Page 56 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Who’s going to overhear?” Kimmy gestured grandly at the rows of books pressing in around them. “Everyone on these shelves is dead.”

Except sometimes, the dead weren’t entirely dead. Sometimes, they showed up and tried to talk to you.

They sat the way they used to in the library in school, on the floor, backs to the stacks, knees against their chests.

“It started because I went to return the parasol to that guide, the one you found. The Domiciles of the Damned woman.” Jess could feel the whirl of leaves around her feet, the shock of the cemetery at night, the wind that seemed to want to push her back. “Actually, it started when I found Ben, Adam’s son, crying under a tree because he’d opened the family crypt and a glass orb had exploded. But then Adam took me back there with him and I found the parasol and I said I’d return it, since I had the contact info from you—and it turned out she had a crazy murder wall covered with pictures of demons and Adam’s daughter, Melinda.”

“I leave you alone in the cemetery for one night . . .” said Kimmy. “So you called the police?”

“Um, no. We decided to stake out her solstice ritual. That’s why I missed Petunia’s party. There was—something—in the sky.”

You. I know you. The heft of the parasol in her hand, the power draining out of her. The parrot, crying Avast! like Errol Flynn on a buccaneer bender.

“Ingrid—that’s the tour guide—said it was a demon bound by a Gilded Age matriarch named Cornelia Vanderwilt that had been accidentally released. She was trying to cast its consciousness into a parrot before it could attach itself to Melinda. Melinda’s mother was a Vanderwilt,” Jess added, as an afterthought.

Kimmy’s mouth opened and then closed again. “I’ve got nothing. I don’t even know where to ask you to begin. Did you say she was trying to cast its consciousness into a carrot?”

“No, into a parrot. The parrots—never mind. It all felt so real. Kimmy, I was there. I saw it.” Jess hunched her chest against her knees. “Adam’s theory is that it’s all speakers and mirrors and possibly some sort of psychedelic.”

“Adam being the hot arborist?” Kimmy turned her head to look at Jess. “What do you think? Ow. My neck doesn’t want to move like that anymore.”

“My butt is numb,” confessed Jess. This had worked better when they were seventeen. “I don’t know. I know he’s probably right, but . . .”

Fire and screaming. The grass turned to snakes.

Jess let her forehead sag against her knees. “Maybe I just want to believe in good versus evil. Maybe I want things to be simple.”

“Sweetie. That story is many things, but it’s not simple. I feel like I need a flowchart. Or even better, a family tree.” Kimmy perked up, groping for her current notebook. Kimmy went through roughly a notebook per month, filled with a disorganized mix of research notes, grocery lists, and reminders to self that she promptly forgot. Jess tried not to wince as Kimmy opened the notebook to a random page. “Okay. So the claim is that Cornelia Vanderwilt summoned a demon?”

“In order to outdo the new-money people and reclaim her family’s place in New York society. There was some sort of group that played around in the occult. Something of the Brass Twilight. Ingrid—who’s an NYU history PhD student, by the way—thinks that Cornelia bound this demon to her descendants in perpetuity so it’s going to attach itself to Adam’s daughter and we have to somehow save her. Also the world.”

“NYU . . .” Kimmy had started her PhD at the Harvard history department before dropping out to have Petunia. “Their department isn’t terrible. There’s one professor—Rebecca Goetz—who’s been doing really good work on the early modern Caribbean. Do you know what this Ingrid’s field is?”

“I think she said Renaissance Italy. Something about Machiavelli. That was how she started tracking this demon.” Jess looked sideways at Kimmy, who was scribbling busily in her notebook. “You’re taking this seriously?”

Kimmy sucked on the end of her pen, her sign of deep thought ever since their second-grade teacher had made her stop chewing on pencils. “I’m not sure I believe in demons, but I do think it’s an intriguing overlap of the social pressures of the post–Civil War period and the late-nineteenth-century fascination with spiritualism. Also women’s hidden means of power. When you think about it, there are echoes of the seventeenth-century Affair of the Poisons, where elite women resorted to diabolism as a means of securing the power that was otherwise societally denied them. Hmm. I like that. There’s something there.”

“So you’re with Adam on this? You believe that Ingrid believes and you believe that Cornelia Vanderwilt believed, but you think it’s all an extended societal construct?”

“Honey, I don’t believe anything until I can footnote it, and sometimes not even then. It’s amazing the lies that make it into print.” Kimmy scowled in the general direction of the wall of biographies. “I don’t know how people get away with publishing this crap and calling it scholarship. But that’s another story. On your demon . . . I’m willing to accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your arborist’s philosophy. But not until I’ve done my research and can come to an informed opinion.”

Looking at her best friend, Jess thought, not for the first time, what a loss it was that Kimmy had let her PhD drop. She’d felt such pity—and yes, scorn—when Kimmy had told her she was putting her dissertation on hold to have Petunia, and then Dahlia, and then Lily, and then Davy. But in the end, here was Kimmy, a household name, with three books to her name and a fourth under contract, fighting for the truth, one footnote at a time.

She was going to win a Pulitzer one day, PhD or not.

“So you think you might look into it?” asked Jess humbly.

Kimmy heaved herself to her feet, shaking out her flounces. “This week is crazy with all the five zillion beginning-of-school-year things—why do moms have to keep organizing picnics?—but I’ll try to get to it in a few days or so. I can at least find out where the Vanderwilt papers are and see if I can get a look at them. In the meantime . . .”

Kimmy swished to the far end of the stack, moving slowly down the row with her head tilted at the approved angle, in the traditional scholar’s shuffle.

“Aha! I thought they’d have it.” Kimmy plucked a book from the row and thrust it into Jess’s hands.

“Vanderwilt: The Hum of the Wasp?” Jess flexed her left foot, which had gone entirely numb.

“This came out five or six years ago. It’s a history of the Vanderwilt family. The general sense was that this guy was scraping the bottom of the barrel, because there’s just not much there—the Vanderwilts didn’t do much other than hunker down and stay put—but his thesis, such as it is, is that by focusing on the robber barons, we ignore the true forces of power in New York, the people who quietly amassed land and wealth and influence, not the meteoric success stories who burned out after a generation. It’s a counterargument to those ‘rise and fall of the Wasp’ narratives. The reviews were meh.”

“Huh.” Jess looked dubiously at the tome in her hands. It was definitely a tome, at least six hundred pages, bound in red cloth.