Page 1 of What Happens at Nightfall

Chapter One

It all began, as so many of these stories do, with a dare in a graveyard.

It began with a key that should not have been used and a door that should not have been unlocked. It began with a pair of eyes blinking open in the darkness and a voice rasping, “Why, hello.” It began with three terrified boys dropping their flashlights and bolting pell-mell into the night, tripping on gravestones.

But Jess Waters didn’t know any of this. She didn’t know that she was on a collision course with destiny.

All Jess knew was that her old pointy-toed flats had raised a blister on her left heel. They’d been great for the stretch from subway to office, back when she still had an office. They were less suited for a stroll in a graveyard.

A stroll. Ha. More like a hike. It had been an hour since the tour group had passed under the great Gothic gate of Green-Wood Cemetery with its echoes of Young Frankenstein. The fact that it had been a half-mile walk from the street to the gate ought to have told Jess something about what she was getting into.

Or if she had, you know, bothered to google it.

Once, Jess hadn’t gone out to dinner without googling. Due diligence, she’d called it. Her due diligence had bitten her in the backside. If she’d been a little less diligent, she’d still have a job, instead of being unemployed and unemployable.

But this time a bit of googling wouldn’t have gone amiss.

How big could a cemetery in the middle of a city be?

Apparently the answer was “very.” So far, they’d passed a monument to the Brooklyn Theater Fire, a statue of DeWitt Clinton, and a weeping willow that had grabbed at Jess’s ponytail as they’d ducked beneath, dutifully following their guide.

This, like so many dubious decisions in Jess’s life, had been Kimmy’s idea.

Other dubious decisions, Jess had made all by herself.

The problem was, Jess’s life choices had all seemed so sensible at the time. Because Jess was nothing if not sensible. By the time she was eight, Jess was the one who made sure the fridge was stocked and the alarm was set for school mornings when her mother was distracted by the exigencies of running a small art gallery and didn’t always remember things like dinners and bedtimes. In high school, she was the one who had called a halt to Kimmy’s crazier schemes, like the underwater production of The Tempest in the school pool. “The good-influence friend,” Kimmy’s parents jokingly called her. Or maybe not so jokingly. Jess had been voted Most Likely to File Her Taxes on Time in the school yearbook.

So how had she wound up here?

Following Kimmy. Through a graveyard. Behind a woman wearing a bustle and too much purple eyeshadow.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” trilled the guide. “On your left . . .”

Their tour guide held aloft a parasol instead of the traditional umbrella. Her outfit was part steampunk and part Old West bordello: purple satin, black lace, and a jaunty hat with a veil that kept poking her in the eye. The parasol was constructed of purple silk, edged with black jet that jangled as she bustled backward.

“Here we have the final resting place of Charlotte Canda, who died tragically in a carriage accident on her seventeenth birthday.” The guide’s breathless tone might have been dramatic effort or a too-tightly-cinched corset. “Note the seventeen roses—one for each year of her short life. The monument is seventeen feet high and seventeen feet long and includes tributes to her various interests and talents.”

Some members of the group nodded sagely; others whispered and giggled. They were an ill-assorted collection. There was a group of twentysomethings in thrift shop chic, passing around a forbidden flask; two Australian tourists, looking tolerant; and a long-suffering woman in her sixties with her husband, who sported a leather jacket and a badly dyed mustache à la early Tom Selleck.

And then there were Jess and Kimmy, Jess in plain black pants—most of her wardrobe was plain black pants—and Kimmy in an exuberantly flounced nap dress strongly reminiscent of the covers of the vintage eighties romance novels they used to pass back and forth in high school, except that Kimmy was standing upright and not bent backward over the arm of a man in a shirt that appeared to have lost all its buttons in a high wind.

Jess sidled up to her best friend, who had a notebook and pen out and was scribbling down mathematical pearls of wisdom. “How much longer?”

Kimmy looked sideways at her. “You sound like my kids.”

“Are we there yet?”

“Don’t make me take away your iPad.”

“I don’t have an iPad.” It had belonged to the office and they’d taken it back when they terminated her employment.

“Just relax. Enjoy. Take in the scenery.”

“And by scenery . . . you mean tombs?” They were everywhere, some freestanding, some built into the hillside like bizarre hobbit houses of the damned.

“Tombs of men and women who wrote the history of this city!” Kimmy gestured with her notebook, pages flapping. “We’ve got Horace Greeley, Leonard Bernstein, Lola Montez—do you know she was rumored to have affairs with everyone from Tsar Nicholas to Alexandre Dumas?”

“Père or fils?”