The Night Sister (2 page)

The call came in at 12:34 a.m.: a woman reporting that gunshots and screams were coming from the old Tower Motel.

Jason was putting on his coat, but froze as he listened, dread creeping into his chest and squeezing his heart like an icy hand.

Amy.

Even though he'd already punched out, and even though he heard Rainier and McLellan were on their way to check it out, Jason decided to swing by on his way home. It couldn't hurt to take a look, he told himself. He knew he should leave it, should just get in his truck, drive home, and crawl into bed beside Margot. He should put his arm around her, rest his hand on her belly, and feel the baby kick and turn in her sleep.

But there was what he
should
do and there was what he
needed
to do. And as soon as the call came in, he knew he needed to go out to the motel. He needed to see if Amy was okay.

He was at the motel in ten minutes, his headlights illuminating the faded and rotting old sign:
Tower Motel, 28 Rooms, Pool, No Vacancy.
As he turned up the gravel driveway and drove past the crooked tower and decrepit motel rooms where, as a boy, he used to hide out, he felt strangely faint; then he realized he wasn't letting himself breathe.

Idiot.

Amy's house was at the top of the driveway, perhaps twenty yards beyond the low-slung buildings of motel rooms. Rainier and McLellan's cruiser was parked in front of it, and the front door of the house stood open. Every light in the house was on, making it look too bright and all wrong somehow—like something you weren't supposed to stare directly at, something dangerous, like an eclipse.

He'd been here just a week ago. Amy had called him at the station, out of the blue, saying she really needed someone to talk to, and would he come? He was taken aback; other than saying a quick, impersonal hello when they ran into each other around town, they hadn't talked,
really talked,
since high school.

“I can come on my lunch break,” he'd answered without hesitation.

Some part of him knew it was wrong, how eager he was to see her, how he had lit up like a Christmas tree because he was the one she'd turned to. He'd thought of how disappointed Margot would be when he told her, so he decided he wouldn't tell her. What she didn't know wouldn't hurt her, and it wasn't so terrible, was it? He was just going to see an old friend, to help out—where was the harm in that? Still, guilt whined around his head like a nagging, persistent mosquito.
You have a wife you love and a baby on the way,
it said.
What do you think you're doing?

Now, as he stood in the open doorway, he heard what sounded like a low groan. His skin prickled. Unholstering his gun, he stepped into the front hall; a closet door stood open, revealing a row of shiny rain slickers and grubby sweatshirts hanging over a jumble of shoes. Jason spotted small, sparkly pink sneakers; a large pair of worn work boots that had to belong to Amy's husband, Mark; the leather flip-flops Amy had been wearing last week when she met him at the door. “Jay Jay,” she had said as she embraced him, somewhat clumsily, sloshing coffee out of her mug. “I'm so happy you're here.”

Now he looked around the house. The living room was to the right, the kitchen to the left, and a staircase directly in front of him. Everything smelled musty, vaguely ruined. Wallpaper hung off the walls like torn pieces of skin. The dull brown carpet (had it been white once?) was full of stains and burns, worn through to the floorboards in places.

He hadn't noticed any of this last week.

Jason's radio squawked. Doug Rainier was upstairs—Jason heard his shaking voice both in the house and, a split second later, as a mechanical echo over the radio. “Three victims,” he was saying. “All dead.” Then, quietly, “Oh God. Oh, shit.”

Adrenaline flooded through him, even before his brain fully understood Rainier's words. He ascended the stairs two at a time, right hand on his gun.

Amy.

Where was Amy?

The scene at the top of the stairs nearly brought him to his knees. He had to grab hold of the wall to keep from going down.

He'd never seen anything like it.

Never seen so much blood.

A gunshot hadn't done this.

There were gory red tracks everywhere in the hall. Doug Rainier was on his knees near one of the victims, retching violently. Jason staggered toward them. The victim was facedown, her long blond hair splayed out around her head. There was a rifle beside her, and she lay in what looked like a small lake of blood. The smell of it, sharp and metallic, hit him hard, filling his nose and mouth.

“Oh Jesus.” Jason breathed out the words and let himself sag against the wall.

She was facedown, but he knew it was her and he knew that she was dead. Her right arm was tucked beneath her chest, but her left was outstretched. A piece of paper rested near her elbow. He leaned in a bit—no, not paper, an old photograph. It was a black-and-white image of two little girls, and written across it in black marker was the phrase “29 Rooms.” He blinked; a part of him knew it must mean something, must be a clue, but what he found himself focusing on instead was Amy's hand, pale and waxy. Her engagement ring and wedding band glinted up at him, just as they had last week, when she'd reached across the kitchen table to take his hand.

“There's no one else I can tell all this to, Jay Jay,” she'd said through tears. “I swear, I think I'm going crazy.”

“Hawke?” a voice called. Jason looked up and saw Bruce McLellan looming in the doorway of the bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Jason couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, couldn't take his eyes off Amy.

“Do you remember, Jay Jay, back when we were kids, how you used to write me notes in secret code?” she'd asked, and he'd nodded. Of course he remembered. He remembered everything.

