The Night Sister (10 page)

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 little 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.”

“Maybe I don't want to be normal,” he said.

She scowled at him. “Yes, you do.”

And now here he was, normal, and the thing of it was, Amy had been right: being with Margot, having a house, a steady job, a baby on the way, all of that felt right and made him happy, like he had his own solid place in the world at last.

Sometimes the fierceness of his love for Margot caught him off guard, left him breathless. There had been a lot of moments like that lately, when he'd just look at her, imagine the baby,
his baby,
growing inside her, and think about how soon they'd get to meet their baby, and they'd all be a family. And his job was to protect them, keep them safe.

When he decided to join the London police, shortly after they got married, Margot hated the idea.

“Jesus Christ, Jason. What if you get yourself shot? I'd rather not be a widow in my twenties.”

“In London?” He laughed. “Nothing bad ever happens here. I don't think there's ever even been a murder.”

He thought of this now, as he sipped his coffee. The crime scene was vivid in his mind: Amy laid out on the floor, all torn up, with a rifle at her side. They'd found a kitchen knife in Mark's hand. The theory was that they had fought, and he stabbed her to try to defend himself before she shot him in the chest. Then, they figured, she'd shot herself.

But something wasn't right.

Just last night, Tony Bell, the chief of police, told him that Amy's injuries were not from that knife.

“So it was another weapon?” Jason asked.

Tony shook his head. “Medical examiner says they've never seen anything like it. It looks more like claw marks. And the other two victims—the husband and the boy—had them as well, in addition to the gunshot wounds.”

The clank of a plate startled him. Piper turned now, presenting him with a pile of French toast and fruit salad—the raspberries bleeding onto the cantaloupe, the green grapes like pale eyes staring up at him.

“Oh, no thanks,” Jason said, gulping down the last of his coffee and standing. “Looks delicious, but I've gotta run.”

He went into the bedroom. “I have to go into work early,” he announced.

“Not again,” Margot said, giving him a sympathetic smile from her spot on the bed as he leaned down to kiss her goodbye. “You look exhausted. You're working too hard,” she said.

Suddenly he was desperate to tell her everything: That he wasn't going into work early. That he was driving to the Foxcroft Health and Rehab to see Amy's mother because, a week ago, Amy had called him and asked him to come out to the motel. That Amy had told him something crazy her mother had said, something he hadn't been able to stop thinking about since last night, when Tony said it looked like Amy was not stabbed but clawed.

But here came Piper, breakfast tray in hand; and there was his sweet, fragile wife, who would be crushed if she knew he'd gone to see Amy and kept it from her.

Why?
she would ask.
Why would you go see her and not tell me?

It was a question he'd asked himself over and over. A question he was afraid to let himself answer. The secrets he kept made him feel rotten, poisonous; they were a dark, growing thing, a cancer deep inside.

“Hey, didn't you go out with Amy back in high school?” McLellan had asked him the other morning, as the medical examiner's team carried Amy's body out of the motel in a bag.

Jason's whole body went rigid. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

“Are you sure? I remember you two being an item. You even took her out to Belmont Bridge once, I swear.”

Jason felt his face heating up. He remembered parking the car (his mom's old Impala) at Belmont Bridge, where all the kids went to park, get a little stoned, have a few beers, and fool around. He remembered the radio playing low—probably a mixtape Amy had brought: Smashing Pumpkins, Throwing Muses, Nirvana, all those bands Jason pretended to like but didn't. He didn't care, though, because Amy's hand was on his thigh, her fingers moving up, spider-crawling the way they did, moving back and forth, teasing, pretending they might not go where he most wanted them to go.

Jason swallowed hard as he looked at the black body bag being loaded into the van. “We might have gone on a date or two. To the movies or something. But it wasn't anything big. I barely remember.”

McLellan lit up a cigarette, his face bathed in the flashing blue lights from the police cruisers in the driveway. He said no more, deciding to let it go. As far as Jason knew, he hadn't mentioned it to anyone else working the case. And Jason decided it was best to keep to himself his little trip out to the motel to see Amy the week before, too. If he told them, there would be questions, and even if it was clear he'd done nothing wrong, it still wouldn't look good: Officer Jason Hawke, married man with a pregnant wife at home, sneaking off to see an ex-girlfriend. London was a small town, and people had long memories. Even though Amy had settled down, plenty of folks remembered her teenage Bad Girl years. Word would get around. Margot would find out. He didn't want any of that to happen.

Now, as he drove toward the nursing home, he went over that last visit with Amy for the hundredth time, trying to recall each detail.

She'd walked him into the kitchen, poured some coffee.

“You look good,” she told him, and his face reddened. “Fit. Healthy. How's Margot?”

