Now it was all falling into the earth. The neighbors were there, gawking and expressing alarm (how big could the sinkhole get? would it swallow the neighborhood?). Her sister, Margot, was there, too, so hugely pregnant she waddled around off balance, like a drunk penguin.
Jason was not there, a fact that irked Piper but did not surprise her.
“Be careful,” Piper warned her sister as the avocado tree was swallowed up, and knew right away that she shouldn’t have spoken; thoughts and words have power, and if you allow your worst fears to form fully, you run the danger of bringing them to life.
As if on cue, Margot stumbled too close to the edge. Piper reached for her, but it was too late. The hole, which had been growing ever wider, threatening to swallow everything, took her sister deep down into the earth, so deep that they couldn’t even hear her scream.
In the distance, alarms rang. But they sounded funny. More like music.
Piper opened her eyes, found herself in her own bed.
She rolled over, looked at the clock: 4:32 a.m. Across the room, her phone was playing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”—Margot’s ringtone.
“Oh my God,” Piper gasped, jumping out of bed—the baby. It was seven-thirty in Vermont, and Margot wouldn’t call this early unless something was really, truly wrong.
Piper snatched up the phone she’d left on the dresser.
“Margot?” Piper said, half expecting it to be Jason on the other end with terrible news. The worst news of all, even—we’ve lost them both. She shuddered as she recalled her sister slipping into the sinkhole, felt herself reaching for her, her hands grabbing nothing but air.
“Piper,” Margot said, and Piper felt a weight lift from her chest. But she felt it return when she heard the strain in her sister’s voice as she continued: “I’m sorry to wake you. Something’s happened.”
“The baby?”
Margot was eight and a half months pregnant. It was her third pregnancy. The first had ended in a miscarriage at sixteen weeks, and the second in a stillbirth at thirty weeks—a baby boy they had named Alex. Margot and Jason were trying again, though Margot had said that if she lost this baby, that was it. No more. She simply couldn’t bear it.
“No, no. The baby’s fine.”
“Jason?”
“No, not Jason. It’s Amy. She…Oh God, Piper, it’s awful.” Margot was crying.
“Jesus, what happened?” Piper asked. She flipped on the light and blinked at the sudden brightness. The room around her came to life—the queen-sized bed with its snowy duvet, the old rocking chair in the corner, the maple dresser with the mirror hanging above it. She caught sight of her own reflection; her face was pale and panicked, and her white nightgown made her seem like an apparition, gauzy and ethereal, not quite there.
Her sister snuffled and sobbed, and at last was able to speak in partial sentences, voice shaking.
“Last night…they’re saying Amy shot and killed Mark and their little boy, Levi, and then herself out at the motel. Lou—that’s her daughter?—she’s alive. The police found her crouched on the roof. She climbed out a window and hid there….I can’t imagine how she…what she…” Margot trailed off.
Piper said nothing. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
After a moment, Margot went on:
“She didn’t just shoot them, Piper. They were…all cut up. Butchered.”
Margot started to cry and gulp again. Piper forced herself to take deep breaths. Behind the shock and gut punch of loss, another feeling was there, worming its way to the surface: fear.
Piper looked over at the framed photo she kept on her dresser: Amy, freckle-faced and smiling as she stood between Piper and Margot, her arms draped heavily over each of their shoulders. They all looked impossibly happy, grinning up from the bottom of the empty swimming pool, white roller skates with bright laces on their feet. This photo had been in her bedroom at home when she was growing up, in her dorm room at college, and in every apartment and house she’d lived in since.
“When was the last time you talked to Amy?” Margot asked at last, the phone crackling, her voice staticky, like it was coming in from a far-off radio station.
“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
Dear Mr. Hitchcock,
My name is Sylvia Slater, and I am eleven years old. I live in London, Vermont, where my family runs the Tower Motel on Route 6. I get top marks in my class and my teacher, Mrs. Olson, says I am already reading and writing at a high school level. Daddy is teaching me to help with the bookkeeping, and sometimes he even lets me write the daily tallies in our big ledger.
