ALSO BY JENNIFER MCMAHON
The Winter People
The One I Left Behind
Don’t Breathe a Word
Dismantled
Island of Lost Girls
Promise Not to Tell
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer McMahon
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover design by John Fontana
Cover illustration by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
Front-of-cover photographs: girl © Stephen Carroll/Arcangel Images; road © Sharon Day/Shutterstock; tree © Tooykrub/Shutterstock; hair © Yuliya Yafimik/Shutterstock; clouds © Mona Makela/Shutterstock; castle © t mulraney/Moment/Getty Images
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McMahon, Jennifer.
The night sister : a novel / Jennifer McMahon. — First edition.
pages ; cm
I. Title.
PS3613.C584N54 2015
813'.6—dc23 2015012149
ISBN 9780385538510 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780385538527 (eBook)
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Also by Jennifer Mcmahon
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
2013
Amy
Jason
Piper
1955
Rose
Rose
Rose
2013
Piper
Piper
1989
Piper
Jason
Piper
Jason
2013
Jason
1955
Rose
Rose
Rose
2013
Piper
1989
Piper
Jason
Piper
1961
Rose
Rose
Rose
2013
Jason
1989
Piper
Jason
Piper
1961
Rose
Rose
Rose
Rose
2013
Piper
1989
Piper
2013
Piper
1989
Piper
2013
Piper
1989
Piper
2013
Piper
1989
Piper
2013
Piper
Piper
Jason
Rose
1961
Rose
2013
Piper
Margot
Piper
Jason
Piper
Jason
Piper
Jason
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A long time ago, I tried to convince my younger brother that on some nights, while he was sleeping, I turned into a monster. This is for you, Tom.
2013
Amy
Amy’s heart hammers, and her skin is slick with sweat.
Focus, she tells herself.
Don’t think about the thing in the tower.
Amy knows that if she thinks too hard about it she won’t be able to do what needs to be done.
She looks down at the photo, the old black-and-white print she’s kept all these years, hidden away in the drawer of her bedside table. It’s been handled so much that it’s cracked and faded, one of the corners torn.
In it, her mother, Rose, and her aunt Sylvie are young girls, wearing crisp summer dresses as they stand in front of a sign that says World Famous London Chicken Circus. Each girl clutches a worried-looking hen, but that’s where the similarities end. Amy’s mother is wearing a scowl beneath tired eyes, her hair dark and unkempt; Sylvie is radiant, the one who was going to grow up and go to Hollywood. Her blond hair is movie-star perfect; her eyes are shining.
Someone had scrawled a date on the back: June 1955. If only Amy could travel back in time, talk to those two girls, warn them what was coming. Warn them that one day it would all lead to this moment: Amy alone and out of options, on the verge of doing something terrible.
She bites her lip and wonders what people will say about her once she’s gone.
That she was broken inside, a woman with a screw loose. (Aren’t all women like that, really? Little time bombs waiting? Especially women like her—surviving on monthly boxes from the food pantry, dressing her children in ragged, secondhand clothes that never quite fit.)
What went wrong? they will whisper to each other while fondling artichokes and avocados in the produce aisle of the grocery store.
What kind of monster was she? they might ask after a few glasses of wine, as they sit in tidy living rooms, gathered for book club.
But these people know nothing of true monsters. They will never have to make the choices Amy has made.
The fluorescent lights in the kitchen buzz and flicker. Amy takes a deep breath, looks out the kitchen window. Beyond the gravel driveway, past the two ruined motel buildings with their sagging, swaybacked roofs, the tower leans precariously. Made of cement and stone, it was built by her grandfather all those years ago as a gift for her grandmother Charlotte. Her own Tower of London.
Amy thinks, as she often does, of that long-ago summer when she was twelve. Of Piper and Margot and the day they found the suitcase; of how, after that, nothing was ever the same.
Where was Piper now? Out in California somewhere, surrounded by palm trees and glamorous people, living a life Amy couldn’t even imagine. Amy suddenly longs to talk to her, to confide in her and ask for forgiveness, to say, “Don’t you see this is what I have to do?”
She thinks that Piper and Margot might understand if she could tell them the whole story, starting with the suitcase and working forward.
But mostly what she wishes is that she could find a way to warn them.
She glances at the old photo in her hand, takes a black marker from a kitchen drawer, and hastily writes a message along the bottom, over the chickens and patterned summer dresses. Then she tucks the photograph into her back pocket and goes to the window.
The clock on the stove says 12:15 a.m.
Down at the tower, a shadow lurches from the open doorway.
