Page 14 of What Happens at Nightfall

“Or a grave,” said Jess.

“Or a grave.” He’d been thinking about that a lot since Kate died, the ways that life twisted away from you. To a vista. Or a grave. Or both. “That’s Charlotte Canda’s tomb down there. Where were you when Ben bumped into you?”

“Standing roughly over there.”

Together, they searched the area by the light of Adam’s flashlight, finding one Hershey’s wrapper, a fuzzy cough drop, and two dimes, but no OMNY card.

They trekked up to the rhododendron and back, weaving between graves, following the bright circle of light from the flashlight.

“Watch out for William!” Adam said, just a moment too late.

Jess caught her toe on the hidden footstone and started to go over. Dropping his flashlight, Adam leapt over a stone to grab her, catching her just in time.

“William?” she echoed.

“That’s all it says on the stone, just ‘William.’” Adam wasn’t sure what her sweater was made of, but it was very soft. Which made him realize he was still holding her. So she wouldn’t fall and break her neck. “You don’t want to twist your ankle on William. I’ve fallen over him a time or two myself.”

“Thanks.” They stood there for a moment, just two strangers in a graveyard, brought together by a lost OMNY card. Then Jess took a small step back. “Unless William took my OMNY card, I think I’m out of luck.”

Adam busied himself retrieving his flashlight. “We can keep looking,” he offered.

“All four hundred and some odd acres? You have to get back to your kids. And your chicken.”

There was a pinched look about her face that made Adam want to wrap her in his fleece and take her home and feed her chicken. But then he caught himself. This poor woman just wanted to get home.

“If you don’t mind swinging by the tomb with me while I lock up,” he said briskly, “I’ll take you to the subway and swipe you through. The tomb is on the way. It’s just a short detour.”

“Like life,” she said wryly. There was something gallant about the way she pulled herself up again, hefting the heavy bag on her shoulder. “All right. Let’s go find your tomb.”

“It’s not my tomb,” Adam said quickly. Not his, never his. He hated that it was his kids’. “It’s the Vanderwilt mausoleum.”

“Vanderwilt? Not Vanderbilt?”

“They were one consonant away from greatness.” Kate used to hate it when he said stuff like that.

He’d joked once that maybe her family’s issues dated back to having a name that sounded like a permanent lisp. Kate hadn’t been amused. She’d been raised on the sanctity of the Vanderwilt name, and as much as she’d pushed back against it all—in marrying him, for example—family pride had been bred into her bones along with a high tolerance for hard alcohol and an inability to wear white after Labor Day.

“If you asked the Vanderwilts,” said Adam, not quite able to keep the edge out of his voice, “they’d tell you they were a much older and grander family than the Vanderbilts, who were just Staten Island come-latelies. That’s the tomb, down there.”

Being Vanderwilts, they had to have the fanciest mausoleum on the block. The others that fronted Sycamore clustered together in a modest crescent, looking like Monopoly houses, simple squares with triangular tops. But not the Vanderwilt mausoleum. It was set back from the street, elevated by a shallow flight of stairs. The stairs were flanked by an ornamental copper urn filled with dead flowers on one side and a marble slab with the reclining figure of a woman on the other, her name obscured by twining roses. A long stone walkway led to the mausoleum itself, in which a neoclassical pediment and pillars jarred stylistically with niches with pseudo-medieval saints, neither of whom looked happy to be there.

Above it all, on the apex of the roof, sat the bust of Cornelia Vanderwilt, surveying her domain.

Adam loved Green-Wood but he hated this place. He usually managed to detour around it. Someone else pruned those roses.

It had been four years.

Tonight, there was no avoiding it. The elaborately pierced copper outer door, green with age, gaped open, and through it came a whiff of something decayed and unhealthy. It smelled like rotten eggs.

Those boys hadn’t egged the tomb, had they?

Adam welcomed the annoyance. He’d rather be annoyed than the strange mix of feelings this place always brought out in him. Regret. Revulsion. Anger.

“Wait.” Jess tugged at his sleeve. “Can you shine your flashlight over here?”

Obediently, he turned in the direction she pointed.

There, at the feet of the reclining woman, just above the roses that were always in bloom, lay a black-and-white OMNY card.