The Night Sister

28 Rooms, Pool, No Vacancy.

Piper flipped down her turn signal, her eyes on the tower. She recalled Lou’s description of the sound of the gun, the footsteps.

Could Amy possibly have shot her husband and son?

Or had there been someone else there?

Something else?

She remembered the notes left for Amy in the typewriter all those years ago, and Amy’s insistence that Sylvie’s ghost had come back and was visiting her in her bedroom at night. The fuzzy Polaroid photo she waved around as proof.

The old gravel driveway was nearly washed out. Piper moved slowly; the car bumped as she passed the leaning stone tower and the long shadow it cast. She shivered.

Just a building, she told herself.

But it wasn’t just a building, was it?

She knew the truth.

There was no way she was going in the tower, not today, not ever, in spite of her sister’s guilt trip. She’d just tell Margot the tower was too dangerous, the wood floors rotted through. I was thinking about my own safety, she’d say, about how I didn’t want your baby to grow up without her kooky aunt Piper.

Kooky. That was something Amy might have called her. Back then.

Suddenly she was twelve again. Gangly and awkward, all legs, feathered hair.

Na?ve. Just so young.

There was so much we didn’t know.

But there were also the things she had known. She’d known that she loved Amy; known it, but never admitted it to anyone, even herself. And somehow or other, in spite all the affairs that came after, both men and women, nothing compared to that wild adolescent longing she felt for Amy. It was Amy she went back to in her mind.

Amy. Always Amy.

Piper passed the first building of units, Rooms 1 through 14. Some of the windows were broken, and the roof had collapsed in three places. She remembered searching through Room 4 and finding binoculars, Amy’s sunglasses, the heavy old key ring and key. Was the lock still broken? If anyone could get inside, they might even be sitting there now, peering between the slits of the ruined plastic blinds.

She pulled the car up to the main house, shut off the engine, and sat for a minute, listening to the car tick as it cooled.

Crystal was right—the police were gone. There was no sign of crime-scene tape, no clue that anything horrible had happened here. It looked like any other badly neglected house in rural New England: shutters hanging unevenly, paint peeling, the yard and once-upon-a-time gardens overrun with weeds. It really didn’t look all that different from the way Piper remembered it when she was a kid. A little smaller, maybe (didn’t everything look smaller once you grew up?), a little more…dark. Was that the right word?

Piper half-expected to look up at the dormer window on the right and see Amy looking down, waving. Come up. I have something to show you. Something exciting. Sylvie’s left another message. She came back last night, stood at the foot of my bed. Here, I’ve got a picture….

Piper got out of the car, blinking up at Amy’s old bedroom window. There was no movement there or at any other window. No one home.

It’s because they’re all dead, a little voice reminded Piper, but she shook off the thought, made herself walk to the front steps, climb the crumbling concrete and stone, and push open the heavy front door.





1989





Piper


“Oh my God, I’m so happy to see you!” Amy threw her arms around Piper, buried her face against Piper’s neck. Piper could feel her hot breath, and then (did Piper imagine it?) Amy gave her the tiniest little nibble, her teeth grazing the tender skin just to the left of her windpipe.

“She’s left us another note,” Amy said now, voice rising like bubbles in a cold glass of ginger ale, going up, up, up, then bursting, tickling someone’s nose.

“In the typewriter?” Margot asked, coming through the front door behind Piper.