Page 122 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I have sat on the edge of a great many beds, in a great many houses. I have always been on my way out of them,” he says finally, very quietly, and I have to swallow before I can ask.

“And tonight?”

He is quiet for so long that I hear the truck come back the other way.

“Tonight I cannot work out what I am supposed to do with what you said in the kitchen,” he says. “I have been sitting here attempting it for two hours.”

“Attempting what?”

“To find the version of it,” he says, “in which you do not pay the price for me.”

My chest aches and I wonder if he can hear that, but I stroke his back instead. “You don’t have to work it out tonight.”

“I know.”

“Julian. Lie down.”

“In a moment.”

“Now,” I say, “or I’ll put my cold feet on you.”

“You know I don’t feel the cold.”

“You can still feel the disrespect.”

He makes a sound that’s almost a laugh, the first one all night. Then he lies down and lets me put his arm around me, and he stays. He is still there when I go under. He is still there in the morning, which is not nothing. It is, in fact, the largest possible something.

CHAPTER 24

Without one single person organizing it, Black Harbor closes ranks.

I don’t see it happen. That’s what I keep coming back to. There is no meeting. Nobody says a word to me, and I am, technically, the person with the most reason to be told. It simply starts happening around the eleventh of January, in a dozen places at once, in a town of two thousand people who have known each other for most of their lives.

It starts, as far as I can reconstruct it, with Mabel.

Chloe Ramirez goes to the Historical Society on the eleventh to look at the town book. Mabel Libby is delighted to see her. Mabel makes tea. Mabel spends thirty-five minutes on the Cordelia, all nine hands, in detail, with the correction about the brother, and gives Chloe a photocopy of pages four through nine of the indexed document.

And the town book, Mabel explains, with enormous regret, has gone to a conservator in Portland.

“It went out in December,” she tells me, when I corner her about it on the twelfth. “The binding is in a shocking state.”

“Mabel, it’s been in a shocking state since 1994.”

“All the more reason to get it done.”

“When’s it coming back?”

“They are extremely busy,” Mabel says serenely, “and it is a small building. I’ve been on the waiting list for a very long time, and I don’t intend to hurry a professional.”

“And the Sturgis boxes?”

“Not accessioned.”

“I accessioned them. I was there. I did nineteen folders and a box of hair.”

“You processed them, dear. Processing is not accessioning. Accessioning requires the committee.” Mabel turns a page in her ledger. “The committee meets in March.”

“Who’s on the committee?”