Page 17 of What Happens at Nightfall

I could tell you.

The voice was back.

“Shall we lock up?” said Jess, more sharply than she’d intended.

“Just let me grab these candles. Ben must have taken the ones we use in our Halloween pumpkins.” Jess could hear the annoyance in Adam’s voice. “I keep a box in the pantry.”

Now that she was closer, Jess could see that the candles, in all their flickering creepiness, were plastic. They had been arranged below the stained glass window, on an elaborately carved stone bench.

Nestled among the candles sat a Ouija board.

Jess knew it was a Ouija board because on the floor next to the bench was a box that said, “Ouija: Mystifying Oracle,” with a picture of hands manipulating a planchette.

Jess pointed to the Ouija board. “At least now you know what he was doing here. It’s a Ouija board. You use it in séances. To speak to the dead.”

“Shit,” said the arborist. He quickly recovered himself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“I’m in finance.” Was in finance. “I’ve heard worse.”

“I try not to swear in front of the plants. Or the children.” Adam leaned over her, his hand hovering over the flat board with its elaborate scroll of letters. He jerked away, not touching it. “Ben’s mother—my wife—died a few years ago. Four years ago.”

“Oh.” Now that Jess knew the answer to what had happened, she almost wished she didn’t. Four years ago, Ben had said the tomb was last opened. “Is she . . . here?”

Adam gave his head an abrupt shake. “No. Her parents wanted her buried here, but once we opened it—I couldn’t. She would have hated it. She didn’t want to be stuck in a box in a wall.”

The false candlelight flickered off the marble walls. Those weren’t marble building blocks, Jess realized. They were grave markers. That was why the tomb was so much smaller inside than out. The walls were filled with corpses, like a card catalog of the dead.

Now that she knew what to look for, Jess could see the writing chiseled on the stones. “Horace Vanderwilt, 1852–1876. Alice Vanderwilt, 1855–1920.”

Even the bench wasn’t a bench. It was a tomb, a more elaborate one than the others. Whoever was plunked in the middle had merited more than the usual slot in the wall. There was writing on it, carved in a thin, spidery script that Jess couldn’t read, at least, not without shoving aside the Ouija board and candles that the boys had brought in their attempt to speak to the dead.

“Do you think—” Jess hesitated, not sure what to say.

“Ben came here to talk to his mother? I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’d thought we were doing okay.”

“Maybe he just wanted to impress his friends,” Jess offered, squelching an entirely uncharacteristic urge to hug him. She was not a hugging person. “Having a private tomb is what my best friend’s daughter would call a flex.”

“Maybe.” The arborist looked down at her, making a concerted effort to pull himself together. “I’m sorry. I’m keeping you from getting home.”

Jess thought of her empty apartment, of the bare twig on the radiator that had once been a plant. “I’m sorry. About your wife.”

“I’m sorry we hijacked your evening.”

Jess cocked her head at him. “Are we having a competition to see who’s the most sorry?”

A laugh tore out of him, a rich, warm sound that seemed to make the plastic candles glow brighter. She had never seen anything as gorgeous as that smile, lighting up the musty crypt with its rainbow shards of broken glass.

“Let me get you to the subway,” he said, leaning over to retrieve his flashlight. “I’ll deal with all of this tomorrow. None of it is going anywhere.”

Ha! someone snorted in her ear.

Jess jerked her head around but saw only the face of the woman in the stained glass, smirking down at her above the nest of candles.

It was being in a tomb by candlelight. It made a person imagine things.

“Good idea,” Jess said, picking her way around the shattered glass. It was, she realized, rather strange the way it had fallen. It should have landed among the candles. Instead, it was as if it had exploded outward, propelled toward the door. “Deal with it by daylight.”

Idiots, said the voice.