The Night Sister (32 page)

Piper paced back and forth in the waiting room, her soaking-wet shoes squishing with each step. Although Margot had regained consciousness in Jason's cruiser, when they arrived at the hospital it was clear that Margot and the baby were in imminent danger. Jason had radioed ahead to the ER, and she was immediately surrounded by nurses, doctors, and techs. In a flurry of controlled chaos that took only minutes, oxygen was started, an IV was placed, medications were given, labs were drawn, and she was attached to monitors of all sorts. Then they were rolling her down the hall for an emergency C-section. Piper had time to give her a quick kiss and say, “I love you, you can do this,” and then Margot was off, Jason at her side, holding her hand.

Now it had been nearly two hours, and still no word. Piper took a sip of the cold, sour coffee she'd poured herself some time ago.

Jason came in, disheveled but beaming.

“They're okay,” he said, his voice breaking. Piper ran to him and threw her arms around him.

“We have a healthy baby girl!” he said in her ear. “And Margot's blood pressure has stabilized. She's awake and alert—the doctor says she's going to be fine. And, oh, Piper, the baby is so beautiful.”

He was crying. They both were. They held each other tight. Piper realized, in that moment, how much Jason loved Margot. Everything else fell away: Lou, Amy, all of it. There was only the sweet relief that Margot and the baby were going to be fine—that was all that really mattered.

When they pulled apart, Jason said, “When they were prepping her for surgery, she was saying the craziest stuff. I don't know if the meds they gave her were making her loopy or what. She said that she saw Lou turn into some kind of monster, and that's why she ran out into the woods—to get away from her. Then, somehow, Lou became a panther? And she said it was Lou who killed her family. She even said that big black dog in the woods was Rose Slater….”

He trailed off when he realized that Piper wasn't laughing.

As Piper looked at Jason, she remembered when they were kids, how he'd always been on the outside. It was time to let him in.

“I know it seems crazy, I really do,” Piper said. “But it's all true. Let's sit—I want to tell you everything.”

And she told him everything. She began with finding the suitcase that summer and worked her way forward, leaving nothing out. She told him about the room in the tower, the skeleton, how Rose killed Fenton and Sylvie, and Lou killed her family. She explained about mares, how they appeared human but could turn into something else, how this ability or curse or whatever you wanted to call it ran in Amy's family. She told him about trying to help Lou, how she felt like that's what Amy would have wanted, but Lou had chosen to stay with her grandmother, to go on being a mare. When Piper was finished, Jason stared at her, glassy-eyed.

“Piper, I just can't…I'm just not able to believe all that.”

“I don't expect you to believe me. A part of me even wonders if I'm actually insane, if this is all part of a complicated paranoid delusion.” She laughed weakly. “But I know it's the truth, and I know it was time to tell you. No more secrets. Okay?” She reached out and took his hand, gave it a squeeze.

He nodded, but he looked completely overwhelmed and baffled. Piper was fairly certain he thought she was crazy, and just didn't have the energy to argue.

“No more secrets,” he said after a moment. “Now, come on. I want to introduce you to your niece.”

P
iper held the swaddled baby in her arms—little Ella. Ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes. Grayish-blue mermaid eyes, in a funny little wrinkled face.

Margot was propped up in the hospital bed, looking exhausted but blissful, as she watched Piper cooing at Ella. The nurse had just come in to check vitals, to peek at the dressing on Margot's belly, and to ask about her pain.

“Doing well, Mom,” the nurse said with a quick smile. Jason was on the other side of the bed, holding Margot's hand. He gave it a squeeze. The nurse bustled out.

“Mom,” Jason said, kissing Margot's cheek.

Ella started pecking at Piper's collarbone. “I think she's hungry.”

Piper brought the baby over to Margot and settled her into Margot's arms.

“I can't get over how beautiful she is,” Piper said, standing right beside Jason now, her arm around his waist as they both gazed down at the baby, one little starfish hand peeking out from beneath the blanket, her tiny perfect mouth opening wide, looking for nourishment.

