Page 102 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Adam. Adam.” Allison, the head of public programming, advanced on Adam with a clipboard in her hand.

“What can I do for you?” Adam shifted his grip on the pizza. “I just need to bring the kids their dinner and then I can help out.”

“It’s the kids I want to talk to you about,” said Allison coldly. “I don’t know what’s going on with Ben, but the next time you volunteer him to help me, don’t.”

“What? I didn’t volunteer Ben to help you.” Ben had asked about it and Adam had been so busy with demons and rain gardens he’d never done anything about it. Another reason he wasn’t winning any “parent of the year” awards. “He did say something about wanting to help out . . . I meant to follow up with you but I never got around to it, and Ben never mentioned it again, so I thought he’d lost interest.”

“He didn’t.” Allison bit out the words. “He’s been all over telling people he was working for me and then screwing things up. The port-a-potties are in the wrong place and we don’t have time to move them. They were supposed to be at the junction of Atlantic and Linden and instead they’re all the way over on Bayside.”

Adam pressed his eyes shut. “He probably thought he was being helpful. I’ll talk to him.”

“Helpful?” Allison gave him a look that called bullshit. “He moved the lights lining the path around the chapel so that instead of turning up Central, they lead straight into the Valley Water.”

“You mean actually into the water?”

“Yes,” said Allison grimly. “We moved them back. He also taped up some fake street signs over the real street signs. Oh, and we’re missing a whole bunch of plastic candles. We had to send an intern out to buy more, like pronto.”

“I don’t know what to say.” None of it sounded like something Ben would do. Of course, Adam also hadn’t thought Ben would steal the family mausoleum key and break in with a Ouija board, so there he was. He didn’t, Adam realized unhappily, know his son nearly as well as he’d thought. “Are you sure it was Ben?”

“It was Ben,” said Allison shortly. “Do you have any idea why in the hell he would want to sabotage one of our most important nights of the year? Never mind. Don’t answer that. I don’t care. Just tell him if he ever pulls anything like that again, I will personally have his guts for garters.”

Adam caught the bakery bag just before it slid off the pizza box. “It’s my fault. I told him he could come to Nightfall and then I told him he couldn’t.”

“So he’s trying to ruin it for everyone?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Adam said again.

“I’m going to go see if I can find any other delightful little surprises before the gates open,” said Allison witheringly, and marched off.

Adam didn’t blame her for being pissed. What Ben had done—if it was Ben—was inexcusable. This was one of their major events.

With a sinking feeling, Adam wondered if Ben had found out that he’d asked Jess. That would do it, he thought grimly, as he trudged down Border Avenue. He’d rescinded his invite to Ben—never mind that it was because they didn’t let in anyone under twenty-one—and invited Jess instead.

Adam dumped the pizza box on the kitchen table and shunted the bakery bag off next to it. Half the cupcakes had already turned sideways in their plastic casing, the icing smushing against the side.

“Ben?” he called.

Footsteps came tripping down the back stairs but it wasn’t Ben; it was Melinda. “He’s not home.”

Adam mentally ran through the week’s activities. Monday soccer, Tuesday study hall, Wednesday Lego league, Thursday chess. “Chess ended at four forty-five.”

Even by the most dawdling, foot-dragging estimate, it shouldn’t take Ben more than twenty minutes to walk home from St. Bonny’s. The kitchen clock read six thirty: half an hour to Nightfall and a good hour after Ben should have been home, playing some horrible video game involving exploding toilets.

“Are you sure?”

Melinda shrugged. “I only got home ten minutes ago. But his backpack’s not here.”

Adam had put AirTags on both the kids’ backpacks, even though there’d been a flap on the parent WhatsApp chain about AirTags being bad—he couldn’t remember why.

Adam reached into his pocket for his phone and pulled out a key.

Huh. He didn’t remember putting that there. It was the key Kimmy had found on the ground that day, the day the ghost had thrown the urn at Jess. He could have sworn he’d stuck it in his desk along with the family crypt key, meaning to show it to Cal.

He certainly hadn’t put it in his fleece pocket. He hadn’t been wearing his fleece that day.

“What’s that?” asked Melinda.

“A key I found. I’ve been meaning to give it to Cal.” Adam stuck the key back in his pocket. Not important. The important thing was finding Ben and then grounding him for the rest of his life.