The Night Sister

“Nope,” Amy said. “That’s an old skeleton key. It wouldn’t work in this kind of lock.”


Amy picked up a rock and used it to finish the job on the window, carefully pushing all the bits of jagged glass from the edges. Then she pulled an old rusty lawn chair over and climbed up, to hoist herself through.

“Careful,” Piper called. “Don’t cut yourself.”

“Whoa!” Amy called, her voice echoing. “Holy time warp.”

Piper climbed onto the chair and peered through the open window. There was a scattering of glass on the floor, and Amy was standing in a tiny kitchen, opening cabinets.

“I want to see, too,” Margot protested.

Piper turned back to her little sister. “It’s too dangerous. There’s broken glass everywhere, and who knows how sturdy the floor is.” She pointed down at her leg. “You don’t want to end up like me, do you? Besides, someone needs to be lookout. If Amy’s grandma catches us, we’re in big trouble.”

Grandma Charlotte had gone out to the grocery store. They should be all clear, but you never knew.

Piper pulled herself up and shimmied through the window, crunching on broken glass once she got inside. Her shin was throbbing. The gash where the splinter had gone in was still red and puffy and hot to the touch when she got up this morning.

“That looks bad,” Margot had said. “Maybe we should tell Mom.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Piper had said in her most deadly-serious big-sister voice.

She’d slathered the wound in bacitracin, covered it with Band-Aids, and worn jeans in spite of the heat.

The air inside the trailer was musty. A thin plywood veneer covered the walls and ceiling. It was peeling and had come completely off in places. The turquoise cushions on the two benches at the table were full of holes, their stuffing pulled out by generations of mice and squirrels.

“Check it out,” Amy said. “Everything’s still here.” She opened the cabinet doors, showing Piper the stacks of cups, plates, bowls, and pots and pans. There were even some ancient cans in the cupboard—string beans, creamed corn, Campbell’s tomato soup—swollen, rusted, and surely festering with botulism.

A small bedroom sat at one end of the trailer. Above the bed was an old movie poster: Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock movie Amy had been telling her about. Piper opened the tiny closet and found it stuffed full of shirts on hangers, coats, a pile of jeans stacked on the shelf, boots and shoes on the floor.

“So what’s the story with this guy Fenton?” Piper asked.

“I asked Grandma Charlotte last night and she gave me the lowdown. Turns out he was my grandfather’s, like, third cousin twice removed or something. His parents died when he was little, and he was kind of adopted by my grandpa’s parents. He grew up on the farm, just like my grandpa, but he was way younger. When Grandpa went off to war, Fenton stayed behind and worked on the farm. Later, when they turned the farm into the motel, Fenton was kind of the handyman, helping build stuff, fix stuff, whatever. But after the highway got built, everything started to fall apart. Fenton left one day to go out west.” Amy shrugged. “That’s the story my grandma tells, anyway—but you know how full of holes her stories can be.” She poked around in the closet. “You’ve gotta wonder, why would this guy leave all his clothes?”

“Maybe he left in a hurry?” Piper suggested. “Maybe he was in trouble or something and had to get away fast.”

There were books and magazines stacked all over the place—on the kitchen counters, the floor beside the bed, along the windowsills—slim paperbacks with yellowed pages and old magazines with names like Weird Tales, Fantastic Adventures, Astounding Science Fiction.