Page 25 of What Happens at Nightfall

Jess trudged up the scuffed stairs. The presumably once white paint of the stairwell had gone piebald. The paint on the doors was peeling and the numbers that marked them hung drunkenly. Behind one door, Jess could hear someone singing scales.

It was a very strange place to have a tour office.

But maybe that was her mistake, thinking of the old travel offices of her childhood, with desks and people and break rooms. This was probably a back office only, somewhere to answer the phones and assign tour guides. All you needed for that was one person and a computer.

By the time she hit six, Jess was using the sturdy shaft of the parasol like a walking stick. She’d had this delusion, when she was first fired, that she’d use her brief unemployed time to go to the gym and become lean and fit, the sort of person who looked good in Lycra. That had been in the first, optimistic, adrenaline-fueled phase, before Jess developed a close, personal relationship with her couch, her channel changer, and the padlocked freezer case that held the Ben & Jerry’s at her local bodega. The lovely man who ran it reached for the keys as soon as he saw her coming.

She really should have kept up with that whole gym idea, she thought, as she wheezed her way up the last few steps.

Six was the top floor. The steps ended here. Jess wrinkled her nose at an acrid smell, like a match that had just been blown out. There was a haze in the air—or was that just her contacts? Jess blinked, and the smoke cleared.

Jess knocked tentatively at the door marked “66”—and the door gave beneath her fist.

Huh. Jess gave it a gentle push. “Hello? Is this Domiciles of the Damned?”

The door opened directly into the kitchen of a studio apartment. A breakfast bar jutted out in the middle in an attempt to divide the cooking space from the living space. The Formica top was crowded with a miscellany of objects, from a corkscrew to a horn-handled knife. Jess could smell the sharp tang of herbs; there were bunches of them hanging from the ceiling, jerry-rigged with yarn held by tape.

Someone had spilled a bowl of kosher salt; the coarse crystals had scattered everywhere.

This wasn’t an office, this was someone’s apartment.

The tour guide’s bustled gown had been flung across a daybed, the bustle sticking impudently up, the hat with its veil discarded beside it. A pair of high-heeled buttoned boots sat on the floor next to it.

She should leave, Jess knew. But her eye was caught by the far wall. Or, rather, what was on the far wall.

It looked like a murder board from a British crime show. Red string connected a haphazard collection of printouts and sketches held to the wall with crookedly applied tape. The room was humid, un-air-conditioned, the heat collecting beneath the roof, but despite it, Jess felt a chill as she stepped forward, salt crunching beneath her feet.

There was that finial they had found last night, the broken one, a face on a winged urn, but in this sketch she could see the face clearly, the cherub’s mouth open in what looked like a scream. There were angels, angels everywhere, grainy printouts of monuments. There was a sketch of a man sitting cross-legged, but the face was the face of a goat. Horns extended like Maleficent’s headdress and something that looked like a giant light fixture grew out of the middle of its head.

There was the tomb she’d been in last night, photographed from every possible angle, with close-ups of the statues in the niches in the front. Post-it notes drooped from the various photos, with illegible notes scribbled in an eccentric hand, all loops and whirls.

But that wasn’t what made Jess take a step back.

There, at the far end of the wall, where the red string ended, were a very different series of pictures. These had a person in them, a girl: with a backpack hanging from one shoulder; raising her hand to wave goodbye to someone; walking obliviously down the street; seen through a half-shaded window.

Jess recognized the house, the peaked roof of the porch, the turrets and widow’s walk. She also recognized the girl, with her short, dark hair and “KEEP CALM AND BUILD A ROBOT” T-shirt.

A Post-it had been stuck across her chest in one of the pictures, with only one word on it, all in capital letters.

INHERITANCE?!?!?!

He’d given her his phone number last night. Adam. The arborist. So she could let him know she’d gotten home safely.

Jess yanked her sweater out of her bag, feeling in the pocket for the scrap of paper with his number.

“Adam Chervinsky.” He answered the phone on the second ring. She could hear the bleep of some sort of machinery in the background.

“Adam? This is Jess. Jess Waters. We met last night.”

“Jess!” His voice changed. She could hear him shift the phone from one ear to the other. “You made it home all right last night?”

“Yes, but—I went to return the parasol to the tour guide and—”

The demon face leered at her from the wall. It seemed to be looking directly at the profile of Adam’s daughter, as she smiled at someone out of view.

There was no good way to explain this.

“There’s something I think you need to see.”