The Night Sister Read online

  She remembered passing Amy in the halls at school, how Amy would avoid catching Piper’s eye, making a point to look anywhere but at her. How Amy walked right by Piper on the school bus every morning and afternoon, calling to her new friends at the back of the bus, and ignoring that Piper had saved her a seat.

  “But she needed us,” Margot said, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, “and we weren’t there. Maybe this…this nightmare wouldn’t have happened if we’d tried harder.”

  “That’s insane. How can you think that?”

  Margot was crying hard now. “I never understood,” she said, “how you could turn your back on her so easily.”

  This was too much. Piper wanted to scream, I’m not the one who turned my back, but she just bit her lip. She recalled what Jason had said about keeping Margot calm, not letting her get worked up. She was doing a wonderful job so far.

  “Look at you,” Margot sobbed. “You don’t even seem upset by what happened. It’s like you don’t care at all.”

  It was true that once Amy broke things off and started to ignore their calls, Piper was too hurt and furious to keep trying. It seemed…pathetic to keep calling and leaving notes, begging Amy to talk to her, to keep saving Amy a seat on the bus. If Amy didn’t need Piper, Piper sure as hell didn’t need Amy. Amy had slammed the door shut, but maybe Piper went ahead and added a few locks for good measure.

  Piper took a deep breath and put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Of course I care, Margot.” Too much, she thought. That was always the problem, wasn’t it? She smiled at her sister and added gently, “It’s just that one of us has to keep her shit together. And at the moment, it’s me.”

  Margot laughed weakly.

  “I flew all the way out here as soon as I heard about Amy, didn’t I? But, honestly, right now my biggest concern is you and the baby.”

  “I appreciate that,” Margot said. “I do. It’s just that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and God knows I can’t talk to Jason about it. And that message…Written on that old photo of Rose and Sylvie, the same one we found in the suitcase that summer, for Christ’s sake,” Margot said.

  “I know,” Piper said.

  “I can’t help thinking that someone—or something—is out there. That you and I are in terrible danger.” Margot rubbed her stomach. “The baby, too.”

  Piper shook her head, leaned in to stroke her sister’s hair. “We’re fine. We’re together. We’re safe. And there’s nothing out there trying to get us. What happened to Amy…it’s terrible, horrific, but it has nothing to do with you and me.”

  “But Amy left that message for us, Piper—because we’d understand it. Whatever happened out at the motel that night has something to do with what we found!”

  Piper felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

  “Margot,” Piper said, “seriously, I’m sure the cops are right—Amy was depressed, or mentally ill, and something just snapped inside her. It happens.”

  Margot shook her head and scooted back on the bed so she was taller against her backrest of pillows. “Jesus, Piper! You don’t really believe that, do you? You don’t really believe that Amy would be capable of something like this? Her own husband and son?”

  “Other than generic Christmas cards and Facebook, I haven’t seen or talked to Amy in years. I don’t know her at all.”

  She felt a lump growing in her throat.

  Margot plucked at the covers. “You’re wrong.” Her voice was calm now, low and serious. “You knew her better than anyone ever did.”

  The statement hung in the air between them; for the first time, Piper wondered how much her younger sister truly knew about everything that had gone on between her and Amy that summer.

  “But we were kids then. People change. I’ve changed.” She swallowed hard. Had she changed that much? Does anyone, really? “I can only imagine Amy had, too.”

  “Changed enough to become a killer? A crazy person who would slaughter her own family? And then blow her brains out?”

  “I don’t know….I—”

  “Yes, you do!” Margot shot forward in bed, puffy face growing redder.

  “Relax, Margot,” Piper said, squeezing her sister’s arm. She had to be the big sister here, the right kind of big sister, the kind she’d seen in movies and read about in books. The older sister who was selfless, wise, who knew just the right thing to say. She owed it to Margot, to the baby, to do the best she could.

  Margot leaned back against her pillows obediently, but her face was set stubbornly. “You do know. So we have to figure out what really happened up at the motel and what it means.”

