The Night Sister

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.”