Page 57 of What Happens at Nightfall

“It’s not terrible,” said Kimmy, in the tone of one determined to be fair at all costs. “It will at least give you some context and an idea of what the sources are. I have my own copy at home, so I can check out his bibliography and see what manuscript sources he had access to after I pick up Dahlia from gymnastics at four thirty.”

“Thanks.” Jess looked up at her best friend. “I know how busy you are. I really appreciate your doing this.”

Kimmy waved that aside. “There might be a book in this for me, in which case I owe you drinks. But right now—I really, really need to get these revisions done.”

Jess hugged the book to her chest. “I’m so sorry about Petunia’s birthday.”

Kimmy gestured at the Sephora bag. “That will go some way to soothing her feelings. I love my daughter, but there’s no denying she can be bought.”

“And she knows I love her.” Jess had been there with Petunia from the day she’d been born. Well, the day after she’d been born. Jess had been in consulting back then, on a project in Brazil. She’d taken the first available flight back from Rio and rushed to the hospital to hold the wrinkled little creature with the spidery fingers who promptly spat up in Jess’s hair. It was love at first puke.

“And she knows you love her.” Kimmy enveloped Jess in a big hug. “Hang in there, sweetie. We’ll figure this all out. Now go away and let me work.”

The book had shinier pages inset in the middle, a bunch of pictures, all clumped together, presumably for ease of binding. It fell open to the same picture Ingrid had shown them on her phone. Cornelia Vanderwilt at the Brooklyn Theater Fire, 1876, read the caption.

In the reproduction, you really couldn’t see the face of the woman next to her at all.

Jess was glad she hadn’t mentioned that bit to Kimmy. There was only so much crazy she could share. And maybe they had just imagined it; maybe it was just that she had one of those generic faces.

Jess checked out her Vanderwilt biography at the desk in the lobby and made her way toward the park. To her right lay the vast bulk of the Metropolitan Museum, with its attendant constellation of hot dog carts and tourists.

The original of the portrait of Cornelia Vanderwilt was in the Met.

Rather than brave the great stairs, Jess slunk in through the Eighty-First Street entrance, among the wheelchairs and school groups. Jess disentangled herself from the herd of people surging toward the Temple of Dendur and cut left at the Great Hall, past the reliquaries and brooding saints of the medieval wing, into the relative calm of the atrium that served as the gateway to the American Wing, with its peaceful Tiffany windows, random classical statuary, and strange glass walkways. Ahead of her lay the facade of a house, a dollhouse in human size.

“Do you know where the portrait of Cornelia Vanderwilt is?” Jess asked the guard.

“Vanderwilt . . . Gallery 742. Through the Louis Tiffany gallery and turn right. If you hit the McKim, Mead and White Stair Hall, you’ve gone too far.”

Jess meekly followed the guard’s instructions, retracing her steps when she hit the stair hall. Gallery 742 wasn’t a gallery. It was a replica of a room.

“The Vanderwilt Dressing Room,” read the sign on the wall.

Jess had wandered through the period rooms before—Kimmy was inordinately fond of the period rooms, for what she called the “historical immersion experience”—but she’d never been in this one. Walking into it was like entering a jewel box; there wasn’t an inch that wasn’t covered with elaborately inlaid wood or patterned silk or both. The coffered ceiling was decorated with a recurring pattern of urns and putti, strung together by garlands of flowers. The walls were covered as high as her shoulder with what the card to her left informed her was satinwood, but it wasn’t just any old wood paneling. Elaborate demon faces scowled at her, sticking out their tongues.

Renaissance grotesques, the helpful card called them.

The portrait of Cornelia Vanderwilt hung above an elaborate dressing table, mistress of all she surveyed—and quite definitely the same woman who had materialized in Adam’s kitchen.

A card below the portrait informed Jess that the portrait would have hung in the drawing room, not the dressing room, but when the Vanderwilt brownstone on Fifty-Fourth Street was razed, the room had been donated first to the Museum of the City of New York, which had then, after a renovation in 2007, passed the room to the Met. The portrait having been recently gifted to the museum, the decision was taken to place the mistress of the house in her dressing room.

This wasn’t a replica of a room. It was the room, taken wholesale from the Vanderwilt brownstone on Fifty-Fourth Street and reassembled in a quiet corner of the Metropolitan Museum. This had been Cornelia Vanderwilt’s most intimate, private place, the place where she retired from the world, the place where she donned the dresses and jewels that served as her armor.

And she had decorated it with sneering demons and fluttering angels holding urns.

A giant wardrobe took up one whole side of the room. The curators had cunningly left one door open, displaying an elaborate gown embroidered with garlands that echoed the ones on the ceiling.

The card informed her that the gown was one of many made for Vanderwilt by her dressmaker, Jacinta Piatti.

Pins in her mouth, the press of the floor against her knees, checking the fall of a flounce—making sure the charms sewn inside were secure.

Jess put her hand to her mouth. There were no pins in it. She was standing, not kneeling, but she could feel herself shaking the way she had the last time she’d been hit with the flu.

Jacinta. The name she’d spent years spelling for people, explaining to people, until she’d given up and just let them think her name was Jessica. Only a handful of people—not counting the Social Security administration and the people who administered the SATs and other administrators of official documentation—knew that Jess wasn’t a Jessica but a Jacinta, from a long line of Jacintas. Her mother was Cindy for Jacinta; her grandmother had been Jan for Jacinta.

Her mother liked to joke that the name was the one family heirloom they’d taken with them when they left New York.

When they left New York.