Page 54 of What Happens at Nightfall

Chapter Sixteen

On Tuesday, Jess tracked Kimmy down at the New York Society Library on Seventy-Ninth and Madison.

The elegant limestone building still retained hints of its past as a private home—if your idea of a private home was a marble colonnade and busts of seventeenth-century worthies on the stairs. Jess could imagine Cornelia Vanderwilt sweeping down that staircase, entirely at home.

Not being a Gilded Age matriarch, Jess cut to the humbler back stairs.

Unlike normal people, who tended to set up their computers in the Hornblower Room on the fifth floor, Kimmy was passionately attached to a school desk tucked away in a recess of the stacks. Stack 7: Biography. This was one of Kimmy’s favorite haunts; when Le Pain Quotidien on Madison and Eighty-Fifth had proved Kimmy-less, Jess knew that Stack 7 was her best bet.

Jess pushed open the door with its Guide to the Stacks taped beneath the glazed window and edged her way between the bookcases. Kimmy was hunched over her laptop at an angle that couldn’t have been good for her back, scowling fiercely at the screen with one book propped open in her lap and three more scattered around her chair.

“Kimmy?”

The book on Kimmy’s lap landed on the floor with a clunk. Slamming the lid of her laptop down, Kimmy rose, bumping her hip on the teenager-size desk. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize.” It had seemed easier to do in person. Also, Kimmy wasn’t answering her calls.

Kimmy folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing one of her signature nap dresses, this one patterned with tiny books. In deference to the cooling weather, she had layered it with a hot pink J.Crew cardigan. “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to.”

Jess held up a Sephora bag. “This is for Petunia.” It was amazing how much a tiny tub of skin cream could cost. “Her real gift got lost in Indiana.”

“Is that where you’ve been? Indiana?” Kimmy radiated skepticism and rage.

“No, I haven’t, it’s just—never mind.” Some other day she could tell Kimmy her customer service saga. “I’ve been in Brooklyn.”

“Oh, wow, so far you couldn’t come back for your own goddaughter’s birthday party.”

Kimmy had always sung the lead in the school musical. Her voice didn’t quite hit Valkyrie levels, but it was loud enough for someone to ease open the door from the stairs and call, “Everything okay in there?”

“Fine!” chirped Kimmy, giving Jess a look of death. “Sorry!”

Jess lowered her voice. “Can we go someplace else? And talk?”

“Unlike some people, I have work to do.” Kimmy froze, a look of extreme guilt crossing her face.

“We both know I’m unemployed,” Jess said in exasperation. “We don’t need to dance around it. I know you’re on deadline and writing is real work and not just something that magically appears on the page. I just wanted to apologize. And explain. But if it’s a bad time, I’ll go away.”

“It’s always a bad time,” said Kimmy, but she sounded marginally less hostile. “Am I supposed to ask what you were doing in Brooklyn that made you forget your goddaughter’s birthday?”

“I didn’t forget it exactly,” said Jess in a small voice. “I just misplaced the day.”

Kimmy gave her a “don’t even” look.

Fine. Jess deserved that. She deserved all of it.

Over the past two days, when Kimmy hadn’t answered her calls and her phone hadn’t buzzed—not that Jess was waiting for a call, it wasn’t like she was sixteen, but still, she’d kind of thought he’d at least text—she’d toyed with various explanations, all of which finessed the truth to a greater or lesser degree. Because the truth was just too bizarre to expect anyone, even Kimmy, to accept.

Jess squared her shoulders. “The reason I didn’t come to Petunia’s party was that I may have been battling an immortal demon.”

“You may have been what?”

“Battling an immortal demon. Possibly.” Jess assumed the demon was immortal. She hadn’t bothered to ask. It seemed like a minor point in the greater scheme of things.

Kimmy stared at her. “That’s a more original excuse than the dog ate your watch.”

“It’s not an excuse,” Jess protested. “You know I love Petunia. You know I wouldn’t have missed her birthday if it hadn’t been something really monumental.”

“No,” said Kimmy, leaning over to pick up her fallen book. “I don’t know. You’ve been really not yourself since the whole thing with Rent the Gallery.”