The Night Sister (28 page)

Jason regarded the scene before him and wished like hell that there had been a tractor-trailer accident on River Road, like he'd told Margot. As much as he'd hated lying to her yet again, especially after last night, he knew he couldn't tell her the truth. If he told her about it, she'd want details, and a crime like this was the last thing any parent or parent-to-be wanted to hear about.

He remembered what Margot had told him last night: “Sometimes a lie isn't what's said, but what's unsaid. An omission.”

Later, when he went to get into bed, she'd told him icily that she'd prefer it if he'd sleep on the couch.

“What?” he'd asked, stunned.

“I think we both need some space,” she told him flatly. “And time to think things over.”

He'd spent the night tossing and turning on the lumpy couch, replaying every decision that had led to this. Surely it would blow over, was just a matter of Margot's hormones making her overly sensitive—he'd never seen her so cold before. But, then, he'd never really lied to her before, had he? And he shouldn't have pushed her about her own omissions, not now. Not when being upset could put both her and the baby at risk.

He pushed the thought away and went back to scanning the crime scene, every horrific inch of it.

The girl had been found by two fifth-graders walking home after school. There was a path that ran through the woods behind London Elementary School to Butler Street. A lot of kids took it. The muddy ground was covered in footprints and bike tire tracks. It was a goddamn thoroughfare. So how is it that no one had seen or heard a thing?

The girl's name was Kendra Thompson. The kids who'd found her recognized her right away, in spite of the condition she was in. Her face was intact, but her body…it looked…like it had fallen into the lion pit at the zoo. Jason had never seen anything like it. Not even in those zombie movies he watched. That stuff—that was nothing.

“Where's Louisa?” a woman called. Jason turned. It was Mrs. Buffum. She'd worked in the front office since Jason was a kid, and it was clear she'd be there till she died. Mrs. Buffum was part of the school, like the brick outside and the cracked porcelain bathroom fixtures. Her well-padded rear end had earned her the unimaginative nickname “Mrs. Buttum” back when Jason was a kid. He wondered if anyone called her that still.

“Louisa?” Jason asked. He was the nearest officer, the one who was supposed to be controlling the crowd, keeping the people back, while the state crime-scene guys did their job.

“Louisa Bellavance. Or ‘Lou,' I guess she calls herself. She came in to school earlier today. I was surprised to see her—I thought she was taking some time away. But I looked out at the playground during morning recess and there she was, playing with Kendra. They were sitting together on the swings, laughing.”

“You're sure?” Jason said. “You're sure it was Lou you saw her with?” Jason's heart slammed in his chest.

“Positive. I thought how nice it was that Louisa had come back, that she was playing with her best friend. It seemed like just what she needed after all that horrible business with her family—to be a normal kid again, playing on the playground.”

Jason jogged over to the group gathered around the body, and tried to keep his face composed while he delivered the news. “Hey, Chief Bell, a school employee just told me the victim was last seen with Lou—Louisa Bellavance. The kid from the motel.”

“Jesus,” said Tony Bell. “So maybe our guy kills Kendra and grabs Louisa.”

“Or maybe she ran?” one of the state cops suggested.

“Quite a coincidence,” Tony said. “Louisa's whole family being slaughtered a couple days ago, now her school friend.”

“What if…” Jason said. “What if Louisa was the target all along? The other girl just happened to be with her?”

He thought of Margot's insistence—and his own gut feeling, if he was being honest—that Amy hadn't killed her family at the motel. What if they were right, and the real killer was out there still? But he'd left a survivor, a potential witness.

Then he remembered his visit with Rose Slater.

“Do you believe in monsters, Jason?” she'd asked.

“No, ma'am,” he'd told her.

“Neither did my daughter. And look what happened to her.”

And now look what had happened to little Kendra Thompson. Jason wondered if she'd believed in monsters.

“We need to find Louisa Bellavance,” Tony barked. “Now!”

The girl kept interrupting, asking all the wrong questions. She didn't understand. Once the evening med cart came around—and it would any minute now—they'd watch her take her pills, and twenty minutes later she'd be out. At least, that was the case when she actually swallowed the pills, which she usually did. The next thing she knew, it would be morning, and the day nurse would be coming in to pull back her curtains and give her her morning pills and talk about the weather. They'd put an alarm on her bed last week (which Rose allowed them to think she couldn't disable, though of course she could, just like she could tuck her sedatives into her cheek and spit them out into a Kleenex once she was alone, when she so chose—she wasn't an idiot, despite what they thought).

