The Night Sister

by Jennifer McMahon

  “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.

  Since Piper and Margot had arrived this morning, Amy had been insisting that some ethereal creature had visited her in the night.

  “I swear,” Amy said. “I wasn’t dreaming. I woke up and it was just like…there…at the foot of my bed.”

  “And what’d it look like again?” Margot asked. “A dog with a human face, or a human with a dog face?”

  Amy banged a drawer open, pulled out a mildewed Gideon’s Bible. “You’ve gotta believe me! It was real! You believe me, don’t you, Piper?”

  Piper nodded. “Sure. I believe you saw something. Or thought you did.”

  Amy shook her head and dropped the old Bible back in the drawer. “There’s no thought involved. I opened my eyes and it was there, just kind of hovering, watching me sleep in the dark. I got a glimpse of a pale face, but it turned away, and then it was, like, all covered in fur, or like it had a fur suit on or something. And then it was like it had this dog face. With a snout and stuff. But then it was gone! Poof.”

  “Maybe you just thought you were awake but you were still dreaming?” Piper suggested. “That happened to me once, I—”

  “I was totally awake. This was not a dream!”

  “Maybe it was Bigfoot,” Margot suggested.

  Amy blew out an exasperated breath, making the pink bangs fly out. “Would you get serious? It was not freaking Bigfoot!”

  “Okay,” Margot said. “So it was a pale-faced, furry ghost who just disappeared when you turned on the light?”

  “Ugh, you guys are hopeless. Just forget it. If it comes back again, I’ll get proof. I’ll sleep with a camera next to my bed,” Amy said, and then sighed. “Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing in this room.”

  “Three down, twenty-five to go,” Piper said. They left Room 3, locking the door behind them, and moved to Room 4.

  “Lock on this one’s broken,” Amy said, sticking the master key back in her pocket as she pushed the door open. She stepped into the room, then froze. “You smell that?”

  “Cigarette smoke,” Piper said. The other rooms had smelled faintly of it, but this was much stronger.

  And there was something else different, too. This room felt…lived in.

  Amy nodded and walked over to the window; an ashtray sat on the sill, with a barely smoked cigarette crushed in it.

  “Someone’s been here. This is no twenty-year-old cigarette butt.”

  “Your grandma, maybe?” Margot said, sounding unconvinced.

  Amy shook her head. “Nah. Why would she come all the way down here to smoke? Besides, she only smokes Virginia Slims. This isn’t one of hers.”

  Piper got down and looked under the bed. “Um—guys?—there’s stuff under here. A bunch of stuff, it looks like.”

  Amy pushed her aside and reached under to pull out a heavy pair of binoculars, then a red plastic flashlight. She switched it on. It worked. She dragged out a plastic two-liter Coke bottle full of water. Then a small paper bag, like what some kids carried lunch to school in.

  “What the…” Amy said as she opened the bag and peered inside. She dumped the contents onto the bed: a skeleton key on a heavy ring, sunglasses, a silver earring, a few pieces of Tower Motel stationery, an old glass soda bottle, and a book of matches.

  “What is all this stuff?” Margot asked, leaning in.

  Amy picked up the earring. “This is mine. So are the sunglasses.”

  “Creepy,” Margot said.

  “Yeah,” Piper agreed, “maybe you’ve got your very own stalker. I mean, why would you have binoculars in here unless you were using them to watch the house? There’s nothing else around.”

  “Maybe it’s the Bigfoot guy!” Margot said. “Mr. Man-Dog. Maybe he’s been living here, watching you!”

  “You should tell your grandma,” Piper said.

  “No way! She’d probably call the cops, and they’d come and start poking around.”

  Piper didn’t think that was such a bad idea and almost said so, but she didn’t want to sound like a baby.

  “I say we put everything back,” Amy said. “Then we just keep an eye on it. We check the room several times every day. Maybe we’ll catch our smoker.”

  Piper agreed, but didn’t like it.

  She wasn’t so sure she really wanted to catch the smoker, and even less sure that the smoker would respond very kindly to being caught by a bunch of girls.

  And what if Amy’s ghost was real—what if whoever had been staying here had sneaked up to the house and into Amy’s room to watch her sleep?

  Jason

  Jason knew there was no going back to Room 4. They’d be watching it now. Maybe they’d even set some sort of trap. He watched from the edge of the woods as they went into one room after another, until all twenty-eight had been visited.

  What were they looking for?

  When they came out of the last one, they were tired, arguing. It was nearly dinnertime.

  Margot said something about Bigfoot.

  Amy said something about a ghost. Then she said words Jason caught clearly: “If it comes back tonight, I’ll take a picture.”

  He watched Margot and Piper head back to the condos through the path in the woods. After waiting five minutes, just to be sure, he started toward the path himself, staying just at
the edge of the woods that bordered the Slaters’ meadow.

  “That you, Jay Jay?” Amy’s voice called out from far away, back down at the motel.

  He turned. Amy was down by the pool, holding the binoculars from Room 4. His binoculars. She had them pointed right at him.

  He stopped, gave a nervous wave.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Walking.”

  “Duh!”

  “I’ve gotta get home. I’m late for supper.”

  “Come back tomorrow, then. First thing. There’s something I want to ask you.”

  He nodded. “Tomorrow morning,” he called down.

  —

  The next day, he was up early. He gulped down some orange juice and a bowl of raisin bran, then ran back to the motel and waited for Amy by the pool. She came out of the house and crossed the cracked patio, with the binoculars hanging from her neck on their heavy leather strap. She was carrying a square piece of stiff paper in her hand.

