The Night Sister

“It’s been a while,” Piper said, feeling light-headed, queasy. And guilty. Margot had urged her, over the years, to reach out to Amy, to try harder. But Amy had made it clear after that summer that she didn’t want to remain friends. They hadn’t lost touch completely—she and Amy sent each other occasional Christmas cards with impersonal messages and, in Amy’s case, stiff-looking school photos of her kids posed against colored backdrops. They were friends on Facebook, and now and then promised each other that they’d get together soon. But when Piper made it back to London to visit Margot every couple of years, the time always seemed to fly by—Amy had to work, or the kids were sick, or Piper was just there for a couple of days to help paint the nursery. Whatever the excuse, she and Amy never got together. Next time, they promised each other. Next time.

Maybe Margot was right—she should have made more of an effort. She should have called Amy to check in from time to time, to ask how the kids were, how Mark’s job was going, to talk the way women talked. After all, she’d let herself imagine it often enough. She had an ongoing imaginary conversation with Amy that had gone on for years. In her mind, Amy was the first person to get all the big news: each of Piper’s relationships and breakups; the steady rise of the video-production studio she and her friend Helen had started six years ago; her scare last year with the lump in her breast that turned out to be benign. But the reality was, Piper never actually picked up the phone. It was easier, more comforting, to go on talking to the Amy in her head—the Amy of her childhood, not the adult version with two children whose names she could never quite remember and a husband that Piper knew only through Facebook photos.

She stared harder at the photo on the dresser, tried to remember that particular day, but all that came back was the sound the wheels of their roller skates had made on the bottom of the pool, the smell of Amy’s Love’s Baby Soft, and the way Amy’s arm around her made her feel invincible. Who had taken the picture? Amy’s grandmother, most likely. The image was tilted at an awkward angle, as though the earth were off its axis that day.

“There’s something else,” Margot breathed into the phone, voice low and shaky. “Something that Jason said.” Jason was one of the half-dozen officers in the tiny London Police Department. In a town where the biggest crimes were deer jacking and the occasional break-in, Piper could imagine how they were handling a gruesome murder-suicide.

“What was it?” Piper said.

“He said they found an old photo with…at the scene.”

“A photo?” For a crazy second, Piper imagined that Margot was talking about her photo, the photo on the dresser.

“Yeah. It sounds like the one we found that summer. Remember?”

“Yes,” Piper breathed. She remembered it too well. Amy’s mom and her aunt Sylvie as kids, in old-fashioned dresses, cradling fat chickens against their chests. It had been taken years before Sylvie disappeared. So—a different photo, of different girls; a different innocent childhood.

“Well, someone had written something on it. None of this is being talked about on the news,” Margot went on. “Not yet. No one in the department can figure out what it means. The theory is that Amy was just crazy. Jason asked me if I had any idea what it was about, and I said I didn’t. But I think he knows I was lying.”

Piper felt her throat getting tighter. She swallowed hard, and made herself ask the question. “What did it say?”

There was a long pause. At last, her sister spoke.

“?‘29 Rooms.’?”

“Oh Jesus,” said Piper. She took in a breath, felt the room tilting around her. Suddenly she was twelve again and skating around at the bottom of that old pool with the cracked cement and peeling paint. Up above, Margot was going in backward circles around the edge, and Amy was whispering a secret in Piper’s ear—breath hot, words desperate.

“I’ll be on the next plane,” promised Piper. “Don’t do anything. Don’t say a word to anyone. Not even to Jason. Not until I get there. Promise?”

“I promise,” Margot said, her voice sounding far off, a kite bobbing at the end of a long string Piper was barely able to hold on to.





1955





Mr. Alfred Hitchcock Paramount Pictures Hollywood, California June 3, 1955