma Charlotte pause. “You saw Sylvie’s ghost?”

  Amy nodded. “She comes to me in my room when I’m sleeping. She leaves me messages on the typewriter. She’s the one who told us how to find the twenty-ninth room.”

  Grandma Charlotte looked down at the cigarette in her hand. She shook her head, but said nothing.

  “Grandma, how do you know that skeleton is Fenton?”

  Grandma Charlotte looked up to stare at Amy through the haze of cigarette smoke. “Because I’m the one who put him down there.”

  “You killed Fenton?” Amy asked.

  “No. I just hid the body.”

  “So what happened to him?” Amy demanded.

  Grandma Charlotte looked at Piper and Margot.

  “Tell me,” Amy insisted.

  “If we go down this path, if I tell you the truth…” Grandma Charlotte’s voice trailed off.

  Amy pushed her chair back from the table, the metal legs scraping the linoleum floor. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I swear I’ll call the police and show them the suitcase and the b
ody in the tower. I’ll let them figure it out.”

  “You can’t do that, dear,” Grandma Charlotte said kindly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, if anyone were to find out what really happened to Fenton, no one would ever leave our family alone.”

  “Jesus, Gram! What happened to him? Tell me now or I’ll call the cops. I swear it.”

  Grandma Charlotte sat up straight, looked right at Amy. “Our family is cursed,” she said at last.

  “Cursed how?” Amy said.

  Amy’s grandmother crushed out her cigarette. “Wait here,” she said, heading out of the kitchen.

  “So, if that skeleton is Fenton, what happened to Sylvie?” Piper whispered, once Grandma Charlotte was out of earshot.

  “And what does she mean, ‘cursed’?” Margot asked, voice trembling.

  Amy said nothing, just watched as her grandmother came back into the kitchen holding a large glass jar. She carried it carefully and placed it gently on the table.

  Inside was a large, pale-green moth with dull, tattered wings, long dead.

  “What is this supposed to be?” Amy asked.

  “It’s a luna moth,” Margot said, leaning closer to peer at the creature, which lay on a bed of dried-up leaves. One of its tissue-paper-thin wings had broken off and lay beside it. The legs were bent, the antennas thick with soft fuzz.

  “The night Sylvie disappeared, Rose, Amy’s mother, followed her sister out to the tower and caught this moth. She believed it was Sylvie she caught. The next day, Sylvie was gone.”

  “Wait,” Piper said. “She actually thought her sister was a moth?”

  “Actually,” Grandma Charlotte said, “she believed Sylvie was a monster: a creature who could change form from human to animal, a creature capable of great harm. She thought she caught her sister that night. But she was wrong.”

  Amy stood up fast, knocking her chair backward. “I’ve heard enough,” she said.

  “Your mother—” Grandma Charlotte began.

  “I know, you’re going to tell me my mother is nuts, but I’m sick of hearing it. Maybe you’re the crazy one—maybe my mom can’t stand being here because of you!”