The Night Sister

Margot looked at him for a long time. “So she called you?”


“It seemed strange to me, too, believe me. Kind of random. But she said she remembered me as being objective. She wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t involved.”

“Did she ever do this before?” Margot asked. “Call you and ask you to come over to talk? To be objective?”

Jason shook his head. “No. It was the first time, I promise.”

“Why, then? Why did she call you? Why now?”

“I don’t know,” Jason admitted. He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand.

“And she just talked about her mother?”

“Pretty much.”

“What about? What was she so upset about?”

“Like I said,” Jason explained, “her mom had gotten pretty delusional. She was saying some whacked-out stuff.”

Margot was watching him carefully.

“What kind of whacked-out stuff?” she asked, twisting the covers.

No point lying now. God only knew how much the kid had told Piper, or how much of the conversation she might have actually heard in the kitchen that day. “Apparently, Rose believed that there were monsters at the motel.” He chuckled nervously. “She was trying to convince Amy.”

“Monsters?” Margot repeated.

“I know, crazy. Poor old Rose is a little off in the head,” Jason said. “I guess the years of hard drinking kind of took their toll.”

He shifted from one foot to the other and looked at his wife, who was now all the way over at the edge of the bed. Neither of them spoke.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Margot asked.

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

Margot snorted out a disgusted laugh. “Upset me? Going to see an old friend, an old girlfriend even, wouldn’t have upset me. Not if you’d come home and told me about it. But the fact that you lied about it, hid it from me—what am I supposed to do with that, Jason?”

“I never lied, I—”

She shook her head. “Sometimes a lie isn’t what’s said, but what’s unsaid. An omission.”

“And what about the things you hide from me?” Jason snapped. He felt his temper rising, though he tried to rein it in. “Your omissions?”

“I have never hidden anything from you, and you know it!” Margot snapped back.

Jason took a breath, tried to keep his voice calm.

“You told me you didn’t know what ‘29 Rooms’ meant.”

Margot’s face shifted from angry to guilty. She looked away.

“You do keep things from me,” he went on quietly. “Important things. You always have. I’m not an idiot, Margot. I know you, Piper, and Amy were up to something that summer, and that whatever it was ended your friendship. I was the outsider then, and I guess I’m still the outsider now.”

He watched her, waiting to see if she might finally tell him, finally let him in. But she remained silent, her lips tightly pursed.





1989





Piper


“I swear,” Amy said as she fitted the master key into the lock on Room 3 and turned it. “It was an actual, for-real ghost.”

Their plan was to search each motel room for clues about what might have happened to Sylvie. Piper doubted they’d find anything, but, then again, she’d never have guessed they’d find long-lost Aunt Sylvie’s suitcase hidden under the floorboards of the tower.

“Ghosts aren’t real,” Margot said matter-of-factly as they entered the dusty, long-abandoned motel room. Just as with Rooms 1 and 2, there was nothing unusual in this one. A bed with the same ugly paisley bedspread, chewed through in spots by mice. The ceiling was crumbling, and the dim turquoise carpet was stained from water damage. There was a big scorch mark on the floor near the desk, in the exact shape of an iron.

Piper checked under the bed, and only found the foul smell of moldering carpet. Margot peeked into the bathroom, rattling the rings to the disintegrating shower curtain as she pulled it back.