Page 123 of What Happens at Nightfall

Adam could feel his cheeks heating. “It was nothing. Also, they weren’t angry. They were just very . . . focused.” Goal-oriented ginkgos.

“Uh-huh.” Jess was having none of it. “So why didn’t that thing over there try to bribe you?”

Adam tried to think about what the demon might have offered him and came up blank. If he wanted coffee, he had a Nespresso machine for that. Outside the doors of his house was the work he loved. His goal-oriented ginkgos, his rain gardens, his finicky chestnuts and conceited rhododendron and hearty oaks. Inside . . . Inside was his daughter, his son, his best friend, pizza—and Jess.

“Maybe,” said Adam, “it was because he knew everything I wanted was already right here.”

Epilogue

Ten Months Later . . .

The July sunset over the Crescent Water glowed pink and purple and gold.

Jess propped herself up on her elbows on Adam’s old plaid picnic blanket, admiring the performers in their Victorian garb setting up across the lake in front of the mausoleum of William Niblo, the great nineteenth-century impresario. Until Adam, Jess had never heard of Niblo, or his famous pleasure gardens, or the annual Green-Wood party in his honor, A Night at Niblo’s Garden.

Jess had learned a lot these past ten months. She’d learned that there were approximately 106,000 monuments at Green-Wood, of which an astonishing number were angels; she’d learned that eleven-year-old boys produce disproportionate quantities of laundry, most of it socks; she’d learned fifteen different ways of cooking chicken and an equal number of ways to avoid cooking chicken; she’d learned that her mother kept her old room ready for her, whenever she might want to come home; and she’d watched all sixty-five episodes of Adam’s beloved Warehouse 13 and learned that, really, a demon in a necklace wasn’t the scariest thing out there.

The demon was, as far as they knew, still in her mother’s necklace; the necklace was in a cider can covered with a mesh of woven paper clips; the cider can was in a toolbox wrapped around with snow chains; and the toolbox was in the sepulcher that wasn’t a sepulcher in Cornelia’s mausoleum, locked with the tiny key, and guarded by Cornelia in stone and stained glass. The reclining woman continued to keep watch outside the crypt, accompanied by the rose that always bloomed.

As for Cornelia, there’d been no sign of her since that night. No irritated voice, no sudden cold, no smell of roses. There was also no Cornelia or, at least, no mortal remains of Cornelia. Her crypt had contained her research materials, but no sign of whatever might be left of her person. Cal and Ingrid had theories, of course. She’d been cremated and her ash used to create the window (Ingrid); she’d been cremated and her ashes stowed in the bust on top of the mausoleum (Cal, which had resulted in some gymnastics with ladders and Ingrid crowing when the bust had been a bust); someone had stowed her in one of the unlabeled slots in the mausoleum and, no, he wasn’t going to pull them all out to look (Adam, trying to end the whole discussion).

Cal was convinced Cornelia’s remains would turn up someday, like Dante’s ashes, which had been discovered on a shelf of a library in Italy after being mislabeled and forgotten for centuries.

Jess wasn’t so sure. They knew the demon had escaped from the Griffith monument in July 1888 and killed Patrizio Piatti. Cornelia had died three months later, and there was nothing that said how she’d died.

Those had been an awful lot of grimoires that Cornelia had collected. What if she’d tried something and it had gone wrong? What if the demon had found her at the wrong moment? Maybe her body had been incinerated in a battle with the demon and only her spirit and will remained. Maybe there wasn’t anything in that sepulcher because there hadn’t been anything left to be put in that sepulcher.

Jess didn’t know, and she hadn’t, to be honest, devoted a lot of thought to the matter. She’d been too busy.

Make the jump, Kimmy had told her. The bridge is there. With Adam and her mother chivvying her along, Jess screwed up her courage and pulled together an application for the CFA program of the New York Academy of Art. The portfolio required five examples of life drawing, which she hadn’t attempted since high school, so on the advice of a friend of Kimmy’s, she’d hastily enrolled in a life drawing class in Chinatown. As for the rest, she’d needed to come up with ten self-directed works in any medium. Adam had turned an unused attic room into a studio; Melinda scavenged materials for Jess’s more inventive projects; Ben occasionally consented to pose. Jess was lightheaded with glue and solvent, perpetually daubed with paint, and happier than she could ever remember being.

Sometimes, Jess could have sworn she felt the brush of wings, as if someone were leaning over her shoulder as she worked.

It had been a mad rush, but she’d done it. She’d gotten her portfolio in by the March deadline, she’d been accepted, and she’d start as a bona fide art student in the fall. Grandma Moses hadn’t started her career in earnest until seventy-eight; in comparison, thirty-eight was no age at all. Or at least that’s what Adam told her.

A few headhunters had called, with the sort of jobs Jess would have jumped at a year ago. An exposé about Rent the Gallery in New York Magazine’s The Cut had done more to rehabilitate Jess’s reputation than any number of lawsuits. People did love a tale of art and fraud. But Jess had turned them down. She’d taken a few short-term consulting gigs, but that old life, the one where she wore suits and lived in front of three glowing monitors in an office in Midtown, felt very far away.

These days, she woke up to the sound of the trees and the birds and Ben dropping his math textbook.

When her lease ran out on her apartment in May, there was very little she’d taken with her. Just a statue of an angel made from paper clips, a handful of pictures, and a few boxes of books.

And her Nespresso machine, of course.

“Have you seen Davy?” Kimmy plunked a large Fortnum & Mason picnic basket down next to Jess’s blanket. She had a lawn chair clamped under her arm. “I let go of him for one minute . . .”

“That way.” Jess pointed at the shore. “Exit left pursued by Adam.”

Adam was currently in the process of hauling a dripping but undaunted Davy out of the Cresent Water.

“I just wanted to see if there were any fish in there,” Davy was saying. “It was for science.”

“Oh Lord, not science again,” said Kimmy, and went to collect her offspring.

“Yesterday he got vinegar all over the kitchen for science,” said Petunia, regarding her younger brother with tween ennui. “Mom was not amused.”

“Hi, sweetie.” Jess scrambled up to hug her goddaughter. “Ben and his chess club friends are over there if you want to go challenge them to a game.”

Jess liked Ben’s chess club friends. They were endearingly awkward, with hands too big for their wrists and hair that stood up at strange angles. Ben’s popularity had gone the way of Belfagor, but these guys had stuck, and Jess liked them better for it.