  “We? You’re not figuring out anything,” Piper said. “You’re going to do what the doctor and Jason say and stay in bed and watch cooking shows and read articles about proper breastfeeding technique and cloth diapers versus disposables.”

  “Right. Which means it’s all up to you,” Margot said, eyes glittering.

  “And what exactly am I supposed to do?”

  Margot bit her lip. “Maybe you can talk to Amy’s daughter.”

  “What makes you think the kid will talk to me at all?”

  “Jason said she seems really stunned, like she’s in shock still. She keeps repeating her story like a robot. But maybe…maybe if you give her some kind of hint that you know her mother didn’t do this…maybe she’ll open up and tell you what she really saw and heard that night.”

  “I don’t know—”

  Margot gripped Piper’s hand tight. “Please. Do it for me. And for Amy.”

  Piper blew out a breath. She remembered being in the tower with Amy, Amy’s hand gripping her own, pulling her farther back, into the shadows.

  “Okay. I’ll try,” Piper said reluctantly. “But if Jason finds out what I’m up to, that you and I are even talking about Amy or her family, he’ll have me on the next plane home—you should’ve heard the lecture I got on the ride here.”

  “I know. We’ll have to be careful. Keep everything secret. But we’re good at that, aren’t we?”

  Margot gave Piper a bittersweet smile.

  And just like that, Piper realized she’d already failed. She was not being the responsible older sister. Here they were, back in their old roles, sharing secrets, chasing trouble: foolish girls once again on a wild-goose chase, Amy egging them on, taunting them, saying: I dare you.

  1989

  Piper

  “Jason Hawke and I kissed,” Amy whispered to Piper. “With tongues.”

  “Ew!” shrieked Margot. She leapt up and skated off to the deep end of the empty swimming pool, the wheels of her skates rattling against the pocked and flaking blue concrete. Margot, who was only ten, always lost patience with truth-or-dare when things got good and turned to crushes and kissing. Her hair was in messy pigtails that stuck out from beneath her helmet, and her eyelids were coated with the neon-blue eye shadow Amy had put on her earlier. They’d have to wash it off before they went home or their mom would have a fit. Margot wore the knee and elbow pads Mom had bought for her. She’d bought them for both girls, but Piper never wore hers. She didn’t because Amy didn’t. Amy didn’t even own any.

  Amy’s little transistor radio was resting on the edge at the shallow end of the pool, tuned to WQVT, “All hits, all the time.” Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” started—one of Amy’s favorite songs. Amy liked any song where the singer poured his soul out—even some of her grandma’s old Perry Como and Frank Sinatra records. Totally cheesy, but somehow, when Amy sang along with them, she made them seem cool.

  “What was it like?” Piper asked, leaning closer. Amy smelled like Love’s Baby Soft and strawberry lip gloss. She had on a tight Ghostbusters T-shirt and ragged cutoffs.

  Amy smiled impishly and tucked a chunk of her pink bangs—dyed with Jell-O—behind her triple-pierced ear. She had neon-blue eye shadow on, too, along with a big streak of silver that went all the way up to her eyebrow. She looked like she’d just stepped ou
t of an MTV video. The little sister of Cyndi Lauper, maybe, but Amy thought Cyndi Lauper sucked, so Piper would never mention the resemblance out loud.

  “Come on, I’ll tell you,” Amy said, undoing the rainbow laces on her white skates. Piper did the same, and both girls slipped on their flip-flops and climbed the ladder out of the pool. It was the end of summer—there were only two more weeks until school started—and both girls’ legs were bronze from the sun. Amy’s were long and lean, the legs of a dancer, like one of the Rockettes Piper had seen when her mom took her to Radio City Music Hall.

  “Where are you going?” Margot asked, scowling. She hated to be left out, but often was, because she was really still a baby even though she pretended not to be. Her pigtails stuck out like antennas from under her helmet, making her look like an angry beetle.

  “Be right back,” Amy said. “Stay here.”

  Piper and Amy hurried across the concrete patio that surrounded the pool, over the crabgrass that had pushed its way up through the cracks, and past the line of broken lounge chairs that led to the motel office, with its steeply peaked roof. A red Closed sign hung in the window, and all the dusty plastic blinds were drawn. Attached to the office on the right were Rooms 1 through 14; 15 through 28 were in a second building, around back.

