Page 130 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Julian looks back at Rowan.

“What I can tell you is that Theo Goodwin does not need my biography to know whether I am the sort of man he wants in his bar. I helped fix his dock in November. I carry Mrs. Ballard’s chair because she is eighty-two and it is heavier than she thinks. I have paid for parts of the roads because I use them and because the town needs them. I have listened to Mr. Marr explain a sailmaker’s palm more times than either of us can count.”

“Thirty-three,” says Wendell from somewhere behind him.

“Thirty-three,” Julian says, and someone laughs.

“I have lived here a very long time, Mr. Pierce. I have done every unglamorous thing a man can do for a place that will never be in an episode. These people have done the same things for me. That is not a conspiracy. It is a neighborhood.”

Rowan looks around the room.

“That still doesn’t answer the question.”

“No. It answers a different one.”

“Which is?”

“Why they will not help you.”

Rowan is silent for a second. Then he says, “You understand my problem.”

“I believe so.”

“If you’re right about what I think—and I’m not asking you to confirm that—then this is extraordinary. This isn’t somebody’s affair or tax return. This changes what we know is possible.”

“Vampires are already known to exist.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.”

“Then where’s the line?” Rowan asks. “Because everybody tells me their thing is private. The company dumping chemicals in a river says it’s proprietary, which is just private with a lawyer attached.” He turns his glass a quarter turn on the bar. “In the second season I went to a town in Michigan which had a ghost story about a girl in the lake. It was a great story, and everybody and their grandmother claimed to have seen her. It took me four hours in a county office to find out she was real and she had died in nineteen sixty-one. And the reason nobody had said her name in sixty years is that everybody knew whose boat she’d gone out on, and that family still lived there.”

He pauses to stare down into his glass.

“People don’t tell a ghost story instead of the truth because they’re stupid. They do it because the ghost is easier to live with. My mother grew up in a mill town in Georgia, and there was a man there that everyone knew about. Everyone. Forty years of a whole town knowing and no one saying it out loud. Do you know what that cost?” He looks over at Julian. “If I start from the position that people get to decide which truths about themselves belong to everyone else, then secrets stay buried and I don’t have a job.”

“No,” Julian says. “You have a difficult job.”

Rowan gives an unamused laugh.

“That’s not an answer either.”

“I don’t have one.”

That makes Rowan look up, and Julian quietly returns his gaze.

“I do not know where the line is in every case. I would distrust anyone who claimed he did. But this isn’t a mill town in Georgia. You’ve been here for two weeks, and you have found no crime. No victim. No one asking you to expose me because I have harmed them. You have found a private man with an unusual history whose neighbors would prefer you leave him alone.”

“An unusual history.”

“I am allowing you the phrase.”

Rowan almost smiles. Julian does not.

“You are a man who mistook a truth for something you were owed,” he adds. “I am asking you to consider whether those are always the same thing.”

For once Rowan Pierce doesn’t have an immediate answer. The recorder’s red light sits between them, and eventually Rowan looks down at it.