  “Okay, Mr. Scientist. What do you make of this?”

  She thrust it at him. It was square photo with a white frame—a Polaroid. He squinted down at it.

  “What do you see?” Amy asked.

  He thought carefully as he looked at the photo. Was this some kind of Rorschach test?

  “It’s all blurry,” he said at last.

  “Don’t you see it?” Amy asked.

  Clearly, he was failing the test. “Um, what is it I’m supposed to see?” It was dark and grainy, and there, off to the left, was a blur of white.

  “The ghost!” Amy said, snatching the photo from him; she jabbed her finger at the white blur. “I took this in my room last night. Our house is totally haunted. Maybe the whole motel is! That’s what I wanted to ask you about. You said you saw someone go into the tower. Someone dressed in blue, right?”

  “Right.” He nodded.

  “But when you went inside, whoever it was had vanished. I think there’s a ghost, and you’ve seen it”—she jabbed a finger at him—“and I’ve seen it.” She touched her chest with her thumb. “And I think I know who it is.”

  “Who?”

  She groaned impatiently. “I can’t tell you that! Not just yet, anyway. Piper and Margot, they don’t believe me. But they haven’t seen it yet, right? And we have.”

  “But I—”

  “Please, tell me you believe me, Jay Jay. Please, please, please. Tell me that what you saw might have been a ghost.”

  Jason hesitated, thinking. He didn’t believe in ghosts. And the figure in that blurry photo in Amy’s hand could’ve been anything. Yet here was Amy, practically begging him.

  “Sure,” he said, “I guess it could have been a ghost.”

  “I knew it!” she exclaimed. “I knew you’d believe me, even if no one else did.” She threw her arms around his neck, knocking him off balance a little. He started to sway backward, but Amy caught him, pulled him up, and then kept pulling him closer, until her lips were on his.

  In that moment, Jason believed wholeheartedly in the ghost of the Tower Motel.

  Piper

  From Piper’s vantage point on the little hillside between the woods and the empty pool, she could clearly see what was happening in there: Amy kissing Jason Hawke. Margot, just behind Piper, hadn’t seen yet.

  “Margot, run ahead and scope out the trailer,” Piper ordered, her voice smooth but steely. “See if you can find a way in; just don’t go in until we get there.” Once her sister had skipped off, Piper approached the edge of the pool. Amy had a pair of binoculars around her neck. Piper realized with a rush of anger that they were probably the ones they’d found yesterday in Room 4—even though the plan had been to put everything back exactly the way they found it.

  “Oh, hey, Piper,” Amy said when she looked up and saw her standing there.

  Her voice was light and cheerful, like everything was perfectly normal. Like being in the pool kissing Jason was exactly where she was supposed to be. Piper said nothing. She didn’t dare open her mouth, worried a scream would come out. She shoved her trembling hands deep into the pockets of her jeans as Jason, bashful, smiled.

  “What’s he doing here?” Piper said at last.

  “He came to talk to me about something,” Amy said. “But he’s going home now. Right, Jay Jay?”

  Jason looked confused and then wounded. “Huh? I…”

  “I’ll see you around. I’ve got plans with Piper and Margot today.”

  Amy was holding something in her hand. Something flat and square. A Polaroid picture.

  Jason climbed the ladder out of the pool, but then he turned back to Amy. “Maybe I can stop by later?” he said. Amy looked at Piper and rolled her eyes in a dramatic, can-you-believe-him kind of way.

  No, Piper couldn’t believe him. But what she really couldn’t believe was that Amy had kissed him again.

  “I’m kinda busy all day,” Amy told him. “But another time. Totally.”

  He nodded and sulked off.

  “What was that about?” Piper asked, voice shaky.

  “Nothing. It was nothing, Piper.”

  “It didn’t look like nothing.”

  “Well, it was.”

  “Why’d you kiss him again?”

  “God, what are you, my mother? The kissing police?”

  “No, I…”

  “Look at this,” Amy said, holding the photo out for Piper to inspect. “What do you see?”

  Piper couldn’t see much. The picture looked all messed up, like the chemicals hadn’t developed right. “It kind of looks like a butterfly.”

  Amy shook her head. “The ghost came back last night. I got a picture. This is proof!”

  Piper squinted down at the photograph. “It’s hard to tell what it is.”

  “Jason could tell what it was. He believes me,” Amy snapped.

  Piper swallowed hard. So this was how it was going to be. “We should go catch up to Margot before she gets impatient and goes into that old trailer on her own,” Piper said. “The place is probably a death trap.”

  —

  The old trailer’s tires were flat, and the tall grass of the field behind the house had grown up around its sides. It must have originally been painted blue and white, but the colors had faded, and in a few patches had been scraped away to reveal bare, rusty metal. The windows were cracked and filthy, and a heavy padlock hung on the front door.

  “I couldn’t see a way in,” Margot said. They had found her sitting on the cinder-block steps leading up to the front door. “Where’d Jason go?”

  “Home,” Piper said, firmly. Then she turned to Amy. “So you’ve never been inside?” Piper asked, nodding at the trailer with the padlocked door.

  “Nah. It’s always been really trashed. And I never found the key. But I think that if we break that window over there we can climb in. It’s pretty much broken already.”

  “Do you think that old key we found in Room 4 could be the right one?” Margot asked.

  “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 t
o 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?”