Page 105 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

His mouth moves. It isn’t much, but I’ll take it.

I go into town. I do the walnut order. I speak to Loretta about the ham, finally and definitively. I portion cranberry filling and answer three emails and discover at half past one that I have been standing in front of my prep bench for some time holding an empty bowl. Because there is one thing in all of this that keeps bothering me.

Mabel. Eleven days ago, in the reading room of the Black Harbor Historical Society, Mabel Libby gave me four names without having to think about them.

Blackthorne. Voss. Volkov. Thorne.

Then she told me it was all in the town book and that in seventy-five years I was only the second person to ask about it. I asked who the first was. Mabel pushed a box of a dead woman’s hair towards me and told me to do the hair.

I take off my apron. The Historical Society is four minutes away if you don’t stop. I don’t stop.

Mabel is at the reading table with the second ledger open and her glasses on. She looks up as I come through the door, and I watch her understand why I’m there about a second and a half before I open my mouth.

“You’ve seen it,” she says.

“Who was the first person to ask you?”

Mabel takes off her glasses.

“She came in October. The nineteenth. A very polite young woman with dark hair and a notebook. She said she was a researcher.” Mabel closes the ledger. “She wanted the transfers on the north point property. They’re public, so I gave them to her. She sat in that chair for four hours and did not once ask me for anything I could have refused.”

A cold feeling starts at the base of my spine.

“She was thorough,” Mabel continues. “I’ve watched a great many people be thorough in this room, and she was the best of them. She thanked me twice. She even wrote her name in the visitors’ book, which nobody does.”

“What name?”

Mabel pulls the visitors’ book towards her, turns it around, and puts one finger on a line.

Chloe Ramirez.

“October nineteenth.”

“Mm.”

“Mabel, that was two months ago.”

“It was.”

“They’re not planning this. They’ve already started.”

“I telephoned the number on the website this morning,” Mabel says. “A very nice young man thanked me for my corrections and told me the location team arrives on the second of January. He asked whether I would consider being recorded.”

January second. Less than two weeks.

“What did you say?”

Mabel puts her glasses back on.

“I said I would think about it.”

I stare at her, and Mabel folds her hands over the ledger.

“Which,” she says, “is something I have never once said to anybody in my life.”

CHAPTER 21

There is a car in the drive at Blackthorn House that night. It’s red and sleek and expensive and it’s parked with its wheels dead straight, which nobody does, and it has Massachusetts plates. I pull up behind it in a nine-year-old van with SALT & SAGE on the side and a dent I have never explained to anyone. I sit there for a second with two quarts of soup on the passenger seat and a very bad feeling.