The Night Sister

Lou was silent for a moment, perhaps imagining what she might have seen if she’d gone inside. Piper struggled to keep herself from picturing it.

When she spoke again, her voice was shaking. “Finally, Jay Jay came out and found me, and he carried me back inside. My face was pressed against his chest. He told me to keep my eyes closed, not to open them until he told me to.”

“Jay Jay?” Piper asked. She’d forgotten that Amy used to call Jason that. But how did Lou know?

“Mama’s friend. He’s a police officer. He came to the house to visit Mama last week. He must have said something that made her sad, ’cause when I walked in that afternoon, she was crying. Jay Jay was holding her hand.”

Piper let out a little gasp, then faked a cough to try to cover it up.

“But that night,” Lou continued, “when he carried me through the house and told me not to open my eyes, he was the one crying. And I knew that whatever had happened was real, real bad, to make a police officer cry.”

Piper thought of a hundred things she could say, maybe should say—words of comfort or empathy, reassurance—but everything seemed grossly, insultingly inadequate. The refrigerator hummed. The clock on the stove ticked. Soda bubbled and ticked in their cans. A radio played off in another room, the music so faint Piper wondered if she might be imagining it. She thought of the little transistor radio Amy used to carry around tuned to the top-forty station.

“One time,” Lou said suddenly, “Mama took me to the city and I saw a little stone man with wings carved into the top of a building.”

“A gargoyle?” Piper asked.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “That’s what I imagined I was up there on that roof, holding still, trying not to breathe. A gargoyle.”

—

Crystal returned from the store an hour later with a carton of cigarettes and an enormous bottle of generic diet soda. She soon made it clear that Piper’s babysitting services were no longer needed. As Piper drove back to Margot’s house, she replayed Lou’s simple, terrible story over and over in her head, sorting through all the details one by one.

What had Jason been doing at Amy’s last week? Surely, if Margot had known about this visit, she would have mentioned it to Piper. Which meant he’d kept it a secret, but why? Each possibility she let herself imagine was worse than the last.

But something else felt wrong about Lou’s story, too.

The realization was gradual, the way night falls in the summer—the light fading slowly, so slowly it’s barely perceptible—and then you see fireflies, stars. There all the time, but only now visible.

Jason had clearly said that Lou had blood on her feet when he found her on the roof. If she’d crept out the window when she heard the first shot, stayed there perched like a statue while the nightmare inside went on, where did the blood come from?





1989





Piper


The condos where Piper and Margot lived with their mother were only a short walk from the motel, on the back side of the hill. Sometimes, when Piper walked down the path that led to the field that surrounded Amy’s swimming pool, she thought of Narnia. Of how going to the motel was almost like stepping through the wardrobe and into another world. Amy and her grandmother were about as exciting and exotic and otherworldly as you could get. Especially now that they’d found Sylvie’s suitcase and had a real live mystery to try to solve.