Page 72 of What Happens at Nightfall

“The carving was sharper?” It was an easy guess. In 1880, the monument was only a couple of decades old. There had been a century of wear since.

Ingrid sighed. “Look closely at the window on the lower right—in either picture.”

The Griffith house had been a classic New York brownstone, with a flight of steps leading down from the front door and a fence enclosing the sunken courtyard that led into the kitchen. The stairs, with Mrs. Griffith descending, were on the far left of the scene. To the right of the stairs were the two barred windows of what would have been the kitchen and scullery, with a tree spreading its branches around them, casting its shadow on one of the windows.

“What are we looking for?” asked Jess. Her shoulder brushed Adam’s as they both leaned forward.

“I’ll make it bigger.” Ingrid zoomed in and now Adam could see it.

From the way Jess’s breath caught, he knew she had seen it too.

What had looked like a shadow from the tree wasn’t a shadow at all. It was a face peering out from between those bars, a hideous face, somewhere between a goat and a human.

Horns curved up above the misshapen head and two clawed hands wrapped around the bars of the window.

Chapter Twenty-One

There was a demon in the window.

“Holy cow,” said Adam. “I walk past that monument every day. Nearly every day.”

“What difference does that make? It’s not like you’d have seen anything now.” Ingrid flipped back to the modern photo. No shadow. No demon. “The demon escaped. And he went after his captors. Patrizio Piatti died mysteriously in 1888. The official story is that it was a gas leak.”

Jess could hear the crackle of flames around her. She felt fear—and determination. Cold sweat under heavy, unfamiliar fabrics. The weight of something in her hand.

She set the coffee mug carefully down in the usual spot on her desk. “You said his captors. Plural. Who was the other one?”

Ingrid looked at her pityingly. “Cornelia Vanderwilt, of course. She also died in 1888.”

Jess cleared her throat. “There’s a lot I don’t understand. Was Piatti working with Cornelia Vanderwilt or against her?” And here it was again, the point that had bothered her from the beginning. “If she called it—why would she contain it?”

Ingrid shrugged. “It killed her son in the theater fire. Maybe she realized she’d gone too far. Maybe it had gotten out of her control. I don’t know, okay?”

“What if Vanderwilt called it and Piatti contained it?” Jess suggested. “And she found out and freed it again?”

“And then Piatti caught it again?” Adam squinted at his phone. “According to this, Piatti died on July 21, 1888. Cornelia Vanderwilt died in October. Piatti died first.”

But there had been another Piatti. Jacinta.

“I went to the Vanderwilt Dressing Room at the Met,” Jess blurted out. “Cornelia Vanderwilt’s seamstress was named Piatti. Jacinta Piatti.”

Adam nearly dropped his phone. “Jacinta?”

“Jacinta.” Jess kept her tone deliberately neutral. “They have an information card about her in the Vanderwilt Dressing Room exhibit. It’s an Upstairs, Downstairs thing, the woman who designed Mrs. Vanderwilt’s dresses.”

“Oh yeah, I knew about that.” Ingrid was deeply uninterested. “She was married to one of Piatti’s nephews. But she’s not important, other than explaining how Piatti and Cornelia Vanderwilt met.”

But what if she was? What if she was very important? But there was no way to say that without admitting that Jess was having memories that weren’t her own.

Did she believe in ancestral memory? Jess had grown up with no relatives except her grandfather. She didn’t believe in ancestral anything. Her grandfather’s apartment at the assisted living community had been furnished in Danish modern. Her mother wore jewelry handcrafted by local artists out of salvaged items. There were no family heirlooms, no family histories, no family anything.

Just her name.

“What makes you think this Jacinta wasn’t involved?” asked Adam. “If she worked closely with Mrs. Vanderwilt . . .”

“She was a seamstress,” said Ingrid, as though that settled that. “Look, we know Piatti was a stonemason. He encased the demon in stone. What would Jacinta do? Sew it into a sack?”

“Do we know where the demon was contained after it fled the Griffith monument?” asked Adam.