Page 23 of What Happens at Nightfall

Because she’d been trying to suck up to the hot arborist, Jess thought sourly. She could remember the gratitude and relief on his face when she’d offered to take it. That man exuded warm fuzzies like the smell of newly baked chocolate chip cookies in human form.

Jess remembered evil Cookie Monster and decided not to think about cookies.

The parasol. She just needed to figure out how to return the parasol. Jess scootched her knockoff ergonomic chair closer to her desk and scrolled down through yesterday’s emails, searching for the tour confirmation Kimmy had sent her. Sure enough, there it was, in between LinkedIn alerts telling her there was a job in her field she could apply to, but they’d never ever take her because her name was now poison. (LinkedIn hadn’t told her that, but Jess figured it was only a matter of time before they added a feature that would.)

Explore the thrilling world of the dead! proclaimed the email. And under that, in smaller letters, Sensible footwear recommended.

They didn’t need to tell her. The blister on her heel still throbbed.

Jess took another gulp of coffee, making a face at the bitterness of the undiluted brew. It was her guilty secret that she liked her coffee so laden with flavored creamer that it had the consistency of a milkshake, but her creamer appeared to have, overnight, mysteriously gone sour and developed clumps. If she were a medieval peasant, she’d be looking around for pissed-off witches. As it was, she blamed the refrigeration system at her local Duane Reade.

There was no contact information on the email, but when she clicked on the Domiciles of the Damned logo—a tombstone with “RIP?” written across it in deliberately wobbly letters—it took her to the company website, a one-page WordPress account with a few grainy black-and-white photos of cemeteries artistically arranged in lopsided rectangles.

Enter the realm of the dead . . . the page read. Package deals for groups of ten or more.

Tours ran Tuesdays and Thursdays at five thirty.

It wasn’t until she got to the very bottom of the page that Jess found what she was looking for, in the sort of minuscule print usually reserved for medication labels. Domiciles of the Damned was domiciled a little more than ten blocks away, at an address on Forty-Seventh Street between Tenth and Eleventh.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes?” Jess fumbled for the phone, grabbing it before she could be knocked to the back of the queue again.

“I can tell you what happened,” said the customer service rep triumphantly. “When products are scarce, the system automatically changes the order to ‘pick up in store.’”

Jess felt her shoulders relax. She wasn’t losing her mind. At least, not about this. “So you’re telling me I did pick ‘ship to address’ and the system changed it on me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the customer service rep, proud of her for grasping the concept quickly.

Maybe there was hope for her after all. “So can I get it switched back to ‘ship to address’?”

“No, ma’am, once you’ve picked ‘pick up in store,’ you can’t change it.”

Jess resisted the urge to slam her phone repeatedly against the desk. “But I didn’t pick ‘pick up in store’! The system picked it for me, that’s what you just said.”

“If you don’t pick it up for ten days,” said the woman soothingly, “the order will be canceled and your money refunded.”

“Can I cancel it now?” Jess asked, feeling like Alice trying to negotiate with the White Queen: always jam tomorrow, but never jam today. She supposed it was better than the axe-happy Red Queen, but still. She wanted her damn jam. Or her Sephora set for her goddaughter’s eleventh birthday. “What if I cancel and reorder?”

“You can’t cancel once you’ve picked ‘pick up in store,’ ma’am,” said the voice admonishingly, like she’d caught Jess trying to double-dip a chip.

“But I didn’t—never mind. What if I re-reorder right now with you and you make sure the system doesn’t revert to ‘pick up in store’?”

“But, ma’am,” said the voice, mildly scandalized, “you can’t order it now. There’s only one and it’s waiting for ‘pick up in store’ by a customer.”

“But I’m that customer,” wailed Jess.

“Your item is waiting for you at the pickup desk,” said the voice encouragingly. “If you don’t pick it up in ten days, your order will be canceled and your money refunded. Is there anything else I can do to help you?”

“Book me plane tickets to Indiana?” muttered Jess.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice sincerely. “We don’t do that.”

“I was— Thank you for your help.” It wasn’t this poor woman’s fault. It was the system that was screwy.

Yeah, sure, Jess jeered at herself, blame the system. If she hadn’t been undercaffeinated and careless, she would have noticed that the shipping instructions had changed. But no, she hadn’t bothered to read through the order summary, too eager to click confirm and knock at least one thing off her to-do list.

How did she manage to screw up something so simple?