Page 82 of What Happens at Nightfall

It was early enough that the post-work crowd hadn’t descended. The place was nearly empty. The waitress, in a black cocktail dress that was much cuter than Jess’s, led her to a table by the wall, next to a trio of women who were drinking something in champagne flutes with lemon peels floating in them.

In the high, vaulted corners of the ceiling, strange shadows formed. Jess kept a wary eye out for falling statuary.

Her grandmother had died beneath a statue of an angel in a cemetery in Brooklyn.

That was all she knew, her mother swore. Not the name of the cemetery, not why Jess’s grandmother had been there in the first place. She’d gone for a walk and never come back.

There were some papers among Jess’s grandfather’s things, her mother had said. She’d take a look through and send them to Jess. If Jess was interested.

Oh yes. Jess was interested.

It was 5:10. Adam was late. Jess pretended to look at her phone, and ordered drinks, and went back to pretending to look at her phone. She rearranged her legs, smoothing the skirt of her black dress over her knees: business attire from another lifetime. She’d even put on mascara and now she was beginning to wish she hadn’t. She’d done it for the location, she told herself, not the man.

Lies, all lies.

When he finally walked in, Jess didn’t recognize him. Another Ivy League type, she thought, khakis and blazer, a tie with shields on it, before realizing the face above that open-necked shirt was Adam’s, the hair brushed out of its usual exuberance, his features subtly different in the half-light: his chin squarer, his cheekbones sharper.

Jess stood up from her spot at the banquette, flapping her hand until he saw her.

In this environment, with the low lighting and the leather chairs and the blazer, it only made sense to exchange the ritual air brush on the cheek.

“How did the meeting go?” She could smell aftershave and coffee.

“It was fine. Shall we get some drinks?” He turned to look for the waitress.

“I ordered us two Prohibition Punches.” Jess dropped down on the banquette with more force than she’d intended. “It seemed like a thing here. Unless you’re really a martini man?”

Adam the hot arborist might drink fruity punches. This frowning guy in the blazer—she wasn’t sure.

Adam pulled out the studded leather bucket chair across from her. “Cal—our archivist—sent me some documents he found,” he said abruptly. “He’s been trying to trace the history of a missing monument. Gottschalk’s Angel of Music. This week, he finally found a lead.”

Adam put his phone flat on the table and pushed it over to her. The tables weren’t wide. They were the sort of table you were supposed to lean across and whisper, designed for flirtation and gossip.

Confused, Jess picked up the phone by the sides, not touching the screen. There was a grainy reproduction of a newspaper article there.

Local Woman Found Under Vandalized Statue

The woman found dead beneath the statue has been identified as Jacinta Waters . . .

Jess stared at the picture, feeling vaguely sick, but unable to look away. The woman was curled on her side, face hidden. She was slight and fine-boned, like Jess.

Jacinta Waters. Dead.

“Is that—you?” Adam asked, his voice hard and strange.

Jess dropped the phone. “That was 1959! I wasn’t even born until November 1987!”

“There was also that other woman that looked like you . . . Thank you,” Adam said to the waitress, who expertly set down two giant, gently perspiring snifters in front of them.

Jess waited until the waitress had gone before retorting, “What do you think I am, a vampire? Here. Check my teeth.”

Adam had the grace to look abashed. “I was thinking more like that family from the Lois Duncan book, the ones that never aged. They just had to keep changing names and moving places and pretending to be their own grandchildren.”

Jess took a giant slug of her punch. It was sweet, it fizzed on her tongue, and it burned going down, like an upscale, champagne-laced version of the grain alcohol punch they drank at frat parties in college. “I didn’t know boys read Lois Duncan.”

“I got bored one summer and read through all my sister Amanda’s books. Ask me anything about Sweet Valley High.”

“There was a Jess in that too,” said Jess belligerently. The bad girl, as opposed to the saintly Elizabeth. And wasn’t that always the way? Madonna or whore, perfect or irredeemable.