The Night Sister Read online

  They were all sitting at the Slaters’ kitchen table, sharing a can of Pringles and some flat Pepsi. They’d tucked the suitcase back into the floor of the tower. Piper and Margot thought they should bring it right to Grandma Charlotte, but Amy didn’t agree. “Not just yet,” she said. “Not until we know more. We don’t know what it means yet, and I don’t want to go upsetting my grandma for no reason. She can get pretty freaked out by anything having to do with Sylvie.”

  So the girls had left the suitcase in the tower and come back into the house, where they’d gone straight into the bathroom to fix Piper’s leg. Amy dumped peroxide on it, which sizzled and hissed dramatically but didn’t sting, just like Amy promised. Then Amy covered the wound with gauze and medical tape. They told Amy’s grandma that she’d fallen while roller skating.

  “You girls should be more careful,” Grandma Charlotte said vaguely.

  Piper was trying not to think about how badly her leg was throbbing. Over and over, she saw the sliver Amy had pulled out, a pointed wooden dagger that she was sure had gone all the way to the bone.

  The potato chips tasted like salty cardboard. She took a sip of soda, remembering, with a warm rush, the feel of Amy’s lips on hers.

  The room felt hot. She wiped at her face with her hand.

  Margot gave her a worried look. Mouthed, You okay?

  Piper scowled at her little sister. Of course she was okay.

  “Tell us about the day Sylvie ran away,” Amy said.

  Amy’s grandma stood at the kitchen sink, her back to the three girls. Their sweaty skin stuck to the vinyl chairs.

  Grandma Charlotte was wearing a light cotton housedress that billowed around her thin frame like a blue-flowered tent. Her gray hair, tinged with yellow, hung in limp wisps. A cigarette was burning low in the ashtray while Grandma Charlotte worked at the dishes in the sink. Piper watched the cigarette burn down on its own, like a fuse. Soon the filter would start to burn, filling the kitchen with its chemical stink.

  “My Sylvie was a good girl,” Grandma Charlotte said.

  “But she ran away,” Amy said. “Why?”

  Grandma Charlotte’s face twitched silently, but then she shook her head. “I guess we’ll never know,” she said, pulling off the yellow rubber gloves to reveal gnarled hands.

  Piper thought of the photo they’d found in the suitcase: Two girls. One plain and chunky with dark, tousled hair; one blonde and beautiful. Both lost in their own ways now. Amy looked nothing like her mother. Amy, Piper suddenly realized, looked more like her aunt Sylvie, radiant and blonde.

  Piper glanced at Margot. She was listening politely, like the good girl she always was, sitting straight up in her chair. Piper felt a brief surge of anger; if her little sister hadn’t been there, hadn’t come into the tower looking for them, then she never would have run and fallen through the floor. They would never have found the suitcase. Piper wished it had stayed hidden. She had a terrible feeling about the whole thing. It had started small at first, like a toothache, but now it traveled through her, pulsed along with the pain in her shin. When Piper glanced down at the bandage now, she saw the pink bloodstain soaking through—it was shaped like a butterfly.

  “Sylvie left a note, didn’t she?” Amy asked.

  Her grandmother sighed. “You know the story. And you know I don’t like to talk about it. Neither does your mother. If…when she comes back, you mustn’t ever bring it up. It upsets her.”

  “I know,” Amy said. For a second, Piper thought Amy looked like she might start crying.

  Piper thought of how little Amy ever said about her mom.

  “She’s a drunk,” Amy had told Piper once, when Margot wasn’t around. “Grandma says that she can’t help it. Something’s broken inside her, and the only way she knows how to make it feel better is by drinking. But I think she’s just plain crazy, drunk or not. One time, when I was real little, I woke up and found her standing over my bed. She was holding this big old chain and looking crazy. I started screaming and crying—I was sure she was going to kill me. Grandma came and asked her what she was doing. Mom kept saying she ‘needed to know.’ I have no freaking idea what she was talking about. Then she just turned and left. She took off, and we didn’t see her for almost a year that time.”

