Page 66 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Okay, that’s weird,” said Kimmy.

“You think?” To Adam, Jess said, “I could go over to Ingrid’s place and ask her.”

Adam frowned at her. “Do you really think you should go alone?”

“Is that because you think I’m in danger or because you think I’m in league with her?” Jess realized she didn’t want to know the answer to that. “Does Kimmy count as a suitable chaperone?”

Kimmy immediately held up her hands. “I’ve got archives to look at—that is, if you’re still okay giving me access.”

Adam looked from one to the other. It was, Jess thought grimly, very obvious what was going on in his head. He could let Jess go alone—possibly to a meeting with her accomplice—or he could let a stranger stay in his house and go through his wife’s family papers.

Adam turned to Kimmy. “You’re welcome to stay. I’ve put the boxes on the dining room table. The coffee maker and pods are over there, and there’s creamer in the fridge.”

Jess yanked her phone off the charging cord. “Does that mean you’re coming with me?”

“I have to pick Ben up from Lego league at four forty-five,” he said. Jess took that as a yes.

So now she knew who he trusted least. Her. “It’s almost two. If we’re going, we’d better get moving.”

They left Kimmy happily surrounded by boxes that smelled of disintegrating paper.

The subway ride to Manhattan was marked by a dozen conversations that weren’t. Every so often, Jess would hear Adam draw breath and open his mouth, as if to speak—and then close it again. Jess concentrated on the scratches on her hands, like the markings on a map she didn’t know how to read.

It was strange to sit together on the subway like a couple, walk through the streets together like a couple, keeping pace but never speaking, sneaking glances when they thought the other wasn’t looking. Jess knew, because occasionally they’d time it wrong and accidentally catch each other’s eye.

They should just have it out. Say whatever they needed to say. And she would. If she knew what it was.

Hi, I know you think I’m dishonest and probably crazy, so please stop looking at me like you want to kiss me again?

She was so sick, so ridiculously sick, of people thinking the worst of her.

The landing outside Ingrid’s apartment smelled faintly of smoke—as if someone had been broiling lamb chops and let them burn.

Jess let Adam knock. “Ingrid?” he said tentatively.

“Come in,” rumbled Ingrid, in a voice that went from very low to very high all in the space of two words.

Adam put a hand to the door and slowly pushed it forward. Something clattered to the ground at their feet.

It was the horn-handled knife.

Adam pushed the door the rest of the way open. “Did you just throw a knife at us?”

Ingrid was sitting at one of the stools at the kitchen counter. Her mouth stretched in a smile that was at once the wrong shape and too wide.

“Wel-come,” she said, breaking the word into two as though her mouth didn’t want to form it properly.

Adam looked at Ingrid with concern. “Are you okay?”

Ingrid stretched her mouth at them—you couldn’t call it a smile, not really—and beckoned with a strange, jerky movement that nearly threw her off the stool. “Come. To me.”

Jess grabbed Adam’s arm. She could feel the clenched tension of his biceps under her fingers. “Adam,” she whispered. “I don’t think that’s Ingrid.”

Ingrid’s eyes glowed red. She pointed a finger at Jess. “You—I know—you.”

A strange rumbling filled the room. Ingrid’s mouth yawned open, wider than any human mouth had a right to open.

Jess bumped backward into Adam’s chest as first one toad and then another and another poured from Ingrid’s mouth.