I want to be an actress when I grow up. Or maybe even a movie director, like you. Are there any girl directors? My sister Rose, she says she doesn’t think there are, but she’s only eight.
I don’t mind telling you, Rose is a little odd. She watches me all the time and it’s starting to bother me. Mama says Rose is just jealous. My father says Rose has an overactive imagination. I honestly can’t imagine what goes on in her head. She runs around the motel in torn dresses, tangles in her hair, and her best friend on earth is a sad old cow we have named Lucy. And yet she has the nerve to tell me I’m silly for wanting to be an actress one day.
I’ve started keeping a movie scrapbook filled with pictures I’ve cut out of famous actors and actresses. Sometimes I show my uncle Fenton what I’ve pasted in my book. You’re his favorite director. He’s seen every single one of your pictures. It was his idea that I write to you, because I have an idea for a movie. But I have to warn you, it’s really scary.
My Oma, she’s my mama’s mother, came to visit last year all the way from England. Oma told me and Rose terrible, frightening stories. Rose loved the stories, but I hated them. They gave me nightmares.
She told one story that I’ll never forget, because she swore it was true. It’s the scariest thing I ever heard.
Mr. Hitchcock, before I tell you any more, there is something I need to know:
Do you believe in monsters?
Sincerely yours,
Miss Sylvia A. Slater
The Tower Motel
328 Route 6
London, Vermont
Rose
Rose watched her sister, Sylvie, pull back the curtain that they’d strung up along the clothesline at the side of the house before stepping out onto the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Sylvie announced in a booming voice. “Welcome to the one and only World Famous London Chicken Circus!”
She dropped the needle onto the phonograph, and “Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts began to play. As Sylvie began to sway back and forth, with each graceful step her blond curls bounced. They were pulled back from her face with simple white barrettes. She’d put her hair in curlers before the circus, because she thought it made her look like Doris Day.
Rose wiped the sweat from her forehead and hauled back the curtain to reveal their audience: Mama and Daddy, Uncle Fenton, Bill Novak the fish man, a shy young couple driving up to Nova Scotia for their honeymoon, and a New Jersey family of four—two parents, one boy, and one girl—who were all on their way to a week of camping in Maine. It wasn’t the largest crowd they’d performed for, but not the smallest, either. It certainly wasn’t bad for a Thursday—tomorrow and Saturday, when the motel was full, they’d have their biggest crowds. The size of the crowd didn’t matter, though: she and Sylvie would do the circus for even a single guest. Daddy said to make every performance count, even if there was just one man watching.
“You never know who that one man might be,” he told them. “Maybe he’s a talent scout. Or a reporter. Maybe he has a hundred friends back home who he’ll tell all about the show and motel.”
Daddy was sitting in the very front row, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, watching intently through his one good eye, the other squinting at them, able to discern only their shadows. He wore his buttoned white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and kept a pack of Lucky Strikes in his pocket, along with a pen and pencil and little notepad. His hair was cut short and slicked back with Brylcreem.
Daddy was the most handsome man Rose knew. Sylvie said he looked just like Cary Grant, who she loved to read about in the papers and magazines guests left behind. She’d talked Daddy into getting a subscription to Life and studied each issue cover to cover as soon as it arrived in the mailbox each week. On the cover of this week’s issue was Henry Fonda in his new picture, Mr. Roberts.
Rose knew that if it came to London—and if the picture was approved by Mama and Daddy—Sylvie would persuade Uncle Fenton to take her to the Saturday matinee. Fenton loved the movies, too, and went as often as he could. He and Sylvie would have long, animated conversations about directors and stars, and sometimes he’d describe the movies she hadn’t been allowed to see to her, scene by scene. It was Fenton’s idea that Sylvie start a movie scrapbook, and she spent hours going through magazines and newspapers, cutting out pictures of her favorite stars and pasting them into her book. She also took notes—making lists of movies she’d seen, movies she wanted to see, and even ideas she had for making movies of her own.
Sometimes Rose got to go to the Saturday matinees with Sylvie and Fenton, but most of the time, she was pronounced too young and was left behind to help Mama with cleaning and mending. To be honest, Rose didn’t mind much. Sometimes Mama would tell her the story of how she met Daddy, and that was kind of like a movie, too.