  Piper thought it was awful and sad, to have a mother who was alive but who, for whatever reason, couldn’t be your mother. She wondered where Amy’s mom was, and if she thought of Amy every day or if she forgot all about even having a kid.

  “Please, Grandma,” Amy said as she pushed back from the dining-room table. “Just tell me one more time. You found a note Sylvie left, right?”

  Her grandmother blew out a breath, then nodded, closing her eyes, like it was easier to tell the story in the dark. “I woke up that morning because your mother was crying, just howling away like it was the end of the world. I went into their room and saw Sylvie’s bed was empty. Your mother was so upset she could hardly speak. The closet was open, and most of Sylvie’s clothes were gone. Then I found the note. It was stuck in her typewriter. On her desk.”

  “What did the note say? Do you remember?”

  “It said she couldn’t stay here anymore. And that she loved us and hoped we’d understand. She promised to get in touch as soon as she got settled.”

  “But she never did, right?” Amy asked.

  “No.” Amy’s grandma flinched slightly. “Not a word.”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure Mom never heard from her?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Do you think that’s where Mom goes?” Amy asked, voice low. She picked at some skin around her thumbnail. “When she’s not here? Do you think maybe she’s off looking for Sylvie?”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Grandma Charlotte said, coming to stand behind Amy and putting her arms around Amy’s shoulders. But Amy only stiffened, sat up straighter.

  “Do you still have the note?” she asked. “The one Sylvie left?”

  Amy’s grandma narrowed her eyes. “Why does it matter?”

  “What’d you guys do with all her stuff? The things she left behind?”

  Her grandmother turned back to the sink and pulled the plug out of the drain. “I don’t know. There wasn’t much. Some of it might be in the attic, I think. Your grandfather and I, we cleaned out their room, packed everything of Sylvie’s into a trunk. We thought it would help poor Rose. She was so destroyed by Sylvie’s leaving. We thought it might be better if she wasn’t surrounded by all of those things—reminders of her sister everywhere.”

  The last of the dirty dishwater went down the drain with a terrible, wet sucking sound.

  —

  The attic smelled like dust and mice. Piper was sure she could hear faint scuttling sounds off in the shadows, feel beady eyes upon her. She hoped it was only mice and not something larger, something more dangerous.

  Was it more than rustling?

  Was that faint breathing she heard coming from the darkest corner, the place where no light touched?

  “I don’t like it up here,” Margot complained.

  “So go back home. Nobody’s stopping you,” Piper said. She wanted to get the hell out of there, too, but no way would she admit that to Amy.

  Margot flashed her a no-way, not-without-you look. Their mom was working, and then she had class—she was going to law school part-time. She was doing it for all of them, she repeated, again and again. She could have a good job, make some real money, make a difference in the world—wasn’t that what her daughters wanted from her?

  Not really, Piper always wanted to say. What she wanted was to have a mom who was more like a mom, someone to be there when they got home from school, to cook real dinners instead of Hamburger Helper and frozen lasagna. A mom who wouldn’t order Piper to stay with goody-two-shoes Margot all day, no matter what. It pissed Piper off a little—it was like being an unpaid babysitter.

  “Aw, your little sister’s not so bad,” Amy would always say. “She’s actually pretty cool.”
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  Amy sometimes said she wished she had a kid sister, or any brothers or sisters, for that matter. She said it stank to be an only child—a mistake.

  “My mom told me once that’s what I was,” she’d confessed to Piper. “That she’d never wanted kids. She got pregnant by accident. Never even told me the guy’s name.”

  Piper had thought that was a cruel thing to tell a kid, even if it was the truth.

  “There’s a lot of crap up here,” Amy said now, blowing dust off another cardboard box. She’d already opened half a dozen of them and found nothing useful—baby clothes, old Life magazines, stained tablecloths, and chipped china.

  There was an old couch covered by a sheet, a broken treadle sewing machine, a wooden wardrobe that was empty except for a few mothballs, and a steamer trunk with a tiny suitcase resting on top. Amy reached for the little square suitcase and undid the latches.