She’s out of time.
Moving into the hallway, she latches the deadbolt on the front door (silly, really—a locked door will do no good), then stops at the closet and grabs her grandfather’s old Winchester. Rifle in hand, she climbs the stairs, the same stairs she’s climbed her whole life. She thinks she can hear young Piper and Margot following behind her, whispering, warning her, telling her—as they did all those years ago—to forget all about it, that there is no twenty-ninth room.
Amy takes each step slowly, willing herself not to run, to stay calm and not wake her family. What would Mark think if he woke up and found his wife creeping up the steps with a gun? Poor, sweet, clueless Mark—perhaps she should have told him the motel’s secrets? But no. It was better to protect him from it all as best she could.
The scarred wood beneath her feet creaks, and she thinks of the rhyme her grandmother taught her:
When Death comes knocking on your door,
you’ll think you’ve seen his face before.
Wh
en he comes creeping up your stairs,
you’ll know him from your dark nightmares.
If you hold up a mirror, you shall see
that he is you and you are he.
Jason
The call came in at 12:34 a.m.: a woman reporting that gunshots and screams were coming from the old Tower Motel.
Jason was putting on his coat, but froze as he listened, dread creeping into his chest and squeezing his heart like an icy hand.
Amy.
Even though he’d already punched out, and even though he heard Rainier and McLellan were on their way to check it out, Jason decided to swing by on his way home. It couldn’t hurt to take a look, he told himself. He knew he should leave it, should just get in his truck, drive home, and crawl into bed beside Margot. He should put his arm around her, rest his hand on her belly, and feel the baby kick and turn in her sleep.
But there was what he should do and there was what he needed to do. And as soon as the call came in, he knew he needed to go out to the motel. He needed to see if Amy was okay.
He was at the motel in ten minutes, his headlights illuminating the faded and rotting old sign: Tower Motel, 28 Rooms, Pool, No Vacancy. As he turned up the gravel driveway and drove past the crooked tower and decrepit motel rooms where, as a boy, he used to hide out, he felt strangely faint; then he realized he wasn’t letting himself breathe.
Idiot.
Amy’s house was at the top of the driveway, perhaps twenty yards beyond the low-slung buildings of motel rooms. Rainier and McLellan’s cruiser was parked in front of it, and the front door of the house stood open. Every light in the house was on, making it look too bright and all wrong somehow—like something you weren’t supposed to stare directly at, something dangerous, like an eclipse.
He’d been here just a week ago. Amy had called him at the station, out of the blue, saying she really needed someone to talk to, and would he come? He was taken aback; other than saying a quick, impersonal hello when they ran into each other around town, they hadn’t talked, really talked, since high school.
“I can come on my lunch break,” he’d answered without hesitation.
Some part of him knew it was wrong, how eager he was to see her, how he had lit up like a Christmas tree because he was the one she’d turned to. He’d thought of how disappointed Margot would be when he told her, so he decided he wouldn’t tell her. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and it wasn’t so terrible, was it? He was just going to see an old friend, to help out—where was the harm in that? Still, guilt whined around his head like a nagging, persistent mosquito. You have a wife you love and a baby on the way, it said. What do you think you’re doing?
Now, as he stood in the open doorway, he heard what sounded like a low groan. His skin prickled. Unholstering his gun, he stepped into the front hall; a closet door stood open, revealing a row of shiny rain slickers and grubby sweatshirts hanging over a jumble of shoes. Jason spotted small, sparkly pink sneakers; a large pair of worn work boots that had to belong to Amy’s husband, Mark; the leather flip-flops Amy had been wearing last week when she met him at the door. “Jay Jay,” she had said as she embraced him, somewhat clumsily, sloshing coffee out of her mug. “I’m so happy you’re here.”
Now he looked around the house. The living room was to the right, the kitchen to the left, and a staircase directly in front of him. Everything smelled musty, vaguely ruined. Wallpaper hung off the walls like torn pieces of skin. The dull brown carpet (had it been white once?) was full of stains and burns, worn through to the floorboards in places.
He hadn’t noticed any of this last week.
Jason’s radio squawked. Doug Rainier was upstairs—Jason heard his shaking voice both in the house and, a split second later, as a mechanical echo over the radio. “Three victims,” he was saying. “All dead.” Then, quietly, “Oh God. Oh, shit.”
Adrenaline flooded through him, even before his brain fully understood Rainier’s words. He ascended the stairs two at a time, right hand on his gun.
Amy.
Where was Amy?
The scene at the top of the stairs nearly brought him to his knees. He had to grab hold of the wall to keep from going down.
