Page 106 of What Happens at Nightfall

Jess turned another page and another. Unlike Jess’s childhood, Grandma Jan had grown up with people. There were christenings and weddings, birthday parties and beach days.

It was crazy to think that just across the bridge in Brooklyn, Jess might have great-aunts and uncles she’d never known about. Cousins. Family. All left behind in a crazy flight across the country before her mom had turned one.

Jess looked up at her mother. “What was Grandma Jan’s maiden name?”

“This is one of the few things I did know,” said her mother. “I needed it as a security question for something. My mother’s name was Engel. Jacinta Engel.”

Like angel. Jess turned another page and came upon a faded clipping. Local girl sings like angel. Her grandmother had won a singing competition. Inspired by the singing of angels, said the article, which sounded like the sort of mawkish platitude one would expect from a local paper in the mid-fifties, but Jess felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.

Angele dei, qui custos es mei . . .

A rustle of wings, a voice like chimes singing. A shadow across her bedroom floor. An image she’d been trying to replicate all her life. A sound her grandmother had tried to copy. Her mother, perpetually drunk on light and color.

Jess felt like she were grasping around the edges of something much bigger than herself. Or maybe she was just a mad fantasist making too much out of the hyperbole of a journalist working for a local paper.

“There’s so much in here, Jess,” her mother was saying. “Did you know she was a glassblower? Not my mom. My grandmother Engel. Your great-grandmother. I’d never known that until I found these scrapbooks. There’s an article in there about it. She was one of the Tiffany girls. That was before she married my grandfather, of course.”

“What was her maiden name?” Jess wished someone had thought to put in a family tree with these papers.

Instead, they had a lot of beach pictures of Grandma Jan. Jess turned another page of the album. Grandma Jan had clearly loved the water. Was that why Pop had decided to move to coastal California?

“I can tell you in a moment. There’s a picture of my grandmother Engel with the other Tiffany girls in 1904.” Her mother dug into the cardboard box, pushing aside cardboard-framed portraits of solemn-faced people, riffling through ancient bits of newsprint.

Jess’s hand stilled on a page of the album. Grandma Jan wasn’t on the beach in this one. In high-waisted slacks and a puff-sleeved blouse, she posed in front of a small, square building with pillars, crowned by the bust of a woman. A shadow fell across her, shaped like an angel’s wing. The picture was overexposed, the details blurry, but Jess would have known that building anywhere.

Grandma Jan was standing in front of the Vanderwilt mausoleum. In Green-Wood.

“Ha, here it is! Piatti! That was it! Grandma Engel’s maiden name was Piatti.”

“Of course it was,” said Jess numbly. Grandma Jan wasn’t a Piatti. But her mother was. Jacinta Piatti Engel. Jess knew she’d need a piece of paper and a family tree to work it all out, but that meant—she thought—that the Jacinta Piatti who had sewn dresses for Cornelia Vanderwilt, the one who’d faced off against the demon Belfagor, was her mother’s great-grandmother.

“My grandmother was nineteen in 1903 when she started work for the Tiffany glass company. I’d never known we had an artist in the family,” Jess’s mother said happily. Noticing Jess wasn’t responding, she peered nearsightedly over Jess’s shoulder at the picture of Grandma Jan in front of the mausoleum. “Where is that?”

“That,” said Jess, “is Green-Wood. The cemetery.” The cemetery where her grandmother had died.

The cemetery where she was supposed to be meeting Adam.

Jess slammed the album shut. “Oh, crap. What time is it?”

Her mother lifted her hands helplessly. She never wore a watch. Time was a relative concept to Jess’s mother.

Jess jabbed at the screen of her phone, bringing it to life: 7:05. Nightfall had started at seven. She hadn’t showered, she hadn’t changed. . . . It would be dark, right? Candlelight, it had said. Hopefully he wouldn’t see her that well. Or smell her.

“So I have this thing tonight—” she began, as her phone started vibrating. Adam. Jess grabbed it. “Adam! I’m so sorry. I’m running a little late.” Okay, a lot late. “My mom showed up out of the blue and I completely lost track of time. I can be there in half an hour.”

“Jess. Jess.” Adam finally managed to break in. “Ben is missing.”

“Ben?” Jess’s brain was slow processing. “Missing? As in . . . missing?”

“The school called.” She could hear the desperation in Adam’s voice, even against the noise in the background, music and laughter and wind. “He faked a note from me and left early. He skipped chess. He’s been out there somewhere for four hours.”

Jess turned away from her mother, cupping the phone against her ear. “Did you look under the tree?”

“He’s not there. And he’s not in the house. I’ve looked everywhere.”

“Could he have run away?”

“Maybe? His stuff is all there. Nothing seems to be missing except the clothes he wore to school and his backpack.”