Page 113 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Can I film it?”

“The chowder?”

“The whole spread. This is honestly the best thing here so far. No offense to the—” He looks around and lands on a glass case containing a very old harpoon. “—the harpoon.”

“The harpoon’s had a rough couple centuries. Let it have its moment.”

Ben laughs like I’ve said something genuinely funny and backs up to frame the table.

They’re going to be nice, I think. Victoria warned me they’d be nice.

The bar for outsiders in Black Harbor is not high, exactly, but it is specific: don’t call it quaint, don’t ask if we get bored, and let somebody finish. That’s it. Half the summer people fail on all three by the end of the first drink.

Rowan Pierce clears the bar in about eleven minutes.

He comes in out of the cold in a good coat and a bad hat, shakes hands with Ines Cardoso, apologizes to Mabel by name for not responding to her letter in December, and then finds Wendell Marr inside four minutes.

Wendell starts on the ditty bag.

And Rowan Pierce takes his glasses off, puts them in his pocket, leans on his elbows on the case, and listens. All the way through. Both parts, including the part about the second cousin, which I have heard eleven times and have never once heard to the end because there is always a tray to carry. When Wendell finishes, Rowan asks him a question about the sailmaker’s palm. Wendell has to think about it, and I watch a man of seventy-eight be asked something he does not immediately know the answer to by somebody who actually wanted the answer.

That’s the moment I understand the size of the problem.

Because I came in here ready for a man with a microphone and a theory. What has actually arrived is somebody genuinely good at the exact thing my town needs, which is being listened to.

He’s about forty. Dark hair going grey in a way he clearly has no plans about, expensive glasses in his pocket, and a completely unfiltered laugh, which is rarer than people think. He talks to Doris about the storm of '78 for six minutes. He asks Theo three questions about the pub and one of them is about the beer. He does not once say the word quaint and he does not once look at his phone.

He’s interested in everything. This is his dreadful gift, and it’s why people talk to him.

Ben, meanwhile, films everything and apologizes for it constantly.

“Sorry—sorry, is this okay? I can stop. I’m just capturing the setting.” He gestures at all of it. “This is the best building I’ve been in all year. Look at the boat. Why is the boat like that?”

“Nobody knows,” I tell him. “Nobody’s ever straightened it.”

“Nobody’s ever straightened it,” Ben repeats, delighted, into his own camera.

Lucy arrives at twenty past six with her camera bag because Mabel asked her to shoot the reception for the Society’s records. Ben Carter turns around when she walks in, and I watch a golden retriever find his stick.

“That’s a… Is that the F2?”

“It’s the F2.”

“You’re shooting a reception on film.”

Lucy raises an eyebrow. “I’m shooting a reception on film.”

“Can I—” Ben starts, and spends the next hour following Lucy around.

“Well,” Mabel says, appearing beside me, “isn’t that interesting?”

Chloe Ramirez finds me at seven, at the end of the table, while I’m arranging more crackers beside the pâté. She’s about thirty, with dark curls and an overstuffed notebook in her coat pocket with a rubber band around it. She stands there for several seconds like somebody waiting to be told off.

“You’re Penny Harrington. You work in the Historical Society.”

“I’m Penny, and I volunteer at the Historical Society.”

“I was there in October,” she says. “I don’t know if Mrs. Libby mentioned it.”