The Night Sister

Go down, Amy whispered in her ear. Or are you…?

“I am not chickenshit,” Piper said aloud, and, to prove her point, she swung her legs over, down into the opening, feet finding the rungs of the metal ladder, while she kept the tire iron clenched in her right hand. Slowly, she descended—all alone, not even a flashlight to guide her.

At last, her feet found the floor.

And something touched her.

An insectlike buzzing, the rapid flutter of wings against her backside.

And there was music.

Madonna.

Her phone! Only her phone vibrating in the back pocket of her jeans. She grabbed it and answered.

“Can you pick up some saline nasal drops?” Margot asked.

“What?” Piper said, trying to steady her breathing.

“And a bulb syringe. I don’t think I put them on your list. It’s in case the baby catches a cold or is too stuffed up to nurse. Are you finding everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” Piper lied, swallowing hard. She was sure that she felt eyes on her—that she wasn’t alone down here. “No problem.” She peered anxiously into the darkness, tried to make out shapes, any sign of movement. The room didn’t feel long abandoned to her. The air smelled damp and musty, but there was something else mixed in with it—something sweet and fruity that reminded her of the smell of Amy’s lip gloss.

Piper’s stomach tightened, as did her grip on the tire iron.

Was the skeleton still there, lying where they’d left it?

Amy had ordered Margot and Piper, made them promise, never to discuss what they’d found in the oubliette that day in 1989. “If you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll kill you,” Amy said. “I swear it.” And, what with Piper’s hospitalization, her mother’s banning the girls from the motel, Amy’s telling them to stay away, and the start of school, it was easy to keep the secret, even convince herself that maybe it had never happened. Through the years since, Piper would sometimes catch Margot looking at her funny, and she imagined her sister was thinking about Amy and the motel and everything that had happened. A few times, usually when she was drunk, Piper herself almost brought it up, but could never quite find the words. The sisters kept their promise.

“Piper?” Margot said now, voice suspicious. “You are at the drugstore, right?”

Damn. Margot knew her too well. But if Margot even suspected Piper had gone into the tower, she’d freak, probably call Jason and the whole London Police Department to come escort her out safely.

“Of course,” Piper said, smiling, concentrating as hard as she could on sounding like she was actually in a brightly lit drugstore, perusing the aisles for new baby paraphernalia. She closed her eyes and imagined she was there, visualized herself standing in front of a display of thermometers. “Working my way down the list. It’s taking a while, though—I didn’t realize I’d have so many decisions to make. Do you have any idea how many kinds of rectal thermometers there are?”

“Piper—”

“Gotta go. It’s crazy in here, and I can hardly hear you. I’ll get the nose drops—can’t have Junior being all stuffed up. See you soon.” She hung up before Margot could say anything more.

Then she turned her phone around so that she could use the faint firefly glow it gave off to see what she could. She held it out and waved it around, scanning the dark landscape of the twenty-ninth room.

To her great relief, there was no skeleton curled against the wall.