Margot caught Piper's eye, and shot her a look—
What did you say to him? What happened?
Piper smiled and shook her head ever so slightly—
Everything's okay. We'll talk later.

Margot nodded, looking down at Ella as she nursed. “Perfect,” she said. “She's just perfect.”

Jason called the station the next morning, while Margot and the baby were sleeping, to see if there was an update on the whereabouts of Lou. McLellan told him, “No sign of the girl yet, but we've got half the state out looking. Now it seems her grandmother, Rose Slater, has disappeared from Foxcroft Health and Rehab—last time anyone saw her was at evening bed check.”

“Weird,” Jason said, biting his lip, remembering what Margot and Piper had told him—how that big dog had been Rose Slater.

“Yeah, but you haven't heard the craziest part of it all,” McLellan went on. “Call just came in. The Tower Motel is burning. The whole damn thing is up in flames. I'm on my way there now.”

Jason hung up and filled Piper in.

“You should go to the motel,” she said. “See if they need you there. I'll stay with Margot and the baby.”

T
he driveway was full of fire trucks and various EMS vehicles, so he parked along the street, pulled over right by the old motel sign.

He'd seen the smoke billowing as he drove through town. Here it was thick and black, a great cloud covering them; it was rising and spreading, soon to cover all of London. It didn't smell like cigarettes or a campfire; it smelled dangerous, full of chemicals and melting plastic.

The house was burning, as were the two rows of motel units and the old crumbling tower. His eyes went to Room 4, where he used to spend his afternoons imagining he was grown up, living some other life. Flames shot through the roof, which crumbled down.

The entire London Fire Department was on-site, dousing the flames with high-powered hoses, but it was clear that the place was beyond saving. The goal now was to protect the woods behind the house and motel. If they went up, the condos might, too.

“Any idea how this started?” Jason asked the fire chief.

“Place was soaked in gasoline,” the chief said, hurrying off to talk with some firefighters from Barre who'd just arrived to help out.

Jason stood in the driveway, in the place he'd stood a thousand times, staring up at the window of the house, Amy's bedroom window. Smoke poured out of it. Flames shot through the roof.

Once upon a time, there had been a boy who'd loved a girl. He followed her everywhere, like a sad dog. Some part of him, he knew, had gone on following her, chasing her through his dreams, calling her name.

Amy, Amy, Amy.

For whatever reason, he'd never really let her go. He'd known it that day last week as he sat across from her at the kitchen table—known it and hated himself for it.

But now it was time.

Time to let go, once and for all.

Jason turned back to the house and watched the smoke rise and take shape: first a phantom, then a bird, a many-headed monster, and, finally, a beautiful girl with streaming hair and the longest legs he'd ever seen. He felt the smoke enter him, tasted it on the back of his tongue, acrid and ruined.

He remembered that long-ago first kiss at the bottom of the pool; the teasing way she'd called him Jay Jay; the crushed cigarettes he'd left her in the tower. He imagined each memory leaving his head, drifting up with the thick black smoke: up, up, up, until it was all just a ruined blur and his eyes burned and he wanted, more than anything, to leave this place for good.

He turned and started back down the driveway, his eyes on the tower. There were no hoses spraying water on it, no firefighters paying it any attention whatsoever. It stood, like a great black, crumbling chimney, flames shooting out the top.

The wooden floor was gone now, as were all the joists. Without the strength of the wooden framing, the tower began to shift, to fall in on itself. The walls of stone came crumbling down in huge clumps of rock and concrete. The fire roared like a great hungry beast.

He thought of Piper's insane story. Of the secret room that she said was down at the bottom of the tower—the twenty-ninth room, built to chain up monsters, to keep them safe and the world safe from them.

It sounded like a story Amy would have cooked up back when they were kids. He remembered her showing him the blurry Polaroid, telling him it was a ghost, begging him to believe her, to say he'd seen it, too. And then he thought of what she'd been trying to tell him that day last week: how, of all people, it was him she had turned to—him she chose to tell that she now believed the monsters her mother spoke of might be real.

