The Night Sister (24 page)

29 rooms.

Up until now, it had seemed like something made up; something from a Trixie Belden book, maybe:
The Mystery of the 29th Room.

Piper pictured Trixie and Honey creeping around with a flashlight, tapping on walls, looking for a secret door to a secret room.

But now, as they searched through old papers and drawings that had belonged to Amy's grandfather, Piper began to wonder, what if it was real?

What if there really was a twenty-ninth room?

“Look at this,” Amy said. She was sitting on the floor next to a couple of banged-up cardboard boxes labeled
Daddy's Paperwork
that she'd dragged out of the closet. She'd been emptying them haphazardly, crazed, glancing at each bit of paper for a split second before tossing it carelessly off to the side.

Now she held a stack of photos in her hand, each showing the motel in a different stage of completion. First it was only a foundation, then a roughly framed outline of two buildings that slowly added a roof, doors, and, finally, windows. In each photo was Amy's grandfather, dressed in khaki work clothes, holding a hammer, saw, or trowel.

“Maybe he didn't have any plans or blueprints or anything,” Margot suggested. “Maybe he just made it up as he went along?”

Piper shook her head. “You can't put up a whole building that way. Especially not if you're not a carpenter or architect or anything. I'm sure he had plans.”

“Well, they're not in this box,” Amy said, pulling the last photos and yellowed papers out of the first box, letting old bills and ledger pages drift to the floor.

She opened the next box. This turned out to be full of photos and papers from her grandfather's days as a pilot in the army. There were lots of letters from his parents on the farm back at home; Amy skimmed through some of them and read bits aloud. They told about how much milk the cows were producing, what a good helper Clarence's young cousin Fenton was turning out to be, the scrap-metal drives being held all over Vermont; they were peppered with gossip from town—Violet Stafford finally got a marriage proposal from Hank Ritter, Mr. Erickson had to close the local branch of the bank, little Richie Welks won the fishing derby last Saturday.

“I'm surprised he didn't get
bored
to death by these letters,” Amy complained, tossing them back into the box.

“Nah,” Piper said. “I bet it was kind of comforting to get all that news from home. To see things back there were just as dull as ever. If I was up in an airplane getting shot at by the Germans, I'd want to know that back at home things were quiet and calm, and there were cows still waiting to be milked, and a plain girl waiting for a marriage proposal.”

“I guess.” Amy shrugged.

Margot dragged a metal file box out of the closet and popped open the clasp.

“What have you got there?” Piper asked.

Margot started flipping through the papers. “Looks like your mom's stuff, Amy. Birth certificate, high-school diploma…Wait a sec, there's something down at the bottom.” She pulled out a stack of letters in worn envelopes held together with disintegrating elastic bands.

“Check it out,” Margot said, handing them to Amy. “It's more letters to that movie-director guy from Sylvie!”

Amy took them and thumbed through. “You're right. They're all addressed to Alfred Hitchcock, and they've got stamps, but it looks like they were never mailed. See, no postmark.”

“Weird,” Piper said. “Why go to the trouble of writing the letters, putting stamps on them and everything, if you're not going to send them? And what's your mom doing with them?”

“Beats me,” Amy said, tossing the letters back into the metal box. “But they're not helping us with the plans for the motel.”

She rummaged around in the closet again and pulled out a brown leather folder with a clasp. “Bingo!” she cried, as she opened it up and peered inside. “Sketches for the motel!”

Piper moved close against Amy and looked at the papers Amy was eagerly pulling out of the folder. Clarence's careful renderings of the motel he imagined were drawn in pencil on yellowing paper. There were structural drawings that showed the framing with measurements and elevation drawings from every angle.

The girls studied them, searching for some sign of a secret passageway or hidden door, perhaps a room between rooms.

“There's not a damn thing in either building,” Amy said at last. “There are the twenty-eight motel rooms, the office, the laundry area and boiler room underneath the office. That's it.” She blew out an exasperated breath, making her pink bangs puff out.

A framed drawing of the tower was propped against the side of the desk. Piper picked it up. Also done in pencil, it showed the outside of the tower: the door, the windows, and the battlements. She looked at it carefully, noticing the attention to detail—each rock a different shape and shade, the shadows in the open doorway seeming almost alive somehow. Amy's grandfather was a talented artist.

Then she noticed it: there, in those shadows, was something else. Faint writing; ghostly unfamiliar letters she could barely make out. She pulled the picture closer and squinted down at it, finally understanding what the problem was.

The writing was backward.

“There's something written on the other side of this drawing,” she said. Amy snatched it from her, immediately flipped the frame over, and went to work bending the wire brads that held the cardboard back on. Soon she'd pried one edge out; then the whole piece of thin black cardboard was in her hand, the drawing on top of it. She carefully pulled them apart and turned the tower drawing over.

On the other side was the original sketch for the tower. There were dimensions for its diameter and height, and the plan for the floor joists and rafters. In the right-hand margin were calculations for the amount of cement, lime, and sand that would be needed.

The drawing showed the three floors the girls had all explored: ground floor, second floor, and the rooftop surrounded by the ring of battlements.

But there was something else: a fourth floor, a basement room that looked as if it was accessed by a trapdoor in the floor above. This room was labeled with Amy grandfather's careful lettering: “oubliette.”

“What's ‘oubliette' mean?” Amy asked.

Piper jumped up, went to the desk, and got the heavy dictionary she'd seen there when they first entered the office. She thumbed through the alphabet until she got to “O.” Otter. Ottoman. Ouabain (Piper's eye caught on this a moment—a poison).

“Here it is,” Piper said. With her finger on the word, she blinked down at the definition; her voice shook as she read it out loud: “ ‘A concealed dungeon with a trapdoor in the ceiling as the only means of entrance or exit.' ”

“Holy crap!” Amy exclaimed. “A dungeon? There's a hidden dungeon at the bottom of the tower?”

“We don't know that,” Piper said. “I mean, it's here in the drawing, but—”

“Come on,” Amy said, already on her way out of the office, “we've gotta go find it!”

Piper dumped the flowered duffel bag in her car, her hands trembling.

She knew what she'd typed.

How, then, did the page get filled with
29 rooms
over and over and over?

She started the engine, yanked the shifter into reverse, and hit the gas; gravel spat out from under her tires as she backed up, spun around, and headed down the steep driveway.

Was she going crazy? Had she typed the words herself in a sort of fugue state?

She remembered Amy's obsession with hypnosis—with that damn book she'd found that had belonged to Sylvie. Amy would say that it was possible to do just about anything in a trance state. Even to receive messages from the dead.

“Damn it,” Piper said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. Just then she was passing the tower, and she glanced inside, through the doorway blocked by two boards forming an X.
Danger,
warned the dripping red spray paint above.

A shadow moved across the floor inside.

There was someone in there!

Piper slammed on the brakes, heart hammering, palms sweating.

Maybe there had been someone in the house with her after all. Someone who had replaced her paper with another. (But how? When?) Improbable as it seemed, Piper clung to this new idea. It felt far better than believing that either a ghost or Piper herself had typed the message.

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.”