The Night Sister

“Quite a coincidence,” Tony said. “Louisa’s whole family being slaughtered a couple days ago, now her school friend.”


“What if…” Jason said. “What if Louisa was the target all along? The other girl just happened to be with her?”

He thought of Margot’s insistence—and his own gut feeling, if he was being honest—that Amy hadn’t killed her family at the motel. What if they were right, and the real killer was out there still? But he’d left a survivor, a potential witness.

Then he remembered his visit with Rose Slater.

“Do you believe in monsters, Jason?” she’d asked.

“No, ma’am,” he’d told her.

“Neither did my daughter. And look what happened to her.”

And now look what had happened to little Kendra Thompson. Jason wondered if she’d believed in monsters.

“We need to find Louisa Bellavance,” Tony barked. “Now!”





Rose


The girl kept interrupting, asking all the wrong questions. She didn’t understand. Once the evening med cart came around—and it would any minute now—they’d watch her take her pills, and twenty minutes later she’d be out. At least, that was the case when she actually swallowed the pills, which she usually did. The next thing she knew, it would be morning, and the day nurse would be coming in to pull back her curtains and give her her morning pills and talk about the weather. They’d put an alarm on her bed last week (which Rose allowed them to think she couldn’t disable, though of course she could, just like she could tuck her sedatives into her cheek and spit them out into a Kleenex once she was alone, when she so chose—she wasn’t an idiot, despite what they thought).

They weren’t going to lose her again. It looked bad for the staff to have a resident go missing, as Rose had, time after time, for hours.

Sure, folks wandered. It’s what people with dementia did. They confidently waltzed into the wrong room, and cried out in alarm at the stranger in their bed. They went into the closet thinking it was the john, or down to the day room at midnight to soothe the baby they thought they heard crying. Many of them were just looking for the way out, the way home. But the staff always found them somewhere on the locked ward right away. Not Rose. Rose’s disappearances had confounded them. They always took place at night. She’d be discovered missing during rounds, some time after midnight. They’d search all night and into the morning for her. Then, inexplicably, there she’d be, back in her bed, by daylight, wondering what all the fuss was about.

“I’ve been here all along,” she’d tell them.

“Well, you must have been invisible,” a nurse once snapped.

Rose had smiled at that. “That’s me,” she said. “The Invisible Woman.”

The one nobody sees for what she truly is.

The staff all called her that from then on: “How’s our Invisible Woman doing today?” Not to her face, but to each other. Sometimes they called her “our Houdini.”

She liked the air of magic it gave her. She didn’t like how they always prefaced it with “our,” but she knew it was the truth. She was theirs. Their prisoner. Their problem.

Only they didn’t know the half of it. Could never have guessed.

Eventually, the staff decided enough was enough: Rose might hurt herself, and the facility would be at fault. They installed the bed alarm and began giving her enough sleeping meds at night to tranquilize a cow.