Page 58 of What Happens at Nightfall

Jess tried to regain some sort of grip on reality. Her grandmother had died in 1959. Whoever this Jacinta Piatti was—pins in her mouth, her needle threaded with silk dipped in holy water—she had to be at least two or maybe even three generations removed from Jess’s grandmother. She probably wasn’t related to them at all. For all Jess knew, the first Jacinta had come over on a boat in 1900 and had been nowhere near the Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1876. Whatever family stories there might have been had been lost with her grandmother, back in 1959, when Jess’s grieving grandfather had taken off for California with his baby daughter and two suitcases, effectively cutting all ties with whatever family they’d had back in New York.

You are what you make yourself, not where you came from, her mom liked to say.

But she’d named Jess Jacinta all the same.

Jess’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out, half expecting it to be her mother, who sometimes had an uncanny instinct for that sort of thing.

But not this time. This time it was Kimmy’s number on the screen.

“Hey,” murmured Jess, lowering her voice even though there was no one else in the room. No one except Cornelia Vanderwilt, looking down her patrician nose at Jess from her place above the dressing table.

“I know I said I wasn’t going to, but I couldn’t resist taking a quick look,” said Kimmy, breathless against a backdrop of honking. She was probably running to get Dahlia from gymnastics. “The things I do to avoid working on revisions! Guess where the Vanderwilt papers are?”

“The New-York Historical Society?”

“No. Good guess, though. They do have some of the earlier stuff, from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Vanderwilts, but we don’t really care about them. Let me rephrase that. Where do you think the Cornelia Vanderwilt papers are?”

“NYU?”

“Nope. Brooklyn. They’re still in the hands of Vanderwilt’s descendants. Which means . . .” Even the sound of cars screeching around her couldn’t drown out the glee in Kimmy’s voice. “Once I get these revisions in and get the back-to-school stuff out of the way, we’re going to need to go see your hot arborist.”

Chapter Seventeen

Adam dumped the last of the boxes on the dining room table.

The dust clung to his palms. The boxes smelled of his in-laws’ apartment, of old portraits and older money. He hadn’t wanted them—he’d never wanted any of it—but when his mother-in-law had retired to Palm Beach in 2019, closing up the Park Avenue apartment, she had dumped all the Vanderwilt materials on Kate. Apparently the climate of Brooklyn was more salubrious for old documents than that of Florida. He and Kate had ferried them upstairs to the attic, washed the dust of generations off their hands, and that had been an end of it—until now.

There it was, the lot of it. A dozen cardboard boxes dating roughly from the Civil War to the present. The earlier stuff had all long since been donated to archives. Adam sniffed back a sneeze; he could spend all day outside with the pollen without the slightest difficulty, but he was allergic to Kate’s family history.

This was his children’s heritage, whether he liked it or not: faded photos of a Newport mansion torn down in the thirties, crumbling programs for debutante balls, letters from the Titanic (Kate’s great-grandfather had made it safely off, and no one had inquired too closely into how).

Adam rubbed his nose vigorously with the back of his hand. He didn’t have time for this. Autumn was one of his busiest times of year, made busier this year by a few big projects, including designing a series of rain gardens to absorb excess storm water. And then there was Nightfall, Green-Wood’s October festival celebrating life, death, and all things macabre.

But when that historian had contacted him last week, asking if she could make an appointment to see Kate’s family papers, he didn’t really feel he could refuse. Kameka Olsen was the real deal. Adam even had one of her books on his nightstand. It had been the parent book club read for Ben’s school, which he had optimistically purchased and never gotten around to, as part of his plan to try to be more involved and build relationships with the other parents. He’d never gotten around to that either.

Maybe if he’d been more present, Ben wouldn’t be stealing crypt keys and trying to communicate with his dead mother.

Not that Ben seemed to be suffering from it. Fueled by parental guilt, Adam had called Ben’s homeroom teacher yesterday to ask if Ben was doing okay. He’d been met by surprise. Okay? Ben was great. His academic performance, which had been mediocre at the beginning of the year, had improved dramatically, particularly his Latin. He was inexplicably popular with the other boys.

Ben’s homework teacher hadn’t said “inexplicably,” but Adam had heard it in his voice. He was a little surprised himself. Not just about the Latin, which Ben was coming to cold, having not taken it at his old school, but the popularity. Ben had never been what you’d call popular. He’d always had his group of two or three friends and that was that, just sporty enough to get by, more goofy than gregarious. Definitely not valedictorian/prom king material.

Maybe Ben’s therapist was right and he’d just needed a new school to make him blossom? His behavior at home wasn’t any example; kids were never the same at home and at school. If he was sullen and withdrawn at home, well, maybe that was just his way of punishing Adam for kissing a strange woman in their kitchen.

Adam felt like a jerk about Jess.

He should have texted her. He should have at least made sure she got home okay. But every time he reached for the phone, he heard a voice, Ben’s voice, reminding him that they didn’t know who she was or what she wanted. Why had she shown up the night Ben opened the tomb? Why had she led him to Ingrid’s apartment?

Adam rubbed his temples. It had been over two weeks since that crazy night, and whenever he tried to think about it, it felt like a dial had turned to static in his brain.

Sometimes, when he tried to think about Jess or that night at the tomb, he’d find himself doing something else—dumping laundry into the dryer, planting bulbs, taking out chicken to defrost for dinner—with no recollection of how he’d gotten there, like his subconscious was trying to make sure he focused on the important things.

Of course, this was the same subconscious that was presenting him with crazy dreams at night: last night, it had been evil Cookie Monster offering Ben a cookie. Adam had tried to get to him but a wall of rosebushes had risen between them.

Then there was the dream in which Jess had appeared as a succubus wearing nothing but a witch’s hat, but that one didn’t require complicated analysis, just a cold shower. Several cold showers.

All of that was done, Adam reminded himself. Jess had disappeared as abruptly as she’d exploded into his life, and if he’d tried to google her and got nothing, that was only a sign she was probably a con woman and had given up on them as unpromising subjects. Melinda had shrugged off the idea of demons and gone back to building One Robot to Rule Them All. And Ben was apparently the Jake Ryan of the St. Bonny’s fifth grade.

Adam squashed the memory of discussing eighties movies with Jess.