The Night Sister

She jumped out of the car, went around to the rear, opened the hatchback, pulled up the carpeted panel, and grabbed a tire iron. She wasn’t going in there unarmed.

She stood, looking at the great crooked tower before her, the metal tire iron clenched in her hands. This was a stupid idea and she knew it. She should get right back in the car, lock the door, and call Jason at the police station to tell him someone was sneaking around at the motel. But that would mean having to admit to him that she was at the motel. He’d probably ask her to pack her bags and get on the next plane back to Los Angeles. And what if whoever was in there got away—sneaked out through some opening in the wall of the disintegrating tower—while she hid quaking in the car, awaiting rescue like a fairy-tale damsel?

She stepped toward the doorway, eyes searching inside the decrepit tower for any sign of movement. Outside, the cement was crumbling, and the whole structure leaned a good ten degrees toward the house.

It looked like an accident waiting to happen.

She peeked in over the X of boards nailed over the doorway. The floorboards looked rotten, and the ladder that led up to the second floor was missing several rungs. Above her, the word Danger seemed to glow like the once-upon-a-time motel sign must have.

Tower Motel, 28 Rooms, Pool, Vacancy.

She took a breath. Heard Amy’s voice in her ear: “Don’t be a chickenshit.”





1989





Piper


“I am not a chickenshit,” Piper said, her whole body rigid as she stood before the open door to the tower.

“So—let’s go,” Amy said, sweeping her arm grandly toward the entrance in a you-first gesture. “We’ve got a dungeon to find.”

Piper’s shin throbbed out a warning, a Morse-code message of pain, as she remembered falling through the floorboards. She didn’t want to go in there. Didn’t want to go prying at the edges of floorboards, shining the flashlight Amy had taken from the kitchen drawer into the shadows, like some wannabe teen sleuth. If there really was a dungeon down there (Surely there couldn’t be? Why on earth would Amy’s grandfather have built a dungeon?), she sure as hell didn’t want to see it. She didn’t think Margot should, either.

“Maybe you should go home,” she said to her sister, who was marching along with purpose, looking more like a little adult than a ten-year-old kid walking into a death trap.

“I’m not scared.”

Maybe you should be. Maybe we should all be.

“Yeah, come on, Piper,” Amy groaned. “Take a hint from Little Sis here. Let’s go.”

Piper followed Amy into the tower. She walked slowly, testing the boards beneath her feet with each careful step. They felt springy, flimsy. How had she not noticed this the other day?

Margot stood in the doorway, eyes wide as she watched.

Amy was walking without care, stomping down on the boards, trying to pry up the edges of them with her fingernails. “I don’t see anything that looks like a trapdoor,” she said.

“Remember upstairs,” Margot said. “There were two layers. The actual floor, and then the boards below for the ceiling.”

“Right,” Amy said. “So maybe the door isn’t right here. Maybe it’s just a couple of loose boards. Come on, Piper. You start at that side; I’ll start over here. Check every board to see if it’s loose. We’ll keep going until we meet in the middle.”

Piper nodded. “Margot, you stay outside and watch. If we fall through or anything happens, you run up to the house and get Amy’s grandma, okay?”

Amy laughed. “If you go get Gram, you better make sure we’re dead first. Because we totally will be if she finds out we’ve been in the tower.”

“Just be careful,” Margot said, hovering in the doorway.

Piper thought it was way too late for that.

She got down on her hands and knees on the wide knotty-pine planks that made up the floor. She imagined Clarence Slater, a young man then, having the boards milled, laying them down himself, pounding nails, building his wife her own Tower of London.