Page 95 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Cornelia Vanderwilt was very into local handicrafts. She donated to settlement houses and sponsored woodworking and needlepoint classes for lower-class kids. All of her stuff was done by local craftsmen. She wasn’t out there importing whole rooms from French châteaux and Italian palazzos like some of her peers. And it wasn’t because she couldn’t afford it. That woman was loaded. She hung out with Hetty Green, the so-called Queen of Wall Street, who put her on to some excellent investments.”

“Wait. I don’t get it. I thought the family was broke and she made a deal with a demon to bring back their money and social power.”

“It’s a classic story, isn’t it?” said Kimmy grimly. “If a woman is successful she must have made a deal with a demon. The broke bit—yes, Cornelia’s husband died young after blowing through both his money and hers. But I’ve been through her accounts. She made good investments. There was nothing supernatural about it.”

“But the demon,” said Jess.

“What if it wasn’t her demon?” Kimmy leaned forward. “You know who was blowing through money? Cornelia’s son Horace. She’s constantly bailing him out of debt. It’s all there in the accounts. And we’re not talking small sums. That man never found a losing horse he didn’t want to back. His tailor bills are insane.”

“This is the Horace who died in the theater fire?”

“Yes. He was a nasty piece of work, he and his Brothers of the Hermetic Order of the Brass Twilight,” said Kimmy darkly.

“Ingrid said they were harmless.”

“Ingrid is either misinformed or deliberately misleading you. They weren’t harmless. At least Horace wasn’t. The stuff in Cornelia’s papers would curl your toes. Or your hair. Or something. It was bad, Jess. It wasn’t just the occult nonsense, although that’s part of it. They were using children in their rituals. Adolescent girls. Petunia’s age.”

Jess felt sick to her stomach. She put down her croissant. “Did Cornelia know?”

“As far as I can tell, not until after. She made financial restitution to the families—it’s there in the accounts—and shipped Horace off to work in London at a family friend’s office. That didn’t work out either. He found like-minded souls there. It may be where he got the idea to add demon summoning to his repertoire, or possibly on an unauthorized jaunt to Paris, where he hung out with satanic circles. There’s a murder charge that was dropped for lack of evidence, but Horace was strongly encouraged to return to the United States, which he did—in 1875.”

“A year before the Brooklyn Theater Fire.”

“Yep.” Kimmy turned a page in her notebook. “Some of this stuff I know because of the payments Cornelia made. Other bits—she kept clippings. Articles. I think she was putting together his activities, even the ones in which he wasn’t directly implicated. It was bad, Jess. This was an era where a so-called gentleman could get away with a lot—but even by the standards of his time, Horace had crossed the line.”

“Do you think Cornelia made the deal with the demon to get rid of him?”

“Jess.” Kimmy closed her notebook over her finger. “Back up for a moment. You’re trying to twist the evidence to make it fit your theory rather than building a theory out of the evidence. You have to stop assuming that Cornelia is the one who summed the demon.”

“Ingrid told me Cornelia called the demon.”

“Do we know where Ingrid got her information?”

“No,” Jess admitted. “I only know what Ingrid told me.”

“Scrap all of it. Forget everything Ingrid told you. There’s not a hint of anything occult in Cornelia’s papers. Except for Horace’s antics with his Brass Brethren. But nothing on her own account.”

“Nothing?” echoed Jess. She’d been counting on Kimmy coming up with something. Preferably a step-by-step guide with diagrams.

“Nothing. At least not that I’ve found,” Kimmy said judiciously. “My adviser always used to say that just because you haven’t found something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, so it could be that somewhere out there is a stack of grimoires with Cornelia’s name on them—or we might not have found them because she didn’t have any.”

The flaky pastry tasted like ash in Jess’s mouth. “So if Ingrid’s story is all wrong, what do we have left?”

“Let’s start with what we do know. Let’s start with the assumption that Cornelia didn’t call the demon. What then?” Kimmy didn’t wait for her to answer. “Horace. Horace, that’s what. Horace needs money. Horace wants power. Horace doesn’t care who he hurts to get what he wants. Horace probably thinks it’s kind of cool wielding the powers of infernal darkness.”

“Then why does Horace die in the fire?”

“I don’t know,” Kimmy admitted. “I can speculate, but it’s only speculation.”

“Cornelia,” said Jess. “Sacrificing her son to save others.”

“Possibly. Although I don’t think so. Not that she wouldn’t do it, but I think it’s more likely that if Cornelia had done it, she’d have put poison in his port. She wouldn’t have done it in a way that injured others. This is always the problem,” Kimmy said sheepishly. “You spend time reading someone’s papers and you start to feel like you know them. See, now I’m the one speculating without evidence.”

Jess closed her eyes, drawing on those flashes of memory—the other Jacinta’s memory. Hunting, searching. She’d known at the theater that night that something was going to happen. She’d known the demon was there.

“The demon, then,” said Jess. “Horace bound the demon—what if the demon wanted out? He could kill Horace and a whole group of people besides. Oh wait, I forgot the whole ‘binding to heirs in perpetuity’ thing. Unless that’s something else Ingrid just made up.”

“Even if she’s right,” said Kimmy, “it actually kind of fits. The next Vanderwilt—Horace’s son—was only a toddler. The demon could have controlled him from the get-go. Or, more likely, killed him—and with him, the entire line.”