The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon Read Free Book Online Page B

Facebook. Piper was embarrassed to ask Jason, not wanting to admit how out of touch she’d become with her once-upon-a-time best friend.
    They drove the rest of the way mostly in silence, their few attempts at small talk quickly dying. Eventually, she and Jason both gave up and just stared out at the scenery. When the exit for London came up, Piper remembered Amy’s telling her once that it was the highway that ruined the motel:
    “Before the highway came, people just came through along Route 6. There was so much traffic then. My grandma Charlotte said they had guests every night, and were full most weekends. My mom and her sister, Sylvie, they had a full audience for their crazy chicken circus. People came to see Lucy the cow. Once the interstate opened, people stopped coming, just zipped right on by. There was no reason to come to London anymore.”
    Piper got that. When they moved to London after her parents got divorced, Piper felt like she’d been dropped in the middle of nowhere—a regular ghost town, full of closed shops and restaurants that were now boarded-up buildings with sagging roofs and broken windows. Even now, as they drove through town, she wondered what would bring anyone here, how her sister could possibly have stayed. Margot worked for a nonprofit historical-renovation organization; her job was to give out grants so that historic buildings could be maintained. She was always talking about how London was undergoing a renaissance—young families were buying some of the gorgeous old houses and fixing them up; a developer had bought a bunch of the buildings downtown, and there were plans for a yoga studio, a coffee shop, and a brew pub. But Piper didn’t see signs of any of this actually coming to fruition and thought her sister’s optimism at times bordered on delusional thinking.
    The storefronts along Main Street were still mostly closed. A few were open: an antiques shop, the London House of Hair Salon, and a Dollar Store. The old Woolworth’s still stood; though there were boards over the windows, through the cracks you could see the lunch counter. There were two gas stations (one that advertised Mrs. Cluck’s famous fried chicken), a tiny library in a stone building, the Congregational church, and a VFW post. At the edge of the downtown sat the granite fire-and-police-department building. Jason cast an eye toward it and gave a guy in a uniform a wave.
    They bumped along the road, which was full of potholes and frost heaves, badly in need of repair. They were following a school bus, and Piper saw a girl looking out at them through the back window. Her friend whispered something in her ear, and the girl turned, laughing. Piper remembered riding in the back seat with Amy, getting off at the motel, running up the washed-out gravel driveway toward the kitchen, where Amy’s grandma Charlotte would be waiting for them, a cigarette between her lips and
Guiding Light
on in the living room, the volume up as loud as it could go so she wouldn’t miss anything as she moved from room to room. She’d have a plate of cookies waiting—biscuits, she called them in her English accent.
    “My grandparents were both from London,” Amy told her once with a grin. “London, England, and London, Vermont.”
    But the school bus did not slow this time. It sped past the motel sign, which now leaned backward, as if it had been struck by a truck at some point. Piper read the familiar words as she and Jason drove past—
Tower Motel, 28 Rooms, Pool, No Vacancy
—but now the letters had faded from red to a pink so pale you could only just read them. Beyond the sign, on the other side of the driveway, was the crumbling tower. The kids in the yellow school bus all turned their heads to look up the driveway, still full of police cars and vans. Piper held her breath.
    “Jesus,” she hissed out as she let the breath go, looking beyond the news trucks to the tower. It had been in terrible shape when she was a girl but was