The Night Sister (18 page)

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.

T
he 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.

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.”

T
he 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 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.

“You'd think, if he was taking off for a new life out west, he'd pack a few things, maybe even straighten up.” Amy went into the kitchen and looked in the sink. “Holy crap, there are two dirty cups in here. He didn't even do the dishes before he left.”

Amy turned and picked up a book from the counter; on its cover, a scantily clad girl was standing in front of a spaceship. “Guess the dude liked his sci-fi.”

Another book sat in the middle of the kitchen table:
The Stars My Destination.
Piper noticed there was a piece of paper being used as a bookmark. She flipped the book open and saw that the paper was Tower Motel stationery, folded in half. On it, neatly typed, were the words:

I know what you are and what you do. You have to stop. If you don't, I will find a way to stop you.

“Take a look at this,” Piper said, handing the note over to Amy.

“Whoa,” Amy breathed.

“Hey!” Margot called through the open window at the other end of the trailer. “I hear a car coming up the driveway—you better get outta there!”

Amy tucked the folded piece of paper back into the old paperback, shoved it in the waistband of her shorts, and pulled her T-shirt over it. She climbed through the trailer window, Piper right behind her.

“Your grandma's home, I think,” Margot said, voice low.

“Come on,” Amy said, “let's go back to my room.”

A
my's grandma was unloading bags of groceries from the back of her Oldsmobile when they got to the driveway. “Give me a hand, will you, girls?” she called out.

They each took a load into the kitchen.

“Grandma, did Fenton go away before Sylvie ran away or after?”

“Right before. I always told your grandfather that Fenton running off like that might have put the idea in Sylvie's head. Made her think it was perfectly normal to go sneaking off for parts unknown in the middle of the night.”

“Do you know what happened to Fenton? Did you ever hear from him?”

“Hmm? No, no, we never did,” Grandma Charlotte said, stuffing a gallon of milk into the fridge. “Now, why don't you girls go on upstairs? I'll put these things away. Then we can make cookies. I got some of that dough in a tube—we just have to bake them.”

“Sure, Grandma, sounds great,” Amy said. “But one more thing…” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out the Polaroid.

Oh, no,
Piper thought.
Not the freaking ghost-dog picture again.

“What do you see, Gram?”

Grandma Charlotte stared down at the blurry picture for what felt like forever. At last, she recited:

“When Death comes knocking on your door,

you'll think you've seen his face before.

When he comes creeping up your stairs,

you'll know him from your dark nightmares.

If you hold up a mirror, you shall see

that he is you and you are he.”

Amy took a step back. “Way creepy, Gram.” Amy glanced at Piper and Margot and gave them a dramatic, my-kooky-old-grandma eye roll.

Grandma Charlotte smiled vaguely and went back to the groceries.

“Go on upstairs now, Sylvie. I'll call you down when it's time for cookies.”

Amy nodded, muttered, “It's
Amy,
Gram,” and headed out of the kitchen, Piper and Margot behind her.

“Well,
that
was weird,” Margot said under her breath once they got to the stairs.

“Yeah, my grandma's full of freaky little poems and rhymes. Stuff her mom taught her when she was a kid. But don't you think that's a little suspicious?” Amy whispered.

“The poem?” Piper said.

“No, dummy, the thing with Fenton! Fenton leaves—in such a hurry that he left all his crap behind—and then Sylvie takes off right after, and neither of them is ever heard from again?”

“It's a little weird,” Piper admitted.

“But what does it mean?” asked Margot.

“I don't know,” said Amy. “But it's another piece of the puzzle.”

They got to Amy's room and closed the door; Amy pushed the latch closed. She went to her desk, pulling the paperback sci-fi book out from under her shirt. Suddenly she froze, as her eyes fell on the typewriter.

“What the
hell
?” she whispered.

There was a piece of Tower Motel stationery rolled into the carriage of the old Royal De Luxe. A message had been neatly typed:

You found the suitcase and typewriter, but there are bigger things to find.

Keep looking.

Maybe, just maybe, you'll find the truth.

“What is this?” Piper asked.

Amy's eyes were huge. “Don't you get it? It's a note from Sylvie. From Sylvie's ghost!”

“Wait, Sylvie's
dead
?” Margot asked.

“I'm sure of it,” Amy said. “It's got to be her ghost that's been visiting me. Jason saw it, too, that day in the tower, remember? He saw someone in blue go in and never come out! And if she was still alive, if she really ran away, why would her suitcase be here?” Amy paused dramatically. “I think she
planned
on leaving that night, but someone stopped her!”

“Like who?” Piper asked.

“I don't know,” Amy said. Her eyes were glittering with excitement. “But, obviously, she wants us to find out.”