The Night Sister (8 page)

But it didn't feel fine.

“Piper?” Margot was in the tower now. “Are you guys in here?”

Below them, they heard Margot tentatively start to climb the ladder.

“Come on,” Amy whispered, tugging on Piper again, and they moved toward the next wooden ladder, the one that led up to the rooftop deck that was ringed with castlelike battlements. And what were they going to do once they were up there? It's not as if there was any place to hide. Maybe they'd flap their wings and fly off the edge.

Amy was giggling, one hand slapped over her mouth to quiet herself. It was all a game to her—the kiss, Jason seeing them, hiding from Margot.

“Come on, you guys,” Margot called. “I know you're up there. I hear you!”

Amy pulled harder on Piper, urging her silently toward the ladder. As Piper did a clumsy gallop, her right foot plunged through the floor like it was made of graham crackers. Piper tumbled forward, her hand slipping out of Amy's.

She screamed, partly with the scraping pain on her shin and partly from the feeling of falling, the fear that she would go all the way down (all the way down to hell, maybe, as Grandma Charlotte had warned). But she didn't. Something stopped her. She looked down and discovered that there were two layers of boards: the floor she had just fallen through was nailed to the top of the rafters, and the ceiling below was nailed to their underside. The boards on the ceiling had held.

“Whoa!” Amy said, turning back, reaching to pull Piper out. “You okay?”

“I think so,” Piper said, lifting her leg out gently and scooting back away from the rotten spot in the floor. Her shin was bleeding, and there was a two-inch-long splinter of wood poking out of the skin like a jagged and bloody thorn. Looking at it made her head swim. She imagined it went all the way down to the bone.

“Oh,
man,
” Amy said, looking at Piper's leg. She tucked a strand of pink hair behind her ear and leaned in for a closer inspection.

“We should get your grandma,” Piper said, carefully keeping her eyes away from her leg. Grandma Charlotte had been a nurse in the war: Piper had seen pictures of her in a crisp white uniform standing before rows of hospital cots. Even though it had been over forty years since she'd tended wounded soldiers, Piper was sure she'd know what to do. When you've seen guys with their legs blown off by land mines, surely you could handle a splinter—even a giant one.

“No way,” Amy said. “We can
not
tell her we were in here. She'd never trust me again. We can totally handle this. Trust me.”

“But I…”

“Shh,” Amy said. “Close your eyes.”

Piper closed them a little, but not all the way.

Amy reached for the splinter, expertly grabbed it between her fingernails, and gave it one quick tug. Piper wanted to scream a thousand bad words, but it hurt too much for her to do anything more than give a guttural cry.

“Got it,” Amy said. Piper opened her eyes to see Amy holding the bloody sliver of wood, triumphant. It seemed to glisten and shimmer in the dim light.

Piper's stomach did a flip.

“What happened?” Margot asked. Her head had appeared at the top of the ladder, and she was now peering into the room.

“Don't come in here,” Amy ordered. “It's not safe. The floor's rotted out.”

“You okay?” Margot asked, eyes worried.

“Fine,” Piper said, using the bottom edge of her T-shirt to dab at the dark blood seeping out of her shin. “I'm totally fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “And you have to swear not to tell Mom about this. She'd kill us. We'd never be allowed over here again.”

Margot nodded. Her eye shadow sparkled in the light coming through the slatted window. “I know that. You think I'm stupid, but I'm not.”

“You're lucky you didn't go all the way through,” Amy said, stooping down to inspect the hole. “That would have been a nasty fall.”

All the way to hell,
Piper thought, nodding in agreement.

“Come on, you guys,” Margot urged, in a voice as small and whiny as a mosquito. “You shouldn't stay up here.”

For once, Piper agreed with her little sister, and stood up on shaky legs. Her right shin throbbed and was sticky with blood.

“Wait a sec,” Amy said. “There's something in here.” She leaned down for a better look, then got on her belly and reached into the hole in the floor to shove her hand way back.

“Be careful,” Piper warned, worried that the floor wouldn't hold her weight and she'd go tumbling in, headfirst, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Amy pulled out a small olive-green hard-sided suitcase.

“What is that?” Margot asked, leaning in for a better look.

Amy said nothing. She turned the suitcase on its side and popped open the clasps by the handle with a loud click. Then she paused, held her breath, and gently swung the top up.

Inside was clothing, neatly folded. Amy pulled out a gingham dress, some stockings. Then a little coin purse stuffed with a thick roll of bills: tens, twenties, fives. Tucked into the bottom of the coin purse was a pair of old earrings with green stones, and a pearl necklace.

