Page 94 of What Happens at Nightfall

“You’re not pregnant again, are you?” Jess asked when Kimmy showed up at her door with a bag of pastries from Kimmy’s favorite bakery.

ColumbiaDoctors on Fifty-First was where Kimmy had her sonograms. Jess had gone with her more than once when Jeremy had been tied up at the office. And they’d always stopped for walnut croissants after.

“No, just a uterine cyst. Don’t look all anxious. Apparently it’s a very unexciting cyst and it would only be an issue if I were trying to get pregnant again—which I’m not,” Kimmy said emphatically. “I’ve only just been able to start doing real book tours again. But what about you? You look like the morning after the night before.”

“I haven’t been sleeping much,” Jess admitted. “Coffee?”

“Of course. Dahlia had me up until two a.m. because she was having thoughts. I told her to think about sleeping.” Kimmy followed Jess into the kitchen. “Is it Rent the Gallery? Has anything happened with the lawsuits?”

Jess stilled on the doors of the cupboard as she realized she hadn’t even thought about the lawsuits for over a week. Or Rent the Gallery. Or any of it. She dumped the pastries Kimmy had brought onto a plate. “No. It’s the Vanderwilt demon.”

“If I hadn’t seen it myself, I’d think you were losing it,” said Kimmy frankly.

“I am losing it,” said Jess, shoving a pod into the Nespresso machine.

She considered telling Kimmy about the aborted interlude with Adam last Friday, but decided “he didn’t want to sleep with me because there was a demon in my bed” was the sort of thing you just had to be there for.

It wasn’t that he’d ghosted her (the term had new meaning for Jess, thanks to her interactions with Cornelia). They’d spoken every morning, on his short walk back from dropping Ben at school. She’d grown accustomed to the sounds of leaves crackling underfoot, the huff of Adam’s breath, the whistle of the wind against the phone screen, the street noises of that particular stretch of Brooklyn.

Jess couldn’t imagine what the other people on the street thought of their conversations, which zigzagged between “we’ve found a good spot for the new rain gardens” and “St. Martin of Tours once exorcised a man by thrusting his arm down his throat and forcing the demon to exit out his anus,” which sounded both unsanitary and uncomfortable.

Adam insisted he saw no signs of demonic influence in Melinda, at least no more than usual. If Cornelia Vanderwilt had bound it to her descendants in perpetuity, it was being slow in reporting for duty. Which was a relief, Adam had said, because he’d already dealt with his daughter’s anus when she was in the diaper stage and he really didn’t want to go back there.

They’d researched herbs: St. John’s wort, dill, lemon verbena, cayenne pepper. None of it seemed to do much, although it did, Adam said, give him inspiration for a new chicken recipe.

None of it gave any hint of how Cornelia Vanderwilt—or Jacinta Piatti—had managed to encase the demon first in stone and then in glass.

And tonight was Nightfall.

Not that anything was necessarily likely to happen at Nightfall. All sources agreed that All Hallow’s Eve was the time they had to worry about, not an arbitrary Thursday in late October. But it did mean that after Kimmy left, Jess had to find something to wear.

“We’re trying to figure out how to get rid of this demon,” Jess said, as they carried their coffees and the plate of pastries to the couch. “Or contain the demon. Or something. Was there anything in the Vanderwilt papers?”

Kimmy settled herself on Jess’s couch, yanking a notebook out of her knockoff Birkin bag. “None of what you told me makes any sense.”

“I know,” said Jess. “But as you said, you saw it yourself.”

“No, I mean about Cornelia Vanderwilt. Nothing you told me about her adds up.”

Jess breathed in the scent of life-giving coffee. “What do you mean?”

“The whole story about her calling a demon because she was broke and terrified of losing her social status? It does not compute.”

“It sounded plausible to me.”

“Of course it did. Because it’s the sort of story we’re told all the time. Because we’re used to stories where women are venal and shallow and reckless. But is it true? Or is it just a very convincing fiction?”

It was one of Kimmy’s favorite hobbyhorses: the ways in which historical women were constantly misunderstood and misrepresented.

As Kimmy drew breath for what could be a lengthy oration, Jess hastily asked, “So if that’s not the truth, what is?”

“People lie. They lie constantly. They even lie to themselves. Don’t even get me started on memoirs. But you know what doesn’t lie?” Kimmy didn’t wait for Jess to answer. “Account books. Cornelia Vanderwilt kept bee-yoo-tiful accounts.”

“And?”

“And this is not a woman trying to keep up with the Joneses. Oh, hey, did you know the Joneses were real people? They were Edith Wharton’s family. But that’s a side point.”

“But that dressing room, in the Met—it was insane. The inlay had inlay.”