Page 71 of What Happens at Nightfall

“I said we have a demon. I think we’re all agreed on that, yes?”

Adam started to hold up his hands and then remembered his cup was in them. “No arguments here.”

“So the question is, how do we get rid of it?”

“You don’t,” said Ingrid, with grim satisfaction. “You can’t. They’re immortal. Some people think they’re fallen angels who sided with Lucifer. Other people have other origin theories. Either way, you can’t just get rid of them.”

Like chemical-resistant lice. They’d had one winter where Melinda had had lice so many times that he’d finally had to suck it up and take her to LiceAway, which took five hours and cost an arm, a leg, and a kidney.

“Okay, so what do we do?” asked Jess.

“You know how there’s LiceAway for lice? Maybe there’s DemonAway for demons,” said Adam hopefully. “There’s a niche business for everything these days.”

“Yes, and most of them are scams,” said Jess tartly.

“That’s what I thought until we had to use LiceAway,” said Adam. “It was expensive, but it worked.”

“They’re not like lice. You don’t get rid of demons. You contain them,” said Ingrid, in a superior tone. She turned her computer toward Jess. “You see this? I think this is where Cornelia Vanderwilt originally contained you-know-who.”

Since he had an excellent view of the lid of the MacBook from where he was sitting, Adam pushed himself off the couch and wandered around the coffee table to stand behind Jess.

He squinted over her shoulder at the screen. He knew it immediately. “That’s the Piatti monument for Jane Griffith.”

Jess turned her head sharply toward him. “Did you say . . . Piatti?”

“Patrizio Piatti.” Piatti’s Griffith monument was one of the most recognizable at Green-Wood, and the most heartbreaking. “Cal—our resident historian—he was thrilled when he managed to figure it out. They didn’t know who the sculptor was until recently. There was a signature, but it was illegible, so it wasn’t until he found a 1950s New York Times article . . .”

He was babbling, Adam realized, because it was easier for him to talk about the monument than to look at it. Jane Griffith’s husband had commissioned the artist to immortalize his wife’s last day in stone: Mrs. Griffith waving farewell to her husband as he stood at the gate, about to go to work, not knowing he was never going to see her again.

“We go out for drinks sometimes and talk about our work,” Adam said with dignity. “It’s a Green-Wood thing. Cal knows more than he’d like to about oak wilt.”

“And you know about Piatti,” said Jess slowly. “Two t’s and an i?”

“Something like that.” Adam couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen it written down, or if he just thought he had, after Cal’s impromptu monologues on the topic. Cal was dedicated to solving the mysteries of Green-Wood. Finding the sculptor of the Griffith monument ranked up there with his quest to track down Gottschalk’s angel. “According to Cal, this Piatti was part of a famous family of sculptors, both here and in Italy. He created a bunch of monuments at Green-Wood.”

But none of those haunted Adam like Jane Griffith’s last day.

What was so heartbreaking about the scene was how normal it was. No dark clouds, no ominous presentiments, just Jane Griffith saying farewell to her husband on the stoop in the morning. Neither of them had any idea that she’d be dead from heart failure by the time he came home from work. The bas-relief was so lifelike that it almost felt like you could walk in and warn them, tell Griffith not to go, to ask his wife how she was feeling, tell her to sit down, catch a breath, call the doctor.

Don’t go running, Adam could have said that morning. They’d had an argument—Adam could replay it in his head, word for word. She was going for a run, Kate had said. They’d talk about it when she got back.

But she’d never come back.

If Patrizio Piatti were to design a monument like this for them, it would show Kate at the kitchen table, bending down to tie her sneakers, while Adam glowered at her from the stove where he was making pancakes for the kids.

It was a deeply eerie thought.

It was a deeply eerie monument. It was that false promise of return. That promise that by re-creating the scene you could freeze it, stop it, go back into it and fix it.

It was guilt etched in marble, regret frozen in stone.

“It’s a beautiful monument,” said Jess. “It’s like looking into a dollhouse. But I don’t get what it has to do with Cornelia Vanderwilt or the demon.”

“The one I just showed you is the Griffith monument today. I mean, last month, when I took the picture. Now look at this view.” Ingrid pulled up another photo on her screen, this one sepia toned, with what seemed like two identical pictures side by side. “There was a company called Beer Bros that took a number of stereoscopic views of various monuments at Green-Wood. This one of the Griffith monument dates to about 1880—four years after the Brooklyn Theater Fire.”

It was a very nice old-timey photo. Adam was sure Cal would love it. “It’s the Griffith monument,” he said.

“O-kay,” said Ingrid, with the tone of a TA dealing with a very slow student. “Now. Tell me what’s different.”