“Great,” he said.

“And when's the baby due?”

“About three weeks.”

Amy turned her coffee mug around, finger looped through the handle. Surely she didn't call him all the way out here to ask about Margot and the baby? Maybe he should follow her lead, ask about Mark and the kids. But he couldn't bring himself to.

“So you said you needed to talk?” he said.

“Yeah. Sorry. I don't really know how to start. I just didn't know who else to turn to. I feel like I need…I don't know…a sane, rational person's perspective. Someone who can be objective, no matter what.”

Jason laughed. “So you called me?”

Amy smiled. “You've always been the most rational human being I know. You take everything in. Weigh evidence carefully. You don't let emotions get in the way of your thinking.”

He shook his head. She was so wrong. That he was sitting here in her kitchen was proof. He knew he should leave—make some excuse and go. But he couldn't. The fact was, some small part of him had been waiting his whole life for this moment: for Amy to call him up, to say she needed him. Pathetic.

“You heard we had to put my mother in Foxcroft?” she asked.

“No. I'm sorry to hear it. What happened?”

He had never actually met Rose Slater, but he'd seen her plenty around town since she'd been back and Margot had filled him in a bit. When they were all growing up, Rose hadn't been around much; Amy never talked about her, but word was she had a drinking problem, maybe had been in a mental hospital. Then, after years of being God-knew-where, she'd made a reappearance just after Amy's daughter was born and had moved back into the house; she helped Amy and Mark with Lou, and in time with baby Levi. Margot said that Amy was thrilled to have her mom back in her life and that she was turning out to be a wonderful grandmother. There were murmurs about where Rose Slater had been all those years, how she could have gone and left her daughter to grow up alone with old Charlotte in that creepy motel. But soon, according to Margot, all the gossip turned positive:
Isn't Rose looking well? She must have been in some fancy rehab out west. Maybe she got religion.
Did you hear she's running the elementary-school bake sale? And she's a troop leader for the Girl Scouts now! Just goes to show, anybody can turn it around.

“Did she fall or something?” Jason asked. “My grandmother broke her hip and had to spend some time in the nursing home, but once she was well, she went back to her own place, and—”

“My mother didn't break her hip,” Amy said abruptly. She stood up, went to the counter, and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. Once she had shaken one out, she held the pack out to him.

“Sure,” he said, though he'd hardly smoked since high school—just the occasional pack when he was feeling stressed or working too many hours.

She sat back down, handed him a cigarette, lit it for him, and put the ashtray on the table between them.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“She suddenly went crazy,” Amy said. “Some kind of dementia, the doctors think.”

Jason drew smoke into his lungs, and let it out slowly. “But I thought things were good. I heard she was doing real well.”

“She was! She was doing amazing. It was like…like I finally had a mom, you know? Like other people. But then, a couple of months ago, she started saying really weird stuff. Talking absolutely crazy.”

“Like what?” Jason asked.

“Oh, like, she said that there are
monsters.
” She laughed, but didn't seem amused. “Actual monsters, with teeth and claws and shit, and that we might have one here at the motel. She said if we didn't do something soon, something terrible would happen.”

“Wow,” Jason said. “Was she drinking?”

“I don't think so. I never saw her anyway, never smelled it on her. She was really freaking me out. Scaring the kids. Sometimes they'd wake up in the middle of the night and she'd be there in their rooms, standing next to the bed, watching them sleep. Mark asked her what in God's name she was doing, and she said she was protecting them. Standing guard. Keeping us all safe from the
monsters.
” Amy did dramatic air-quotes with this last word.

“Sounds terrible. I'm so sorry,” Jason said.

Amy nodded. “We took her to the doctor. They admitted her to the hospital, did all kinds of tests, but they didn't find anything physical, nothing they could do, blah, blah, blah, so they discharged her. Mark didn't want her to come back home—felt it wasn't safe to have her around the kids. So we got her into the nursing home. They're taking good care of her.”

“Probably for the best,” Jason said.

Amy pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it with the tip of her first smoke, which was still burning. Her hands were shaking.

“Here's the thing,” she said. “The thing I haven't told anyone, not even Mark.” She sighed mightily, clearly steeling herself for what she was about to say. “I'm starting to think maybe my mother
isn't
crazy. That maybe…maybe…she was right.”

Jason stubbed out his own cigarette. “Right about what, exactly?” He kept his voice low and level, the way he was trained to do when talking to the emotionally disturbed. But surely she couldn't be serious? She wasn't about to tell him that monsters were real?

She reached across the table and took his hand. “There's no one else I can tell all this to, Jay Jay,” she said quietly. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “Maybe I'm crazy, too, but I really don't think—”

“Mama?” a voice chirped from behind him.