Page 125 of What Happens at Nightfall

After ten months, Jess and Ben were . . . okay. Ben hadn’t exactly embraced her, but he was prepared to tolerate her presence. It wasn’t exactly The Sound of Music, but, on the other hand, Melinda wasn’t making out with Nazi postmen, so it was a trade-off.

Jess ducked as a drone whizzed straight at them, making little clicking sounds. Not just any drone; Adam’s oak wilt drone.

“What was that?” demanded Adam, as his daughter followed close behind the drone.

“Aerial photography,” explained Melinda. “The intersection of art and technology.”

Adam struggled to a sitting position on the picnic blanket. “What about the intersection of not dumping a very expensive tool in the lake?”

“Ye of little faith,” said Melinda. “Say cheese.”

The drone hovered in front of them for a moment, and then swooped off again.

“I did not tell her she could use the drone,” said Adam emphatically.

“Ah, but did you tell her she couldn’t?” asked Jess, who was wise to the ways of Melinda. Ben was still a bit of a negotiation, but she and Melinda understood each other. It was rather nice, actually, having a ready-made teenage daughter.

Adam groaned and buried his head in his hands. “That was my mistake.”

Jess patted him comfortingly on the arm. “If this whole engineering thing doesn’t work out, she’ll make an excellent lawyer.”

“And by excellent, you mean terrifying.”

“Same thing.” Jess was rather glad her own lawyer was so terrifying; her damages from Rent the Gallery were paying for art school.

It was crazy to think that just a year ago she’d been alone with a dead orchid, brooding over her lost career. Now Jess had paint under her fingernails and an angel in her front yard. The kitchen table had a place set for her, and sometimes for Ingrid and Cal as well, or Melinda’s two besties or Ben’s buddies, the room bursting with chatter and backpacks and the smell of chicken cooking, people coming and going, and lost tourists ringing the bell, needing to be let out of the gate after hours.

Jess leaned back on her elbows and looked up at her boyfriend and couldn’t believe that he was hers and they were them and that she’d gone from sterile white walls and a dead orchid to an exuberance of glorious, growing things.

Pretty funny considering that she was surrounded by dead people. But as Kimmy had pointed out, if doing the right thing goes wrong, maybe doing the wrong thing will go right. The city of the dead was remarkably full of life.

“So,” Adam murmured. “Now that the kids are finally otherwise occupied . . .”

“Look what we found!” Ingrid plopped herself down on the blanket right between Adam and Jess, waving a piece of paper in front of their faces.

“We found the plans for the Vanderwilt mausoleum,” panted Cal. He didn’t sit, but he stood over them, hands planted on his hips.

“Great,” said Adam, batting the paper away. “Wonderful. Enjoy. Go examine it somewhere.”

“We already did.” Ingrid had theoretically gone back to work on her dissertation, but Jess had her doubts about how much she was actually writing, given that she seemed to be perpetually at Green-Wood.

Ingrid and Cal had made it their personal mission to track down anything related to the Vanderwilts or Piattis. It had become a sort of competition between them, each trying to out-research the other. They’d already identified several previously unsuspected Piatti-made monuments, and Cal was impossibly smug about it.

Melinda had expressed the opinion that they should just hook up already and get it over with, a sentiment with which Jess strongly concurred.

“After the demon escaped from the Griffith monument in 1888, Cornelia knew she needed a stronger containment facility,” said Ingrid importantly. “In the three months between Patrizio Piatti’s death and her death, she drew up plans . . .”

“They were added to and altered over time,” Cal interjected. “Her daughter-in-law, Alice Vanderwilt, took up the project.”

“Alice?” It took Jess a moment to remember where she’d seen that name, inscribed on the wall of the mausoleum. Alice had outlived both her husband and her mother-in-law. “We never even thought about Alice.”

“The mausoleum as we know it wasn’t fully completed until 1905,” said Cal apologetically. “Cornelia died in 1888.”

“So . . . was it Alice who defeated Belfagor in the end? Alice and Jacinta, I mean,” Jess added.

“We don’t know,” said Cal frankly. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

Ingrid gave him a pitying look. “We’re not that ignorant. We know Cornelia Vanderwilt hired the Piatti family to make the statuary and Alice Vanderwilt hired Jacinta Piatti to make that window, including the 3D glass globe.” Ingrid brandished a paper, yellowed with age. “Jacinta Piatti’s sketches for the window.”