  “Cool! It’s a typewriter,” she said, pulling off the cover to reveal a gunmetal-gray typewriter with green keys. Royal, it said in silver letters on the front. And on the back, Quiet De Luxe. “Holy crap, I bet this was Sylvie’s typewriter! The one she wrote her goodbye note on!” She punched a few keys, and the arms with the letters moved up and got stuck, tangled together. Amy hefted the typewriter to the floor and opened the trunk. “Jackpot,” she said.

  Inside, they found clothes: a wool winter coat, saddle shoes, a couple of dresses and cardigans, a few slips, three white nightgowns. There was a bowling trophy, a certificate for winning the London High spelling bee: Presented to Sylvia Slater on the thirteenth day of March, 1959, it said in ornate calligraphy.

  “I guess this is definitely Sylvie’s stuff,” Piper said.

  “The things she left behind,” Amy said, staring down as she pulled things out of the trunk.

  Piper wondered what she would choose to take with her if she ran away.

  Amy—you’d take Amy.

  Idiot, she thought to herself.

  Amy unpacked the trunk. A handful of books were tucked into the bottom corner: Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a book called Beauty, Glamour and Personality that seemed to be a hair-and-makeup guide, some dress patterns, and then, all the way at the bottom, a stained and worn hardcover: Mastering the Art and Science of Hypnotism. Amy lifted it out and opened the cover.

  “Check out the inscription.”

  To Sylvie, the world’s greatest chicken hypnotist, with love from Uncle Fenton, Christmas 1954

  “Who’s Fenton?” Piper asked.

  “I guess he was my mom’s uncle or something? He lived in that old trailer out back for a while.”

  Piper had never paid much attention to the trailer. It sat in the overgrown field just behind Amy’s house, blending in with all the other junk back there: a decaying pickup truck without tires, a half-built motorcycle, a rusted oil tank, a tractor missing the seat, and a bunch of television sets with the picture tubes busted to shit.

  “Fenton’s a weird name,” Margot observed.

  “I think it was a family name or something,” Amy said. “I don’t know much about him. There are a couple of pictures of him with my mom and Sylvie and my grandparents. He worked at the motel, like the fix-it guy. My grandfather was the idea man, but Fenton put all the ideas into place. Grandma told me once that after Fenton left, everything started to fall apart. I bet if I ask Grandma about him she’ll tell me more.”

  “You ever been inside the trailer?” Piper asked.

  Amy shook her head. “It’s got a huge old rusted padlock on the door. The ceiling’s caved in. It’s been deserted forever. But it might be worth checking out, if we can find a way in.” She flipped through the hypnosis book. “Check this out! Sylvie underlined parts, wrote notes in the margins.”

  She held out the book, and Piper saw that at the bottom of page 75, Sylvie had written in neat cursive: “9/23/55: Attempted post-hypnotic suggestion with Rose. Success! Will continue to experiment.”

  “What’s post-hypnotic suggestion?” Margot asked.

  “It’s where you tell someone to do something when they’re hypnotized, then they do it some time later, after they’re not hypnotized anymore,” Piper said. “I don’t think they have any idea about it.”

  “That seems kind of mean,” Margot said.

  Amy closed up the trunk but held on to the book. “It might be mean,” Amy said, “but it’s also really cool, having that kind of control over someone. I mean, who knows what you might be able to get them to do.”

  “Remind me never to let you hypnotize me,” Piper joked.

  Amy smiled. “Oh, come on, you know you’re dying to let me try,” she said, looking right into Piper’s eyes. “Who knows what I might get you to say or do? You’d be under my complete control.”

  “No way,” Piper said, looking away, her face burning as she wondered what it might feel like, to give yourself over to another person so completely, whether you meant to or not.

  Jason

  Jason had been sitting by the window in Room 4, watching the house and tower, for hours now. He’d seen Piper and Margot leave the main house and head for home, walking around the pool and to the path in the woods. But Amy never came outside. He’d waited and waited, and now it was too late. He had to go. His watch said 6:05. His mom would kill him if he wasn’t home for supper. And he had to pee. Tempting as it was, he couldn’t use the toilet in Room 4—no way to flush it.

