Page 81 of What Happens at Nightfall

Adam flipped over to his calendar. At nine he had a meeting with an architect to discuss designs for rain gardens, part of a bio-retention program designed to absorb water runoff and limit flooding of nearby areas. They’d received a $1.7 million grant from the state to put in twenty-two thousand square feet of rain gardens within the next decade. It was going to be a challenge: picking the right spaces, finding the right combination of plants and soil so that the bioswales would absorb excess water and filter out pollutants, making sure it was all in keeping with Green-Wood’s historical aesthetic. Adam had been itching to get going on it since he’d gotten the word that they’d won the grant.

But it was only 8:20 now.

He’d said he’d call. And this time he was keeping his word. Adam hit Jess’s number. “How did last night go?”

“No frogs.” Jess lowered her voice. “Ingrid is still sleeping.”

“You guys were okay? Jess? Did Ingrid do something?”

“You mean did she start speaking in tongues and come after me with a ceremonial dagger? No.” Adam heard the snick of a door closing behind Jess. “Sorry—I had a conversation with my mother I haven’t quite processed yet.”

“I know how that goes,” said Adam.

“Mm-hmm.” Adam got it. Families were complicated. “Ingrid and I were fine. We ate Thai food and watched the new Mean Girls movie. She’s just a kid, Adam. Unless she’s lying, I don’t think she has much more of a clue than we do.”

That wasn’t entirely reassuring. “I’d almost rather she was an evil mastermind. Then at least someone would know what they were doing.” Adam paused at the corner across from the main entrance of Green-Wood. The smell of Baked in Brooklyn taunted him with its promise of pastries. “Should we . . . meet up and discuss what’s going on? It might be good to have a plan. Or something like a plan.”

“Cower under the bed?” said Jess wryly. “That’s my plan.”

She hadn’t been cowering either of those times they’d encountered the demon. She’d been out there, warding him off, with light streaming out of her hands.

“How is tomorrow night for you?” Adam asked.

“As empty as most of my other nights. Should I see if Ingrid’s free?”

“Maybe let’s keep this just us? I have to be in Manhattan tomorrow afternoon for a meeting.” A potential donor to Green-Wood had asked to speak to Adam about Green-Wood’s environmental potential before pulling the trigger on his gift. “Have you been to the Campbell apartment?”

“The swanky drinks place in Grand Central? Years ago.”

“It’s across the street from my meeting,” said Adam quickly, although he wasn’t sure why he felt the need to explain. “Five?”

If anything strange happened in the interim, Adam was too busy to notice. Cal’s email slipped down his inbox along with a dozen others while he dealt with a crisis involving the wrong kind of algae in the Conservatory Water, obsessed over the plans for the new rain gardens, investigated some new hybrid chestnuts as a possible solution to chestnut blight, and had a long talk with the drone technicians about how to make the device more effective at discovering oak wilt and less effective at freaking out the butterflies in the butterfly garden.

It felt like playing hooky to shrug into his ancient blazer and a pair of rarely worn khakis and bolt for the subway to Manhattan. Donor, Adam reminded himself, although he knew the bit that was making him tug at his cuffs and sniff to make sure he’d remembered deodorant was drinks with Jess.

Feeling twitchy, Adam fished his phone out and began scrolling through neglected emails. His oldest sister wanted to know if they were coming to Chicago for Thanksgiving. She was hosting. (Translation: Buy your tickets, doofus.)

And there was Cal with Gottschalk! which looked like an unsuccessful Broadway show. Give them the old Gottschalk razzle-dazzle? Maybe that wasn’t so far off after all. Adam vaguely remembered that Gottshalk was something to do with show business. The missing angel was supposed to have been the Angel of Music, but that was all Adam knew about it.

Cal, with typical enthusiasm, hadn’t just attached the documents. He’d pasted them into the body of the email, taking up roughly half of Adam’s storage capacity in the process.

The first was a sepia-toned photo. There was the base of the Gottschalk monument as Adam knew it, plain and bare. Next to it, on the grass, lay two forms.

Adam squinted at the photo. Two? There’d only been one angel. The one lying just shy of the obelisk next to the Gottschalk monument was definitely the marble angel. He could see the broken wings lying on either side of it. But there, next to it, half covered by one wing, was another form.

Underneath, Cal had pasted that article he’d mentioned. “Local Woman Found Under Vandalized Statue.”

On the night of July 28, 1959, under cover of a blackout that had struck the city, vandals had attacked Green-Wood Cemetery. Their path of destruction had included the iconic Angel of Music over the grave of Louis Gottschalk, which, in falling, had struck and killed a local woman, a young mother.

The subway screeched toward Bryant Park. An indecipherable voice rumbled something about changing for the 7 to Grand Central.

Adam lurched to his feet, his eyes still on the blurred typeface reproduced in grainy imperfection on his phone.

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

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Campbell apartment was a Gilded Age relic tucked away in a corner of Grand Central, a faux Florentine palace complete with minstrels’ gallery: part Newport mansion, part eighties cocktail bar.