The Night Sister

He peeked out the window and saw it was all clear. He opened the door slowly, listening, looking both ways. The girls still hadn’t come out of the house.

He darted across the driveway and went straight for the tower. As he ran, he thought he saw movement in the shadows that gathered around the doorway.

Had he missed the girls somehow? Were they back there? If they were, it was too late now: they’d have seen him. He’d play it cool, tell Amy he had something for her. He kept going, got to the doorway, and peeked in.

“Hello?” he called.

Nothing. No one.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been someone there. He could almost smell it in the air.

“Anyone there?” he called again, looking up at the ceiling. He could climb the ladder to check the two floors above him. But, somehow, he couldn’t make himself.

He set the cigarettes and note down in the center of the ground floor and ran back outside, across the driveway, and to Room 4.





Piper


“Grandma,” Amy cooed in her sweetest voice, “tell us about Aunt Sylvie.”

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.