Page 28 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Yes, Kimmy.” Jess took a deep breath, stretching the buttons of her 1950s dress. Adam could see a flash of pink bra through the gap before she exhaled. “She writes narrative nonfiction, and she’s researching someone who’s buried at Green-Wood. I keep forgetting her name, but she was the first female African-American physician in New York. Possibly the US.”

“How did you come into this?”

“Kimmy didn’t want to go on the tour alone, so she called me.” Jess fiddled with the straw of her coffee. “I’ve known Kimmy since we were five. She has a long history of dragging me into things I don’t want to do. I stopped fighting it years ago.”

Time to stop messing around and put on his Sherlock hat. “Who arranged this tour?”

“Kimmy found it. I’m not sure how. Probably Google? She’d wanted Boroughs of the Dead”— a company Adam knew— “but they didn’t have any Green-Wood tours running right now, so she signed up for this one. I knew I should never have gone with her.”

“Was it a private tour?” If there were other people there, he could confirm that the tour actually happened. Theoretically. Although he supposed that didn’t necessarily preclude her being a stalker who had cunningly signed up for a tour as a blind.

“It was one of their regular tours. It was a big group. Some Australian tourists and a bunch of hipsters—do they still call them hipsters?”

“Don’t ask me. Most of the people I see are dead.” Her head jerked up. Adam hastily revised his words. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not like that kid in The Sixth Sense. I don’t actually see dead people, just their . . . houses.”

“The domiciles of the damned?” Jess made a wry face, and Adam found himself fighting liking her. “Anyway, I just wanted to get that damned parasol off my hands and put this whole thing behind me—”

There was a ring of truth to that. Adam wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or mildly offended.

“—so when I saw that their office was ten blocks from my apartment, I thought I’d just walk over there and drop it off.”

It was mid-morning on a Friday. Hadn’t she said last night that she worked in finance? It was, Adam thought sagely, another detail that didn’t add up. “Are you working from home?”

“I’m not working at all. I was laid off.” Her lips closed tightly over the words. “I shouldn’t really be buying expensive coffees, but—I was rattled by what I saw in there. Shall we?”

It was four and a half long avenue blocks from Bouchon to what Adam now kept thinking of as the murder room. It was funny, Adam realized, he had remembered Jess as tiny, but when she walked next to him, her head came almost to his chin. Five three? Five four? The fitted shirt dress played up curves Adam hadn’t realized were there. In her black pants and black sweater last night, she’d seemed as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke, as if she might disappear at any moment. He’d known people who seemed much bigger than their actual size, but Jess seemed to have a talent for making herself smaller.

Jess’s skirt swished against his legs as she pointed down the block. “It’s in the building with the taxi company—that yellow awning.”

“You first.”

She pushed a filthy door open onto an unlocked vestibule. “What happened to chivalry?”

Chivalry still wasn’t entirely sure if this was a setup. “I’ve got your back.”

“It’s my front I’m worried about,” she said drily, as she started up the stairs ahead of him.

“Do you think she’s violent?” Adam asked Jess’s back. Her dress clung to her shoulder blades and elsewhere. It was, Adam belatedly remembered, proper etiquette for a gentleman to precede a lady up the stairs so he wouldn’t ogle her nether regions.

“I know as much as you know,” she said shortly, and Adam could hear her trying to manage her breathing. “There. Apartment sixty-six.”

Jess knocked sharply on the door. The door gave, but there was no response. There wouldn’t be, Adam reminded himself, if this was Jess’s apartment.

“Is it breaking and entering if the door is open?” he asked.

“I have no idea. I went to business school, not law school.”

“Don’t look at me. I went to forestry school.” His entire family had told him he was crazy to trade in law school for forestry school. It hadn’t helped that he’d married a lawyer instead of becoming one; it just rubbed salt in the wound. “We can claim ignorance of the law.”

“Doesn’t ignorance of the law excuse no one?” Jess put her shoulder to the door, pushing it open, her back against the door as she gestured him in. “Welcome to—I’m not even sure what to call it.”

“A domicile of the damned?” Adam didn’t want to turn his back on her, so he sidled through the door facing her, a maneuver that brought them chest to chest, like a bizarre waltz. A batch of inexpertly dried thyme brushed the top of his head, sprinkling tiny leaves and making him smell like a pizza.

It wasn’t a big place. He could see a tiny bathroom to his right, off the kitchenette. The main room was roughly the size of the Vanderwilt crypt, just large enough for a daybed and a wall covered with crazy. And a knife. A very sharp knife with a horn handle that sat ominously on the breakfast bar. Books flagged with Post-it notes and sheaves of smudged printouts were scattered everywhere. The place looked like a windstorm had howled through, scattering papers and salt crystals and the dried petals of some very unhappy flowers.

Jess marched right up to the wall, gesturing broadly. “Here you are. See for yourself.”

It was even worse in person. The red yarn. The pictures of Melinda.