  He opened the door, looked right and left, listened. Heard only the wind in the trees. A truck going by on the road.

  He planned to run behind the building and circle around to the path through the woods. If he really booked, he’d be home in five minutes. But once his feet hit the driveway, that wasn’t the way he went.

  He sprinted back across the gravel to the tower, just to check.

  “No way,” he said aloud as he peered in at the wide-planked wooden floorboards, “no freaking way.”

  The pack of cigarettes and note were gone.

  Which was impossible.

  He’d been watching the tower.

  No one had gone in or come out.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He spun, saw Amy coming down the driveway toward him.

  “Nothing, I…I left you some cigarettes. Did you get them?”

  “Cigarettes? No, I never saw any cigarettes.”

  “I put them in the tower earlier this afternoon.”

  She moved close, stuck her head in the tower. “Well, where are they?”

  “Gone,” he said. “I left them right there just a couple hours ago. If you didn’t take them, who did?”

  “I dunno. Someone must have come along and picked them up.”

  “But no one went in or out of the tower! I was watching!”

  “Watching?” She looked from the open doorway to his face, which suddenly felt like it was on fire. “Stay out of the tower, Jay Jay,” she snapped.

  Jason nodded. Took a step back, away from Amy, toward home. “But I just wanted to give you the—”

  “I don’t want to catch you anywhere near this place. It’s off limits. Piper nearly died falling through the floor in there today. It’s not safe. Got it?”

  “Whatever you say,” he told her, and she smiled, tousled his hair.

  For once, he’d done the right thing.

  2013

  Jason

  Jason sipped his black coffee while Piper flitted around the kitchen. She whipped eggs and milk, dunked slices of crusty bread, then gently placed them in the cast-iron skillet, where they sizzled and spat in butter. A huge fruit salad sat on the counter in a cut-glass bowl he and Margot had gotten as a wedding gift and only used for special occasions.

  Margot was in bed, resting, just the way she was supposed to be.

  He was still a joke to Piper. He saw it in the way she watched him, waiting for him to screw up in some way, to let Margot down. There was something slightly amused—mocking, even—in the way she looked at him and spoke to him, as if he were still an awkward littl
e boy.

  Piper had lied to him about not knowing what “29 Rooms” meant. It meant something to her; to Margot as well. He could see it there, a flicker of recognition, perhaps a twitch of fear. He could understand Piper’s not telling the truth, but Margot had never lied to him before. Maybe she’d break down and tell him. He wouldn’t push her, though. He didn’t want to risk upsetting her, raising her blood pressure.

  Jason bit the inside of his cheek. He wished he could smoke a cigarette, but he never smoked in front of Margot (though sometimes she smelled it on him) and wouldn’t dream of lighting up in the kitchen. He’d wait till he was in his truck.

  He blamed the smoking on Amy. Hadn’t his first cigarette ever been from a pack he’d stolen to give to her? And later, when they were in high school, the two of them smoked together all the time, even sharing cigarettes. There was something so intimate about it, almost more intimate than when they slept together.

  They were never exactly going out. They didn’t do the things other couples did: going to the movies, holding hands in the halls at school, hanging out at Dairy Cream on Friday nights and sharing a chili dog and a banana split.

  “I don’t believe people are meant to be monogamous,” Amy told him once, after sex. It was when they were lying together in the dark, smoking, that Amy would share all her secrets and dreams. All the walls came down, and she would talk to him about anything and everything. “Do you?”

  “I dunno.” He shrugged, although inside he wished that she’d be his girl and wear his ring and do all that other sappy bullshit that other couples did.

  It was Amy who encouraged him to ask Margot to the junior prom. This was after Amy had turned him down flat—no way would she be caught dead at any prom.

  “You should ask Margot. She’s been madly in love with you since she was in, like, third grade.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe you and I can meet up and have our own un-prom night.”

  “Jay Jay,” she said chidingly, “I’m telling you: ask Margot. Sooner or later, you’ve gotta get a real girlfriend. You’ve got to do stuff like go to prom and take a girl out on an actual date. That’s what normal people do.”