“Whoa,” Margot said. “I bet those are real emeralds and pearls!”

Amy studied them a minute, then placed them back in the purse and continued unpacking the suitcase.

Beneath the clothing was an old scrapbook, with the letters “SAS” in neat black calligraphy. Amy pulled it out carefully and began to thumb through it. The brittle pages were pasted with photos of old movie stars cut from newspapers and magazines. Piper thought she recognized a couple of them, but they weren't anyone who was popular now. Some of them had names neatly printed underneath: Gary Cooper, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day.

Amy dug around in the suitcase again, and pulled out a photograph in a frame this time: two girls. One was a stunningly beautiful older girl with a narrow face, straight blond hair, and haunting eyes; the second girl seemed a shadow of the first, with dark, unkempt curls, and circles under her heavy-lidded eyes. Both girls wore stiff dresses, smiling into the camera with faces that looked equally stiff, as if the photographer had grumbled a warning, “Smile now, damn it.” Each was holding a chicken cradled carefully in her arms, and they stood in front of a painted sign:
World Famous London Chicken Circus.

“It's my mom and Aunt Sylvie,” Amy said. She thought a minute. “This has to be Sylvie's suitcase. The one she took with her when she left.”

“But why's her suitcase still here, then?” Margot asked as they stared down at the now disheveled pile of clothing inside. It gave off a musty smell, the scent of things long forgotten.

Amy picked up a dress and held it so that it waved gently, like a flag, like a moth fluttering. If Piper squinted her eyes, she could almost see the blond-haired girl from the picture wearing it; she was smiling, but under the smile, her eyes flashed them a warning glance.

Put it back,
she seemed to say.
If you know what's good for you, you'll walk away and forget you ever found it.

Jason was still trying to make sense of what he'd seen in the tower. He kept playing it back in his mind, a broken loop of tape that always ended with Piper looking up and seeing him, just as Margot called his name. And then he thought of Amy. Would she be mad? Was she looking for him right now, ready to wring his neck, to make him swear to forget what he'd seen?

After slipping away from Margot, he'd gone home and played Nintendo for a while, but he couldn't concentrate. He'd sneaked back through the woods to the motel just in time to catch the girls coming out of the tower, arguing. He stopped where he was, crouched behind a thick maple tree.

Piper was limping, her leg bleeding.

“We need to tell your grandma what we found,” Piper said.

“Maybe call the police,” Margot chimed in.

“No,” Amy ordered. “Not until we know what it means.”

Jason clung to the tree he hid behind.

Call the police?
What had they found?

When the girls went into the house, Jason circled around the woods to the motel units and let himself into Room 4.

Room 4 was his favorite to hide in, because the lock was broken and he didn't have to stop at the office for a key. He'd even hidden some things under the bed: binoculars, an old Coke bottle full of water, a flashlight (just in case he ever came after dark, which he hadn't been able to pull off yet), and a bag of sunflower seeds. Jason's mom didn't believe in junk food, so she fed him bird food instead: nuts, seeds, dried fruit.

In addition to these supplies, he kept his treasures there, too. Things of Amy's he'd found lying around by the pool: a half-f bottle of Coppertone, a single silver hoop earring, a pair of knockoff Wayfarer sunglasses with red plastic frames. He'd added other relics he'd found around the motel: a book of Tower Motel matches, a page of motel stationery, and a brass key-ring with a single skeleton key that he'd found hidden at the back of a desk drawer in the office.

Sometimes he made believe that he lived at the motel. That he'd just come in after a long day. He'd kick off his Nikes and lie back on the musty bed with its moth-eaten paisley spread, look around the room, and think how good he had it. His own room. His own bathroom, albeit one where the water didn't turn on anymore and the bathtub was full of broken tiles. Mostly, what he thought of was Amy. Of how, one day, she'd be his girlfriend. He was sure of it. His mom always told him that if you wanted something badly enough you just had to visualize it; if you pictured yourself having it already, soon it would be yours. His mom was big into things like visualization and positive affirmations. There were little sayings taped to the mirrors all over their condo with statements like “I am living my dream” and “Wonderful things are on their way to me.” Jason wasn't too sure about the power of these tactics: even though she said, “I am wealthy beyond my wildest dreams,” twenty times a day, his mom still had her minimum-wage job over at the nursing home, cleaning drool and pee off old people.

