Page 144 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Saturday is clear and cool, one of those May evenings when the light stays over the water longer than you expect it to. I drive up the hill at seven in Gran’s garnets and the red dress from the Maritime Museum benefit, and the gate is open the way it has been open for months now. The oak is visible across the south lawn, absurdly small beside the old beech and covered in new green leaves. There are lights in the windows. A lot of lights.

Julian opens the door before I knock. He’s wearing the black suit, and I stop because Julian in that suit deserves a stop. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he says, “There isn’t a sufficient word.”

I stare at him. “You’ve used that.”

“It remains true.”

“You’re recycling material,” I tell him, trying to look stern.

“I have had a long life, Penny. Eventually some phrases must be reused.”

“You could pick another one.”

“Extraordinary.”

“Also used.”

“It has not stopped being accurate.”

He takes my coat, and his hands go over my bare shoulders on the way, cool and unhurried and entirely deliberate. I stand in the hall of Blackthorn House wondering how much of this dinner I’m actually going to get through.

He doesn’t lead me to the library. He takes me to the dining room.

I’ve been in the Blackthorn dining room perhaps half a dozen times. It’s at the front of the house on the south side and has always looked like a photograph of a room. A long table under a sheet. Chairs against the walls. A sideboard with a clock on it that stopped sometime during the Coolidge administration and apparently became decorative.

The sheet is gone. The clock is ticking. A fire is lit, although the evening isn’t cold enough to need one, and candles run down the center of the polished table. All the chairs have been brought out from the walls and put where chairs belong. There are eighteen of them, but only two places are set, facing each other at one end, close enough that I could reach across and take his hand.

“Julian.”

“Sit down.”

“You wound the clock.”

“Arthur wound the clock. It required a key, and the key required Arthur, and Arthur required an explanation, and I would rather not go into it.” He pulls out my chair. “Sit down, Penny. Before it goes cold.”

“What goes cold?”

He leaves the room. I hear something in the kitchen. The unmistakable sound of a spoon hitting the edge of a pot. I get halfway out of my chair before Julian comes back carrying a bowl.

The soup is pale gold, with chives over the top. I know it immediately.

“Fern’s parsnips.”

“Fern’s parsnips.”

I look at him. “You made soup.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t taste soup.”

“I am aware.”

“Julian.”

“Eat it.”

I pick up my spoon. It’s good. It’s not my soup. I use more butter and brown the onions longer, and I’d have put a little more pepper in it, but it is genuinely, unmistakably good. I look across the table at a man who hasn’t tasted food since before anybody thought Maine ought to be a state.