“Sometimes I'd pretend not to understand them,” Amy said. “But I always did. I always knew just what you wrote.”

“Hawke, I need you in here—now!” McLellan barked, and Jason turned from Amy at last, to walk down the hallway like a ghost version of himself, there and yet not.

As Jason entered the bedroom, he realized this was Amy's old room. He remembered standing in the shadows of the driveway as a boy, looking up at her dormer window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

Now Jason did a quick sweep of the room's contents: a fluffy pink throw rug in the middle of the wide, white-painted floorboards; a dresser with a small collection of glass and plastic jungle animals displayed on top; a disheveled bed with a twisted polka-dotted pink-and-purple comforter, its pillows and stuffed animals spilling onto the floor.

McLellan was standing in the center of the room, his gun clenched in both hands. He nodded down at the floor. A trail of small, bloody prints led to an open window.

“Out there,” he whispered, his face red and sweaty. He sounded boyish, frightened. “On the roof.”

Jason nodded and walked slowly across the room with his gun in front of him, hands trembling.

He put his back against the wall on the left side of the open window, and listened. He heard a low moaning. A whimper. From out on the roof.

Sirens wailed in the distance. Backup would be here soon. He could wait. But what if someone was out there, hurt?

“London Police Department!” Jason shouted. “We know you're out there. I need you to come inside and keep your hands where I can see them.”

There was scrabbling, a scuttling noise, but no one appeared.

“I'm going out,” he mouthed without sound. McLellan nodded and stayed where he was, his gun locked on the open window.

Holding his gun, Jason ducked through the opening and stepped out onto the roof. Immediately he dropped into a crouch and swiveled right, then left, scanning the rooftop.

A pair of eyes glinted in the dark. A flash of blond hair.

He felt the gun slip from his grasp, heard it hit the roof and slide off with a clatter. Amy? It couldn't be, but there she was, looking just like she had when he first met her, all skinny legs and wild hair.

Suddenly he was twelve years old again: a gangly, awkward boy staring at a girl who held all the secrets he'd ever dreamed about.

“Hawke?” McLellan called from inside. “What's going on out there?”

Jason blinked and looked at the little girl again, his eyes adjusting to the dark. Like Amy, but not Amy. Amy's daughter. She was squatting down next to the crooked chimney with crumbling mortar, one hand resting on it for balance. Her blond hair was in tangles; her lips were trembling, eyes wild with fear. She had on pale pajamas that shimmered in the moonlight.

“Remember me? I'm Jason,” he said, holding out his hand. “And I'm going to get you out of here.”

Piper was frowning at the giant sinkhole that had appeared in her tiny backyard.

She had put a lot of work into this yard, pulling up the sickly grass and relandscaping with drought-tolerant plants: sedum, purple sage, sheep fescue, deer grass, desert mallow. A crushed stone path led to a small patio shaded by an avocado tree, where she sometimes sat with a good book and a glass of sauvignon blanc.

Now it was all falling into the earth. The neighbors were there, gawking and expressing alarm (how big could the sinkhole get? would it swallow the neighborhood?). Her sister, Margot, was there, too, so hugely pregnant she waddled around off balance, like a drunk penguin.

Jason was not there, a fact that irked Piper but did not surprise her.

“Be careful,” Piper warned her sister as the avocado tree was swallowed up, and knew right away that she shouldn't have spoken; thoughts and words have power, and if you allow your worst fears to form fully, you run the danger of bringing them to life.

As if on cue, Margot stumbled too close to the edge. Piper reached for her, but it was too late. The hole, which had been growing ever wider, threatening to swallow everything, took her sister deep down into the earth, so deep that they couldn't even hear her scream.

In the distance, alarms rang. But they sounded funny. More like music.

Piper opened her eyes, found herself in her own bed.

She rolled over, looked at the clock: 4:32 a.m. Across the room, her phone was playing Madonna's “Like a Prayer”—Margot's ringtone.

“Oh my God,” Piper gasped, jumping out of bed—the baby. It was seven-thirty in Vermont, and Margot wouldn't call this early unless something was really, truly wrong.

Piper snatched up the phone she'd left on the dresser.

“Margot?” Piper said, half expecting it to be Jason on the other end with terrible news. The worst news of all, even—
we've lost them both.
She shuddered as she recalled her sister slipping into the sinkhole, felt herself reaching for her, her hands grabbing nothing but air.

“Piper,” Margot said, and Piper felt a weight lift from her chest. But she felt it return when she heard the strain in her sister's voice as she continued: “I'm sorry to wake you. Something's happened.”

“The baby?”

Margot was eight and a half months pregnant. It was her third pregnancy. The first had ended in a miscarriage at sixteen weeks, and the second in a stillbirth at thirty weeks—a baby boy they had named Alex. Margot and Jason were trying again, though Margot had said that if she lost this baby, that was it. No more. She simply couldn't bear it.

“No, no. The baby's fine.”

“Jason?”

“No, not Jason. It's Amy. She…Oh God, Piper, it's awful.” Margot was crying.