Rose liked to imagine it. There they were, her parents, up on the big screen. Daddy was in an English hospital bed, rumpled and wounded but still handsome after his plane had been shot down, and Mama looked like an angel in her stiff white nurse’s uniform as she changed the bandages over his injured eye.
“I’d all but given up on myself,” he’d tell the girls when they asked for his version of the story. “The last thing I wanted to do was go back home and be a half-blind farmer. I was feeling like my life was just about over until your mother came along. Charlotte, your mama, was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.”
Rose would always smile at this part, imagining her mama young and pretty, drifting onto the scene, and changing everything—Mama, who was what Daddy called a rare beauty. When he said this, Rose would picture him off in the jungle, coming upon a one-of-a-kind orchid high up on the edge of a waterfall, carefully uprooting it, putting it in a pot, and carrying it home, hoping he had what it took to help it flourish.
“I asked your mama where she was from. ‘Here in London,’ she said. And I laughed and said, ‘Wouldn’t you know it? I’m from London, too.’ ”
“I think it’s so romantic,” Sylvie would say. “The boy from London meets the girl from London. Like it was meant to be.”
“Life could be a dream, if I could take you up in paradise up above,” the Crew Cuts doo-wopped now, as the record spun on the little portable player Sylvie had brought out from their bedroom.
“Introducing Miss Matilda, the star of the show,” said Sylvie, and she led the plump Rhode Island Red onstage with her handful of raisins. Matilda followed Sylvie over to the wooden structure they’d built with two poles placed four feet apart, each with a platform and a ladder leading up to it. This was the high-wire act, although instead of a wire they had a narrow board, because they hadn’t been able to teach a chicken to walk across rope.
With Sylvie’s encouragement, Matilda climbed the ladder on the left, made her way across the narrow top board, then to the other platform, and down the ladder. When she reached the bottom, she rang the little bell that hung there by hitting it with her beak.
The crowd applauded, smiling. Sylvie had Matilda do her bow, which got more applause. Sylvie looked up and smiled, her hair coming loose from her right barrette, a few wisps falling into her eyes. The boy guest was a
t the edge of his seat, his eyes dreamy, the way people’s eyes often got when they watched Sylvie. She had the same effect on people that she did on chickens: they watched her intently, eager to do whatever she asked them next.
Sylvie might be able to entrance the chickens and the whole rest of the world, but Rose Slater was immune to her sister’s charms. That didn’t mean Sylvie didn’t try.
Uncle Fenton had given Sylvie a book—Mastering the Art and Science of Hypnotism—for Christmas, and she’d studied it cover to cover, underlining passages and making notes in the margins. Fenton had thought that she could use some of the techniques on the birds, but Sylvie had taken it further, insisting on practicing on Rose.
“Keep your eyes on my finger; feel yourself getting sleepier, sleepier still. I’m going to count backward from ten; when I get to one, you’ll be fast asleep, but you’ll hear every word I say.”
It never worked, really, but Rose pretended. She followed Sylvie’s finger, lowered her eyelids, spoke and moved as if she was in a trance state. She said goofy things, clucked like a chicken, did whatever Sylvie commanded. It was great fun, fooling her sister, letting Sylvie think she was in control. Rose loved knowing that she had the power to ruin the game, to pop open her eyes and confess that she’d been faking all along. And there would be Sylvie, the clever daughter, the beautiful, graceful girl, waving her dumb finger through the air for nothing.
Rose herself was just the opposite of Sylvie: awkward and thick-limbed, with dark, easily tangled hair. She was the kind of kid people glanced right over, a short and clumsy shadow lurking behind Sylvie and occasionally sticking out her tongue when she was sure no one could see.
As Sylvie and Matilda hammed it up for the audience, Rose busied herself setting up the next act: Petunia was a Barred Rock who Rose had taught to balance on a metal roller skate as it was pulled across the stage on a string. The best part was her costume—a little gingham dress and a pillbox hat that Rose bobby-pinned to her feathers.
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