Page 49 of What Happens at Nightfall

Cornelia stared directly at the viewer, but a little bit behind stood another woman, shorter than Cornelia, her head tilted up as if she were saying something to Mrs. Vanderwilt.

She had a narrow, fine-featured face, unremarkable except for one thing.

“Jess,” said Adam bemusedly. “That’s you.”

Chapter Fifteen

“It can’t be me,” said Jess blankly.

But it was. Adam had never been much of an artist but even he could see that the woman’s facial shape, her eyes, her nose, even her expression were a replica of the woman sitting beside him. Trade out the opera cloak and ankle-length skirt for a pair of pants and a sweater, and there she was.

Adam expanded the picture as far as it would go, which turned out to be a mistake. Whatever resolution the archive had used when they digitized, the move dissolved the picture into a blur of pixels.

Or were those pixels? Seen too close, the picture was composed of a complicated cross-hatching of tiny lines.

He looked at Ingrid. “That’s not a photograph, is it?”

“No, photography didn’t become common in newspapers until after World War One. For the most part, they used drawings and etching. This was an etching based on a drawing.”

Jess stirred herself. “So what you’re saying is that it’s several steps removed from the actual scene. It’s a reproduction of an artist’s rendering. We don’t even know if the artist was there on the spot or just made it up.”

Ingrid’s expression turned mulish. “Cornelia Vanderwilt was there.”

Jess rubbed her eyes. “I’m not denying Cornelia Vanderwilt was there. I’m just saying that woman next to her could be anyone. She could be a figment of the artist’s imagination. But no matter what, she’s certainly not me.”

“Unless you’re Doctor Who,” suggested Adam. “Time-traveling two-hearted alien with a British accent? Fights things that look like garbage cans with plungers attached? Travels in a flying blue police booth that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside? No? Just me?”

“That’s just silly,” said Ingrid, which Adam thought was a bit rich coming from a woman who’d been trying to cast the consciousness of a demon into a parrot.

Jess’s eyes were still on Ingrid’s phone. “I think I just have one of those generic faces. I remember reading a phrase once in a book about a character having hair-colored hair and eye-colored eyes, and that’s me. Nothing memorable or remarkable.”

The faux Tiffany fixture that hung over the kitchen table cast a golden glow over Jess’s hair-colored hair. Her eye-colored eyes, Adam noticed, were asymmetrical, one slightly larger than the other. There was a faint expression of worry pinching her lips and deepening the hollows under her cheekbones. She was, Adam thought, like a forget-me-not, small and deceptively simple, easy to overlook, but remarkable once you actually looked properly.

No. He didn’t find her generic at all.

He was staring, Adam realized. “Do we have any idea who that person is?” he asked.

“The only person in the photo I’ve conclusively identified is Cornelia Vanderwilt,” said Ingrid, which Adam took as a no.

“Whoever she is, she’s talking to Cornelia Vanderwilt. They look like they’re related somehow. Not related like relatives,” Jess corrected herself. “But associated. Somehow connected. You know what I mean. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

“It’s been a long night,” said Adam, even though the clock on the wall told him it wasn’t yet nine. It felt more like two in the morning.

Somehow, he realized, Ingrid had maneuvered them into discussing this on her terms. This was her story: Cornelia Vanderwilt, ambition, a demon. What had they seen, really? The electronics in the diner—he suspected that for someone like his daughter, projecting something onto a TV or onto a speaker might be laughably easy. As for the pyrotechnics at the tomb—sound and lights. He’d been part of enough spectacles at Green-Wood to know how easy it was to work with the landscape to create convincing atmospherics.

Adam pushed his chair back, the legs scraping harshly against the floor. “Let’s say we buy your story. Let’s say you do have proof that Cornelia Vanderwilt thought she was summoning a demon. She died a hundred and fifty years ago. Where does my daughter come into it? Why her? Why now? Why you?”

“Cornelia Vanderwilt bound the demon to her heirs in perpetuity. The idea was that he would be obliged to serve her lineal descendants. This was never put to the test because the demon was contained before she died, so the transfer was never effected.”

Jess lifted her head from the table. “If she summoned it, why would she contain in? And how did she contain it?”

Huh. He hadn’t even thought of that one. “Good point.”

“Demons aren’t easy to bend to one’s will,” said Ingrid sagely. “They have a way of twisting terms and keeping to the letter of a bargain while delivering terrible woes. Look at Dr. Faustus. My guess—and this is just a guess—is that Cornelia never intended to bargain away her son’s life. She would have been fine bargaining away other peoples’ lives—little people who didn’t matter—but it would be very like the demon to exact a much higher and more personal cost, to make her suffer for binding him. Also because he feeds on pain and that sort of thing.”

“How can you know any of this?” asked Adam in frustration.

Ingrid looked superior. “I’m a historian. This is what I do.”