  All of the motel rooms were now sealed up like little tombs, even though the keys with their blue plastic tags still hung on the metal rack behind the office desk. Sometimes the girls would sneak into the rooms, which had been left unchanged since the motel closed in 1971. The beds were covered in brown-and-mustard paisley spreads, and dull turquoise carpeting full of cigarette burns and years’ worth of unidentifiable stains was underfoot. There were prints of yellow and orange marigolds in heavy frames. The old color TVs had been sold, but the tables that had once held them remained, along with bureaus and nightstands, some of which still contained mildewed copies of Gideon’s Bible. Their finishes were nicked and scratched, covered in circular water stains—the ghostly images of wet glasses left by guests long gone. Some of the bathrooms still had soap wrapped in paper, but most of the soap had been chewed through by mice. There were ashtrays in all the rooms, and sometimes when Piper went in she swore she was breathing 1971 air—it smelled like dust and cigarettes and long-faded perfume. Like ghosts, if ghosts had a smell.

  The roofs in some of the rooms had begun to leak; the ceilings were water-stained and mildewed, the plaster crumbling in places. Some of the rooms still contained matchbooks and notepads printed with the Tower Motel name and logo—a simple drawing of the castlelike tower that stood at the base of the driveway by the road.

  Amy’s grandma had shown them pictures of the tower being built. Her gnarled fingers, stained yellow from nicotine, pointed at the curled black-and-white photos glued in an old album.

  “He always said he built the tower for me,” Grandma Charlotte would say. “But we knew the truth. He did it because he wanted to. Because he thought it would bring people in from all over, make us rich and famous.”

  The pictures were not all that exciting: Amy’s grandfather wanted the tower to be a surprise, so he’d built large staging around it, sheathed in boards and tarps so that no one could see what he was doing. At last, in the final photo, the great unveiling: Clarence Slater stood, a dashing figure in a suit and hat, dark hair slicked back, one eye squinting slightly. He was holding his wife’s hand; Grandma Charlotte was young and beautiful then, not the disheveled old woman Piper knew now. They posed with the painted wooden sign he’d put up in front of the tower, angled to catch the eye of drivers on Route 6: Come See the Famous Tower of London.

  Piper and Amy stepped over the remains of the sign, which had been knocked over years ago and lay in rotting pieces amid clumps of grass, mullein, and chicory, strewn with cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers thrown out the windows of passing cars. Then they paused just outside the tower.

  Amy and her friends were not supposed to go inside. Her grandma said it was dangerous, with its crumbling walls and sagging floors.

  “It’s a death trap,” Grandma Charlotte had said over and over, voice rusty, breath sour. “You steer clear of it,” she warned, giving an uncharacteristic shake of the finger to emphasize just how serious she was. “One of these days, someone’s going to fall straight through the floor and end up in hell.”

  Grandma Charlotte took care of Amy when Amy’s mom, Rose, wasn’t around (which, as far as Piper could tell, was pretty much all the time—she’d never laid eyes on Rose, not once in the whole year she’d known Amy). Amy said that her mom had mental problems. And she drank. Grandma Charlotte explained once, “My poor Rose was never the same after we lost Sylvie. She blamed herself. Never got over it. Some people are made stronger by loss. Others are broken by it.”

  Sylvie was Amy’s aunt, her mom’s older sister, and she had run away when she was eighteen. Went off to California to be a movie star—that’s what Amy said. She packed a suitcase and left a note in her typewriter, saying goodbye and that she’d be in touch soon. They never heard from her again. Amy’s middle name was Sylvia, after her long-missing aunt.

  Piper felt kind of bad for Grandma Charlotte—an old woman left alone to raise a wild kid like Amy. Her husband, Clarence, had died not long after the motel went out of business, back before Amy was even born. Grandma Charlotte said he’d died of a broken heart, which Piper figured meant a heart attack.