Still, he visualized Amy being his girlfriend. He concentrated so hard on it that his head hurt. And maybe, just maybe, the power of positive thinking was working after all: yesterday Amy Slater had actually kissed him. And it wasn't just a stupid half-second little peck—it was a real kiss. Their tongues had touched (which was kind of gross, yet thrilling at the same time), and at the end she'd given his lower lip a little nibble. Okay, maybe more than a little nibble. When he looked in the mirror this morning, it still looked slightly puffy and purplish. But he didn't mind. He kept working his tongue over the swollen place on his lip, remembering what her teeth had felt like.

It had all been so surprising that he half-wondered if it had really happened. If he had really found Amy roller skating by herself at the bottom of the pool yesterday, and if she had invited him down.

“Come here,” she said, in a way that was really more of an order than an invitation. “You got any cigarettes?”

Jason shook his head.

“Of course not,” Amy said, disappointed, but not altogether surprised; she rolled away, her back to him.

“But I can get some,” Jason called after her.

She stopped short and spun neatly back to face him, grinning. “Really?”

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

She laughed, skating forward like a rocket, then skidding to a dead stop, her face inches away from his nose.

“When?” she asked.

“Umm…tomorrow? I can bring them tomorrow. If that's okay, I mean.”

“That's just perfect,” she said, smiling. She stared hard at him, cocking her head first to the left, then to the right, studying him from different angles. “Hey, did anyone ever tell you you're kind of cross-eyed?”

“Um…no,” he stammered. He felt his face flush.

“No one has a perfect face,” she said. “Not even supermodels. Did you know no one's face is symmetrical? The left half of our nose is totally different than the right. Like here,” she said, putting a finger on the left side of his mouth, “this side might be just a little bit bigger than the other, or turn down a little more. I guess we're all kind of like messed-up jack-o-lanterns.”

Then she leaned in and kissed him, despite his crossed eyes and his face that didn't match up.

And if it wasn't for the swollen lip, he might be able to tell himself he'd imagined the whole thing after all. It had happened so quickly and was over too fast. She'd skated off, saying, “Toodle-oo, Jay Jay. Don't forget the cigarettes next time.”

And he hadn't forgotten the cigarettes. He'd gone home and nabbed a pack from his brother's carton of Marlboros. As soon as his mom left for work this morning, he'd thrown on one of his brother's Ramones T-shirts.

“I didn't know you were into the Ramones,” Amy might say.

And he'd say something like “There's a lot about me you don't know.” Or maybe, “I'm full of surprises.”

No. That was too stupid, even for him.

He'd gone to the motel, seen only Margot at the pool, and headed down to the tower to look for Amy and give her the cigarettes. That's when he'd seen them. And smushed the cigarettes when he involuntarily clenched his fist in shock.

Now, as he lay on the bed in the musty darkness, he pulled the crushed cigarette pack from his pocket and wondered what the girls were up to, what they'd found in that old crumbling tower. He took out a cigarette. Still smokable.

Maybe he could leave them for Amy somewhere. It would be a way to say,
No hard feelings.
That he wasn't weirded out by what he'd seen in the tower.

But where should he leave them?

Somewhere he was sure she'd go.

The pool? No, her grandma sometimes went out there to sit in one of the old sagging chairs. She'd see the cigarettes, and then Amy might get in trouble.

The tower.

He'd leave them in the tower!

Would she know they were from him? Probably. Maybe he should leave a note, too.

He jumped up, went to the desk. Found a pencil stub and an old piece of Tower Motel stationery.

He thought and thought about what to write. Should he say anything about what he'd seen in the tower? Should he remind her of their kiss yesterday in the pool? Tell her that he thought about her all the time? That, whatever it was she'd found, she could tell him—she could trust him?

Maybe he should write her in code?

No. In the end, he decided simple was best.

She'd appreciate that more than anything stupid and sappy.

Finally, he wrote his note:

Cigarettes as promised.

Hope to see you soon.

—J

He peeked out the window and saw it was all clear. He opened the door slowly, listening, looking both ways. The girls still hadn't come out of the house.

He darted across the driveway and went straight for the tower. As he ran, he thought he saw movement in the shadows that gathered around the doorway.

Had he missed the girls somehow? Were they back there? If they were, it was too late now: they'd have seen him. He'd play it cool, tell Amy he had something for her. He kept going, got to the doorway, and peeked in.

“Hello?” he called.

Nothing. No one.

But he couldn't shake the feeling that there had been someone there. He could almost smell it in the air.

“Anyone there?” he called again, looking up at the ceiling. He could climb the ladder to check the two floors above him. But, somehow, he couldn't make himself.

He set the cigarettes and note down in the center of the ground floor and ran back outside, across the driveway, and to Room 4.