He’d never seen anything like it.
Never seen so much blood.
A gunshot hadn’t done this.
There were gory red tracks everywhere in the hall. Doug Rainier was on his knees near one of the victims, retching violently. Jason staggered toward them. The victim was facedown, her long blond hair splayed out around her head. There was a rifle beside her, and she lay in what looked like a small lake of blood. The smell of it, sharp and metallic, hit him hard, filling his nose and mouth.
“Oh Jesus.” Jason breathed out the words and let himself sag against the wall.
She was facedown, but he knew it was her and he knew that she was dead. Her right arm was tucked beneath her chest, but her left was outstretched. A piece of paper rested near her elbow. He leaned in a bit—no, not paper, an old photograph. It was a black-and-white image of two little girls, and written across it in black marker was the phrase “29 Rooms.” He blinked; a part of him knew it must mean something, must be a clue, but what he found himself focusing on instead was Amy’s hand, pale and waxy. Her engagement ring and wedding band glinted up at him, just as they had last week, when she’d reached across the kitchen table to take his hand.
“There’s no one else I can tell all this to, Jay Jay,” she’d said through tears. “I swear, I think I’m going crazy.”
“Hawke?” a voice called. Jason looked up and saw Bruce McLellan looming in the doorway of the bedroom at the opposite end of the hall. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Jason couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t take his eyes off Amy.
“Do you remember, Jay Jay, back when we were kids, how you used to write me notes in secret code?” she’d asked, and he’d nodded. Of course he remembered. He remembered everything.
“Sometimes I’d pretend not to understand them,” Amy said. “But I always did. I always knew just what you wrote.”
“Hawke, I need you in here—now!” McLellan barked, and Jason turned from Amy at last, to walk down the hallway like a ghost version of himself, there and yet not.
As Jason entered the bedroom, he realized this was Amy’s old room. He remembered standing in the shadows of the driveway as a boy, looking up at her dormer window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.
Now Jason did a quick sweep of the room’s contents: a fluffy pink throw rug in the middle of the wide, white-painted floorboards; a dresser with a small collection of glass and plastic jungle animals displayed on top; a disheveled bed with a twisted polka-dotted pink-and-purple comforter, its pillows and stuffed animals spilling onto the floor.
McLellan was standing in the center of the room, his gun clenched in both hands. He nodded down at the floor. A trail of small, bloody prints led to an open window.
“Out there,” he whispered, his face red and sweaty. He sounded boyish, frightened. “On the roof.”
Jason nodded and walked slowly across the room with his gun in front of him, hands trembling.
He put his back against the wall on the left side of the open window, and listened. He heard a low moaning. A whimper. From out on the roof.
Sirens wailed in the distance. Backup would be here soon. He could wait. But what if someone was out there, hurt?
“London Police Department!” Jason shouted. “We know you’re out there. I need you to come inside and keep your hands where I can see them.”
There was scrabbling, a scuttling noise, but no one appeared.
“I’m going out,” he mouthed without sound. McLellan nodded and stayed where he was, his gun locked on the open window.
Holding his gun, Jason ducked through the opening and stepped out onto the roof. Immediately he dropped into a crouch and swiveled right, then left, scanning the rooftop.
A pair of eyes glinted in the dark. A flash of blond hair.
He felt the gun slip from his grasp, heard it hit the roof and slide off with a clatter. Amy? It couldn’t be, but there she was, looking just like she had when he first met her, all skinny legs and wild hair.
Suddenly he was twelve years old again: a gangly, awkward boy staring at a girl who held all the secrets he’d ever dreamed about.
“Hawke?” McLellan called from inside. “What’s going on out there?”
Jason blinked and looked at the little girl again, his eyes adjusting to the dark. Like Amy, but not Amy. Amy’s daughter. She was squatting down next to the crooked chimney with crumbling mortar, one hand resting on it for balance. Her blond hair was in tangles; her lips were trembling, eyes wild with fear. She had on pale pajamas that shimmered in the moonlight.
“Remember me? I’m Jason,” he said, holding out his hand. “And I’m going to get you out of here.”
Piper
Piper was frowning at the giant sinkhole that had appeared in her tiny backyard.
She had put a lot of work into this yard, pulling up the sickly grass and relandscaping with drought-tolerant plants: sedum, purple sage, sheep fescue, deer grass, desert mallow. A crushed stone path led to a small patio shaded by an avocado tree, where she sometimes sat with a good book and a glass of sauvignon blanc.
The Night Sister Page 1