Page 13 of What Happens at Nightfall

Adam swung his flashlight. He hadn’t even realized that an ornament had broken off the finial. Jess knelt beside the fallen piece. It was shaped like an urn, except instead of handles, the urn had wings, and in the center was, as she had said, a face. A face surrounded by stylized folds of fabric, like a wimple.

“What is this?”

“It looks like part of the monument,” Adam said helpfully.

“I would never have figured that out,” muttered Jess.

Adam realized, vaguely, he’d stopped thinking of her as that woman and started thinking of her as Jess. It was like freshman year of college, that strange closeness you developed with total strangers in unusual circumstances.

“Urns are pretty common around here. But usually they’ve got veils, not wings. They’re supposed to symbolize . . . something.” Way to dazzle the woman with his extensive knowledge of funerary art. “Monuments aren’t my department. I’ll have someone come and look at it tomorrow.”

“Right.” Jess rose slowly to her feet, brushing off the knees of her pants. “This is going to sound like a strange question—but is there a monument shaped like a bear?”

“Oh, you mean the Beard monument.” That one he knew. “William Holbrook Beard. He did a painting called Bulls and Bears in the Market. That’s why he has a bear monument.”

“So—that was actually a thing I saw.” Jess held up a hand to shield her eyes from the light. Adam hastily dropped the beam of his flashlight. He hadn’t meant to train it right on her, like a spotlight. “It’s going to sound crazy but it seemed like it was moving.”

“It’s very lifelike. It doesn’t look like a statue. Ben used to like to visit it when he was little. He thought if he offered it the right snack, he could lure it from its pedestal.” Adam grinned at the memory. “Turns out the bear wasn’t tempted by Oreos. At least not that bear.”

“I feel like an idiot.”

“Don’t.” It was nice to know he wasn’t the only one to feel like an idiot around here. He led her around the Catacombs, turning right onto Grove. The green-roofed Whitney mausoleum towered over them at the top of the hill, like something out of a movie with Vincent Price. “If you don’t know what to expect, some of the monuments can be pretty startling, even by day. There’s a bench with a woman on it, just sitting there, enjoying the sunshine. I’ve seen people sit down next to her, thinking she’s a person. And then there’s the Bride, who looks like she’s walking straight toward you, holding out her bouquet. It’s pure Stephen King.”

“Does it bother you?”

“I don’t even notice most of it anymore,” Adam said cheerfully.

She was looking at him like he was crazy and he couldn’t blame her. It was hard not to notice acres of mausolea, some as elaborate as small mansions, some outré enough to populate Instagram feeds around the world. But to him, by now, they were like furniture. You didn’t notice the end table that propped up your coffee cup or the rug that cushioned your feet.

“My province is the living things of Green-Wood.” Even now, in the dark, he could feel the trees around him, like so many old friends. “We’re an arboretum as well as a cemetery. Do you see that over there? That’s ginkgo biloba—a maidenhair tree. These trees have been around since the days of the dinosaurs.” A fact that used to impress Ben when he was little and obsessed with extinct reptiles. “They’re endangered today. This particular tree is actually twelve trees that sprouted from a single stump and then grew together.”

“Do you know all the trees by name?”

“We have over seven thousand trees on four hundred and seventy-eight acres of land.” It was his standard answer for people who thought his job was raking leaves off a few yards of cemetery and planting the odd rosebush. Like his parents. And Kate’s law school friends. “Green-Wood was one of the inspirations for Central Park.”

Jess glanced at him sideways. “Central Park left out the graves.”

“You can’t have everything.” Except at Green-Wood, they did. Mostly. They had bee hives and wetlands and trolleys. Every now and then Adam was reminded of the sheer scope of it all, how much there was to do, how much he got to do. He wanted to rub his hands together with glee every time he thought of it. How had he gotten so lucky? “Last year alone we planted five hundred and seventy-seven new trees. We have over eight hundred and forty-three species of trees and shrubs.”

“Including a giant rhododendron.”

“That’s the least of it,” said Adam. “Don’t tell the rhododendron I said that. It has a very exaggerated sense of its own importance.”

“Like I’d be able to find it to tell it. I always used to think I had a good sense of direction, but this place . . . I’m completely disoriented. Even with the map, I can’t figure out where I am. It’s like the roads move around on you.”

“It takes a while to get used to it.” Adam had felt that way in the beginning, constantly going down the wrong road, having to reverse and retrace his steps. Now he could make his way through the cemetery on muscle memory. “They designed it that way on purpose.”

Jess shivered. “So the dead couldn’t find their way out?”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“The Winchester House. We went there on a class trip when I was in grade school.” Jess rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Adam repressed the urge to offer her his fleece.

“That’s in California, right?”

“I grew up in a small town on the California coast. You won’t have heard of it.” The answer sounded as automatic as Adam’s tree statistics, something repeated so often it had become the verbal equivalent of a rubber stamp. “They told us that she’d deliberately built the house as a maze so that the ghosts of the men murdered by her husband’s rifles wouldn’t be able to find her.”

“That wasn’t what they were thinking here. Green-Wood was part of what’s called the rural cemetery movement. It was the industrial revolution; cities were crowded and dirty and full of disease and coal smoke. But here—here you had God in nature.” Adam was explaining it poorly, he knew. “Green-Wood was as much about life as death. When you think about it, the twisting pathways here are a lot like life. You can’t just blast forward from A to B, no matter how much you might want to. Instead, you’re forced to wander and take detours—and you might not get exactly where you meant to go, but sometimes you find yourself in front of an unexpected vista.”