They weren't going to lose her again. It looked bad for the staff to have a resident go missing, as Rose had, time after time, for hours.

Sure, folks wandered. It's what people with dementia did. They confidently waltzed into the wrong room, and cried out in alarm at the stranger in their bed. They went into the closet thinking it was the john, or down to the day room at midnight to soothe the baby they thought they heard crying. Many of them were just looking for the way out, the way home. But the staff always found them somewhere on the locked ward right away. Not Rose. Rose's disappearances had confounded them. They always took place at night. She'd be discovered missing during rounds, some time after midnight. They'd search all night and into the morning for her. Then, inexplicably, there she'd be, back in her bed, by daylight, wondering what all the fuss was about.

“I've been here all along,” she'd tell them.

“Well, you must have been invisible,” a nurse once snapped.

Rose had smiled at that. “That's me,” she said. “The Invisible Woman.”

The one nobody sees for what she truly is.

The staff all called her that from then on: “How's our Invisible Woman doing today?” Not to her face, but to each other. Sometimes they called her “our Houdini.”

She liked the air of magic it gave her. She didn't like how they always prefaced it with “our,” but she knew it was the truth. She was theirs. Their prisoner. Their problem.

Only they didn't know the half of it. Could never have guessed.

Eventually, the staff decided enough was enough: Rose might hurt herself, and the facility would be at fault. They installed the bed alarm and began giving her enough sleeping meds at night to tranquilize a cow.

This suited her fine. For the first time she could remember, she'd wake up feeling rested.

Rose was pulled back to the present as Piper pushed open the heavy curtain and looked outside. It was dusk, and the clouds were thick and threatening, making the sky darker still. “I went down to the room below the tower,” Piper said. Rose squinted at her, tried to picture the woman before her now as the little girl she'd once been: the girl who'd roller-skated with her Amy, flying around in cut-off shorts, with the little radio they carried cranked up as loud as it could go. Piper had never met Rose, but Rose had seen Piper plenty. She'd watched her that summer. Spied from the trees, from the tower. A few times, she'd been nearly caught—by that silly boy who was always hiding in Room 4, and then by Amy, who would awaken in the night and catch her mother watching her from the shadows.

How many nights had she spent like that, hiding in the shadows of her daughter's room, waiting, watching, seeing if she might change—if Amy was a mare, too?

“Shh,” Rose would tell Amy. “Go back to sleep. You're dreaming.”

“I was there today. The twenty-ninth room,” Piper said now, leaning in, and speaking more loudly than she needed to. “Someone's been down there recently. Someone's been using it.”

Rose nodded.

“Tell me, please,” Piper said. “Is she back? Sylvie? Did she have something to do with what happened to Amy and her family?”

Rose looked at Piper, but was listening to the noises in the hall outside. Through the din of voices and bells, she heard the unmistakable clacking of the med cart's wheels rolling down the hall, but there were still a good four or five rooms before hers.

“Listen carefully,” she said. “I am going to tell you the truth, but we haven't got much time. You mustn't interrupt.”

“Okay,” Piper said, leaning even closer.

“It wasn't Sylvie being kept down in that basement. Sylvie is dead. Has been for over fifty years.”

“Dead? Are you sure?” Piper gave her an am-I-dealing-with-a-poor-senile-old-woman-after-all look.

“Of course I'm sure, silly girl,” Rose hissed. “I'm the one who killed her.”

Mr. Alfred Hitchcock

Universal Studios

Hollywood, California

October 2, 1961

Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

I think there is something wrong with me. At least, I hope there is. I sincerely hope that I am delusional.

Because, Mr. Hitchcock, I believe my sister Rose wants me dead. I think there is something wrong with her, terribly wrong. She has always been jealous of me, but these days, it seems so much more than that. There's an icy hatred in her eyes.

I wake up in the night sometimes and find her bed empty.

Worse still is when I wake up and find her standing over me, staring down.

Once, I woke up and she had her hands around my throat.

Though I know I will sound insane, I must tell you the worst of all: One time I swear I saw a creature crawl into her bed in the middle of the night. I thought at first it was a dog, or a small bear, but it wore human clothes: Rose's dress. As I stared at it in the moonlight, it burrowed under the covers, and I closed my eyes in horror. When I dared to look a moment later, there was my sister, her head on the pillow, appearing peacefully asleep.

In the morning, there was dark, coarse fur on Rose's pillowcase. And her sheets had the rank stink of a wild animal.

What is my sister?

And what is she capable of?

Yours truly,

Miss Sylvia A. Slater

The Tower Motel

328 Route 6

London, Vermont