Page 126 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Julian is quiet for a very long time.

“Yes,” he says.

Which is not a plan. But it is, as far as I can tell, the first time in four hundred years that man has wanted something out loud instead of thinking about what it costs, and I would like the fifteenth of January recorded somewhere, ideally in brown ink.

CHAPTER 25

Chloe Ramirez comes into the Salt & Sage at four on the eighteenth and buys a lemon tart she does not want. I know she doesn’t want it because she stands at the counter turning it around on the plate for ten minutes without taking a bite, and Chloe Ramirez is not a woman who lets a lemon tart sit. I have watched her eat three of them this week. She has a color-coded notebook open beside it and a pen she isn’t using.

“It’s very good,” she says, of the tart she has not touched.

“You haven’t had any.”

“I know it’s good. I’ve had three.” She puts the pen down. “Is there somewhere we can talk that isn’t the front window?”

I take her into the back, past the walk-in, and put the kettle on because I need my hands doing something and so, plainly, does she.

“I pulled the transfers in October,” Chloe says. “The north point property. I want to start there because I don’t want you thinking somebody made me do any of it.”

“Nobody thinks that.”

“I think it.” She looks down at her hands. “I’ve been doing this for six years. I’m good at it. I found the four owners in an afternoon and I was… Penny, I was thrilled. I sat in a rented room in Somerville at one in the morning, grinning like an idiot, with four images on one screen. It’s the best discovery I’ve ever made.”

“I know the feeling,” I say. “I found three of them in a church annex.”

She looks up.

“Did you?”

“On a Thursday. In about five hours. Mostly I was doing hair.”

“Right,” says Chloe Ramirez, and puts her hand over her eyes for a second. “God. Right.”

The kettle clicks off. I pour water into two mugs.

“I’ve been trying to say something for two weeks and I’ve finally got it into one sentence, so I’m going to say it before I lose it.” She puts both hands flat on the counter. “Finding out is not the same as telling.”

I don’t say anything.

“I will chase a dead man forever. Happily. I’ll spend a year in a county records office to find out who really paid for a customs house in 1938 and I’ll think it was time well spent and I’ll be right. That’s history. But Julian is alive. And he isn’t doing anything to anybody.” She wraps both hands around the mug I give her. “I don’t think finding something out gives me the right to hand it over.”

“Rowan doesn’t agree.”

“Rowan doesn’t agree.” She says it without any heat at all, which is somehow worse. “And I want to be fair to him, because he’s the best boss I’ve ever had and he has never once asked me to do anything cheap. But he thinks the distinction I just made is sentimental. He thinks that if you accept it, then every powerful person who’s ever wanted something kept quiet gets to use it, and he’s got nine years of examples. I’ve heard him make that argument at four in the morning and I have never won it.”

“He made it to me. At the reception.”

“He makes it to everyone. It’s not a trick. He believes it in his bones.”

“So what’s changed?”

“Nothing’s changed. That’s why I’m here.” She pushes the mug away. “He’s written it. Episode four. He wrote it over the weekend and sent it to me on Sunday night. Penny, it’s good. That’s the awful part. It’s the best thing he’s written in three years. It doesn’t say vampire because it doesn’t have to. It lays the four pictures out in order and it tells the audience there are no funerals and no obituaries and no probate, and then it stops. Then it says, we asked to speak to Mr. Volkov. He declined.”

“And then two million people go and look.”

“And then two million people go and look, and about four thousand of them are extremely good at this, and by Thursday there’s a spreadsheet.” Chloe presses her lips together. “I’ve seen the spreadsheet before. Season eight. There’s a man in Vermont who disappeared afterwards. I did the research for that episode and I’ve thought about it every week since I found out what happened to him.”

“Victoria mentioned Vermont.”