Jason looked up through the smoke and flames, through the ghosts of memories, and saw movement just beyond the tower. There, behind it and to the right, where the yard turned to woods, two sets of eyes were watching.

It was the big black dog and the wild cat. Jason looked up the driveway at the firefighters and police rushing here and there, eyes on the burning buildings. No one seemed to see the animals at the edge of the yard. No one but him.

He moved toward them, slowly at first, but then, when they turned and trotted off, he began to jog.

He drew his gun and followed them into the woods, up behind the pool, across the long-overgrown path that he had taken a thousand times as a boy, running from his house to the motel.

He was running now, clumsily stumbling over tree roots, dodging pine trees. The animals were too quick for him, moving with the grace and dexterity of wild things.

At last, the animals paused, and turned back to look at him once more. He raised his gun, took aim at the panther.

The big cat caught Jason's gaze and held it, with strange but somehow familiar blue eyes. Blue eyes?

He blinked in disbelief.

“Lou?” he called out hesitantly, lowering the gun.

The dog nudged at the panther, then sprang into the brushy woods. The panther stayed a moment longer, eyes still locked on Jason. At last, it turned away slowly and followed the dog deep into the shadows, until the two beasts were nothing more than shadows themselves.

Mr. Alfred Hitchcock

Universal Studios

Hollywood, California

April 14, 1961

Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

Sometimes I can see it so clearly: my future in Hollywood. My mother shakes her head, laughs, asks why I would want such a thing. But still, I picture myself there, under the Hollywood sign, my own name in lights and on the front of every industry paper: Sylvia Slater, star of the big screen.

I will be bright and shining.

I will be larger than life.

I will live forever.

Who wouldn't want a thing like that?

Sincerely Yours,

Miss Sylvia A. Slater

The Tower Motel

328 Route 6

London, Vermont

Some books come more easily than others. This one had a great many challenges in store for me, and I have a lot of people to thank for helping me find my way through it.

Dan Lazar, I've said it before and I'll say it again: I couldn't ask for a better agent, and I really couldn't have pulled this off without you. A thousand thanks.

Andrea Robinson, who said at one point that this book was like a puzzle, for diligently (and oh so cleverly!) working to help me figure out which way the pieces might fit together.

Anne Messitte, for all her editorial insight, guidance, and tremendous support in all things book-related.

The whole team at Doubleday, for each and every thing you do, whether it's correcting a spelling error, putting together a brilliant cover, or getting me home from an event when I'm stranded in a snowstorm.

Karen Lane and all the folks at the wonderful Aldrich Public Library in Barre, Vermont, for helping me with the microfilm machine (which I was pretty sure I broke until Karen fixed it!) so I could research Alfred Hitchcock's visit to Barre.

Paul Heller, for his tremendous help with painting the picture of the evening Alfred Hitchcock and Shirley MacLaine came to Barre.

(It is true that
The Trouble with Harry
was filmed in Craftsbury, Vermont, and the world premiere was held at the Paramount Theater in Barre. Being a novelist, I took some pieces of that truth and wove them into my story. If any of the facts are not historically accurate, it's due to my choices, and not the information I received from Paul or any of my other sources.)

Sara Baker, for giving me the lowdown on what it was like to grow up in a family-run motel in Vermont, and for all the wonderful feedback on an early draft (and for the delicious iced coffee!). I couldn't have created the Tower Motel without you.

My father, Donald McMahon, for his unfailing support, and for helping me learn all sorts of facts about the aircraft of World War II, which unfortunately never made their way into the book.

Drea Thew, as always, for living through every one of my freak-outs over the book, helping me edit each draft, and always being my first and most trusted reader. Remember when you asked if I was sure I really wanted to write a book about shape-shifting monsters? Turns out I did.

And, finally, to Michaela and Keelin Needham, and to Zella McMahon, who taught me a great deal about monsters, and helped me envision this story while we ate lots of gelato. Next time I'm stuck with an idea, I know just the girls to go to, to help me work it out (and, yes, more gelato will definitely be involved).