“Jesus, what happened?” Piper asked. She flipped on the light and blinked at the sudden brightness. The room around her came to life—the queen-sized bed with its snowy duvet, the old rocking chair in the corner, the maple dresser with the mirror hanging above it. She caught sight of her own reflection; her face was pale and panicked, and her white nightgown made her seem like an apparition, gauzy and ethereal, not quite there.

Her sister snuffled and sobbed, and at last was able to speak in partial sentences, voice shaking.

“Last night…they're saying Amy shot and killed Mark and their little boy, Levi, and then herself out at the motel. Lou—that's her daughter?—she's alive. The police found her crouched on the roof. She climbed out a window and hid there….I can't imagine how she…what she…” Margot trailed off.

Piper said nothing. She couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.

After a moment, Margot went on:

“She didn't just shoot them, Piper. They were…all cut up. Butchered.”

Margot started to cry and gulp again. Piper forced herself to take deep breaths. Behind the shock and gut punch of loss, another feeling was there, worming its way to the surface: fear.

Piper looked over at the framed photo she kept on her dresser: Amy, freckle-faced and smiling as she stood between Piper and Margot, her arms draped heavily over each of their shoulders. They all looked impossibly happy, grinning up from the bottom of the empty swimming pool, white roller skates with bright laces on their feet. This photo had been in her bedroom at home when she was growing up, in her dorm room at college, and in every apartment and house she'd lived in since.

“When was the last time you talked to Amy?” Margot asked at last, the phone crackling, her voice staticky, like it was coming in from a far-off radio station.

“It's been a while,” Piper said, feeling light-headed, queasy. And guilty. Margot had urged her, over the years, to reach out to Amy, to try harder. But Amy had made it clear after that summer that she didn't want to remain friends. They hadn't lost touch completely—she and Amy sent each other occasional Christmas cards with impersonal messages and, in Amy's case, stiff-looking school photos of her kids posed against colored backdrops. They were friends on Facebook, and now and then promised each other that they'd get together soon. But when Piper made it back to London to visit Margot every couple of years, the time always seemed to fly by—Amy had to work, or the kids were sick, or Piper was just there for a couple of days to help paint the nursery. Whatever the excuse, she and Amy never got together.
Next time,
they promised each other.
Next time.

Maybe Margot was right—she should have made more of an effort. She should have called Amy to check in from time to time, to ask how the kids were, how Mark's job was going, to talk the way women talked. After all, she'd let herself imagine it often enough. She had an ongoing imaginary conversation with Amy that had gone on for years. In her mind, Amy was the first person to get all the big news: each of Piper's relationships and breakups; the steady rise of the video-production studio she and her friend Helen had started six years ago; her scare last year with the lump in her breast that turned out to be benign. But the reality was, Piper never actually picked up the phone. It was easier, more comforting, to go on talking to the Amy in her head—the Amy of her childhood, not the adult version with two children whose names she could never quite remember and a husband that Piper knew only through Facebook photos.

She stared harder at the photo on the dresser, tried to remember that particular day, but all that came back was the sound the wheels of their roller skates had made on the bottom of the pool, the smell of Amy's Love's Baby Soft, and the way Amy's arm around her made her feel invincible. Who had taken the picture? Amy's grandmother, most likely. The image was tilted at an awkward angle, as though the earth were off its axis that day.

“There's something else,” Margot breathed into the phone, voice low and shaky. “Something that Jason said.” Jason was one of the half-dozen officers in the tiny London Police Department. In a town where the biggest crimes were deer jacking and the occasional break-in, Piper could imagine how they were handling a gruesome murder-suicide.

“What was it?” Piper said.

“He said they found an old photo with…at the scene.”

“A photo?” For a crazy second, Piper imagined that Margot was talking about her photo, the photo on the dresser.

“Yeah. It sounds like the one we found that summer. Remember?”

“Yes,” Piper breathed. She remembered it too well. Amy's mom and her aunt Sylvie as kids, in old-fashioned dresses, cradling fat chickens against their chests. It had been taken years before Sylvie disappeared. So—a different photo, of different girls; a different innocent childhood.

“Well, someone had
written
something on it. None of this is being talked about on the news,” Margot went on. “Not yet. No one in the department can figure out what it means. The theory is that Amy was just crazy. Jason asked me if I had any idea what it was about, and I said I didn't. But I think he knows I was lying.”

Piper felt her throat getting tighter. She swallowed hard, and made herself ask the question. “What did it say?”

There was a long pause. At last, her sister spoke.

“ ‘29 Rooms.' ”

“Oh Jesus,” said Piper. She took in a breath, felt the room tilting around her. Suddenly she was twelve again and skating around at the bottom of that old pool with the cracked cement and peeling paint. Up above, Margot was going in backward circles around the edge, and Amy was whispering a secret in Piper's ear—breath hot, words desperate.

“I'll be on the next plane,” promised Piper. “Don't do anything. Don't say a word to anyone. Not even to Jason. Not until I get there. Promise?”

“I promise,” Margot said, her voice sounding far off, a kite bobbing at the end of a long string Piper was barely able to hold on to.