  Grandma Charlotte was thin, her sallow skin sagged, and her hair had gone white. She had two long silver hairs coming off her chin, and Piper longed to pluck them. The house was always a wreck (despite the fact that Grandma Charlotte never seemed to stop tidying), and sometimes they’d catch her just staring out the kitchen window down the driveway, a lost and vacant look on her face.

  “What’s she doing?” Piper asked.

  “I dunno,” Amy said. “Looking for my mom or Sylvie, maybe. Or for motel guests? I think she still half expects that old bell wired from the office to the main house to ring, even though it’s been broken for a zillion years.”

  Sometimes Amy’s grandma got confused and called Amy “Sylvie.” Piper heard her do it once in a while.

  “Come here, Sylvie, and let me braid your hair.”

  “I’m Amy, Grandma,” she’d say, sounding uncomfortable and impatient. “Sylvie’s gone.”

  “So she is,” Grandma Charlotte would say, running her gnarled fingers through Amy’s golden-blond hair. “She was my good girl. So are you.”

  Now Amy pulled Piper through the arched doorway and into the cool shade of the tower. Piper held her breath, waiting for the walls to collapse around her. Inside, it was dark and smelled like damp cement, rotten leaves, and something acrid and spoiled. The wooden planks covering the floor were spongy beneath their feet. There were no windows on the first level, and the only light came from the narrow doorway.

  Years’ worth of dry leaves crunched beneath their feet. Piper could also make out a Milky Way wrapper, and a crushed Budweiser can. Far off, she could hear the sound of Amy’s radio playing up at the pool; the music drifted down like fog, the song unidentifiable.

  “Do you really want to know what it was like?” Amy asked, her face nearly lost in the cool shadows of the tower. “Kissing Jason?”

  “Yeah,” Piper said, her palm sweaty as Amy held it tightly, gave it a squeeze. Piper had never kissed anyone, but she thought about it all the time. She stared at the lips of all the boys she knew, studying their shape and the way they moved when the boys talked. She tried to imagine their lips touching hers, wondering if it mattered whether or not they had the soft, peach-fuzz beginnings of a mustache. She wondered if it tickled, and how you arranged your heads so that noses didn’t get in the way.

  Jason Hawke was in their grade, a scrawny boy who lived practically next door to Piper and Margot, in one of the condos on the back side of the hill Amy lived on. His hair was a little too long (but not long enough to be cool), and he was always creeping around with a magnifying glass, try
ing to show them how neat tree bark or a little green beetle looked through it. Margot said she felt bad for him, because he seemed lonely. Piper thought he was just a geek. A few months ago, he’d given Amy a note written in secret code. She hadn’t even tried to decipher it, which had seemed a terrible disappointment to Jason.

  “I’ll show you,” Amy said, and before Piper could say anything or even think about what was going to happen next, Amy’s lips were on hers, slick with lip gloss. Her small tongue probed gently at Piper’s mouth, coaxing it open. Piper opened her lips and tasted strawberry lip gloss and the moist heat of Amy’s breath. Piper made a soft moaning sort of sound, an I-surrender-to-this-and-whatever-might-happen-next sigh, and leaned into the kiss. The tower around her seemed to shift and spin a little. Piper was sure it was going to come crashing down on them right then, at that very moment.

  Then she sensed movement, actual movement—not from the tower, but from a shadow that passed over them. She looked up. Someone was there, in the doorway, watching. She froze, jerked away.

  The shadowy figure backed up into the light, and Piper saw his face.

  “Jason?” Piper heard Margot call; she must have been coming up the driveway that led toward the tower. “Have you seen Piper and Amy?”

  Jason bolted from the doorway without answering, and disappeared outside.

  “Hey! Wait a sec,” Margot called. They could hear her footsteps running after him. Then both their footsteps stopped.

  Piper and Amy held very still and listened. Piper leaned back against the wall; the stones felt cool through her T-shirt.

  “Where are you going?” Margot asked.

  “Home,” Jason said.

  “So did you see Piper and Amy?” Margot asked.

  Piper crouched lower in the shadows and looked over at Amy, but couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t look worried or stressed, that was for sure. If Piper had to guess, she’d say Amy seemed mildly amused.