Page 6 of What Happens at Nightfall

People.

He and Kate used to look at each other and say, Can you believe we made people?

When Kate died, everyone had warned him to keep a close eye on Melinda. She’d just turned eleven. It was a rough age for a girl to lose her mother. Puberty. Hormones. Boys. Skin care. Mean girls.

But here she was fifteen, and Adam wasn’t quite sure how they’d gotten here, but Melinda was . . . Melinda. Math team, robotics team, still close to the same two best friends she’d had since third grade, indulged in the odd game of Dungeons & Dragons but didn’t link her own chain mail. Levelheaded. That was the word he was looking for. More reserved than she’d been at eleven, maybe. Less joyful. But master of her own fate in a way that made Adam both proud and slightly terrified, as though at any moment the shell would crack.

He’d begun to hope, maybe, that it wasn’t a shell. Maybe this was just Melinda.

It was Ben who kept him up at night these days. That and heartburn from that last batch of chicken chili.

Maybe Melinda was right. Maybe he needed to cool it on the chicken. As for Ben . . .

It was hard to tell what to do about Ben. He’d seemed okay for a while. Or as close to okay as any of them were. But then Melinda had started at Brooklyn Tech last year. It had been Melinda that Adam had worried about, with new people and a new commute and a famously tough academic program, but it had been Melinda who’d thrived and Ben, left behind at their old elementary school, who’d floundered.

A change of scene would do him good, his psychiatrist advised. Adam had swallowed his pride and taken his in-laws up on their offer to pay for private school. Not the famously stuffy all-boys school his father-in-law had attended on the Upper East Side—which ended in eighth grade anyway—but St. Boniface’s, only ten blocks from Green-Wood in Park Slope, warm, artsy, quirky. A fresh start.

Except it was like those old commercials they used to mock: “Do you ever feel not so fresh?”

It had only been two weeks. It was tough starting a new school where all the other kids had been together since kindergarten. Eleven was a weird age. Adam couldn’t remember precisely what he’d been like at eleven—although his older sister Amanda was only too delighted to inform him, in detail—but he suspected he’d also been not so fresh.

They’d have a boys’ day, Adam decided, and do something together, just the two of them. It would be fine. It would all be fine.

His chicken was sticking to the pan. Adam splashed in some more olive oil and turned up the volume on the music. “Sometimes I give myself the creeps . . .”

The Bach Toccata flared up, warring with Green Day for musical supremacy.

“What the—?”

“I reprogrammed the doorbell,” said Melinda, as if that were just something fifteen-year-olds did.

“Seriously? The Bach Toccata?” He’d argue musical choices with her later. Adam thrust the spoon at his daughter. “Here. You stir. I’ll go. It’s probably a lost tourist.”

The gates were locked at seven, but not everyone realized that—or made it out in time. At least once a week, someone rang their doorbell, desperately seeking someone who could let them out.

The Bach Toccata unfurled again, more insistently. Not just a lost tourist, an impatient lost tourist. Now accompanied by the creepiest music known to man.

“Coming!” Adam grasped the door handle and tugged. And tugged some more.

It felt like someone was pulling from the other end, trying to stop him. But when he got it open, the woman on the porch was standing at least a foot back from the door, huddled into one of those giant, open sweaters women wore, her hair blown into wisps all around her face. She clutched an enormous shoulder bag nearly as large as she was.

“Hi. Are you the arborist?” Her voice was hoarse, like she’d been running.

“Yes?” It wasn’t like being a doctor. Tree-related emergencies seldom struck after hours. Before he could ask her why she wanted to know, Adam saw a dark shadow slink out from behind her, trying to move stealthily and failing. “Ben?”

“I found your son under a tree,” the woman said.

Chapter Three

“You found him under a tree?” the man echoed.

“Rhododendron,” the boy muttered as he slouched past Jess into the foyer.

Warmth radiated off the man in the doorway, or maybe it was the light coming from behind him that made him glow like an image seen through infrared goggles. He wore a T-shirt so old that the letters “YALE” had cracked and flaked to ghosts of themselves, the fabric worn so thin that Jess could see the shape of his body beneath the material.

“But . . . he was just in his room. I could have sworn he was in his room.” There was no doubting this was the boy’s father. It was there in the dark curls and the look of parental alarm on his face. “I’m sorry. I should be saying thank you. For bringing Ben home.”

The wind gave a shriek of pure rage, slamming into Jess so hard it made her stagger.