Page 55 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I have said for six years that you should wear red. You may quote me later, when I’m unavailable.” She has a ship’s wheel brooch on and the expression of a woman whose entire evening has already been worth it. “Come and look at the roof plans.”

“Mabel, no one wants to look at roof plans.”

“Then they should not have come to a party about a roof.” Mabel takes Julian’s arm without asking and steers the pair of us towards the auction tables at a speed I cannot account for in a woman of seventy-five.

The canapés are from Portland. I know it immediately and I know it professionally and I say nothing to any living soul for a full fifteen minutes.

“You’re counting,” Julian says.

“I’m not counting.”

“You’ve looked at that tray four times.”

“There are nine crab things left and there were forty. That’s a fifth of a tray for a hundred and ten people.” I take a stuffed mushroom off the tray, mostly to give my hands a job. “Someone costed this on paper, and on paper it’s beautiful.”

“Would you prefer to leave and go and make something?”

“Desperately.”

“Say the word,” he says, “and I’ll get the car.”

He has a champagne flute in his left hand. He has had it since we entered the room, and the level in that glass has not moved a millimeter. He carries it the way you’d carry a program and tilts it correctly when he laughs at Doris Alden’s story about the 1978 storm. At half past eight, he sets it down on a passing tray as full as it was when we walked in.

He is also standing closer than a man needs to stand at a fundraiser. He’s not touching me, but he’s close enough that I can feel the cool coming off him down my whole left side. I have now spent an hour in a granite building wanting to put my mouth on the half an inch of bare throat above his collar. I remind myself I’m here for the roof.

Julian is good at this in the way I’ve noticed since the first dinner party. He remembers everyone. He asks Mabel about a book she mentioned three weeks ago. He asks a retired ferry captain about his granddaughter’s college applications and Doris about the window she was having replaced. He gives each person his full attention, asks exactly the thing that makes them light up, and deflects every question about himself so smoothly that the person asking walks away feeling they’ve had a wonderful conversation.

I’m learning to watch for it now. The way he gives people exactly enough to feel warm and never enough to feel informed.

“You do that on purpose,” I say quietly when we get a moment alone beside the auction tables.

“Do what?”

“Make everyone feel important enough that they forget to ask about you.”

He looks at me for a second. “You noticed.”

“I notice a lot about you.”

“Yes,” Julian says. “I’ve begun to find it alarming.”

He says it like a compliment. I decide to take it as one.

We stroll around the museum until we reach Case Four. Case Four is the big one along the north wall with the exhibit about the early merchant trade, the years when Black Harbor stopped being a fishing beach with opinions and started being a port. Three half-models sit on brackets, a ledger lies open under glass at a page no one has ever read, and there’s a bell.

Dr. Ines Cardoso has run the museum for two years. She came up from a real one in Boston, she’s roughly my age, and she has extremely good shoes. She catches us at the case because she catches everyone at the case.

“The Anne Sewall,” she says. “Our first square-rigger. Launched 1802, lost in the Indies trade in 1806. She’s the reason there’s a breakwater.”

Julian looks at the card for a while.

“Seventeen ninety-nine,” he says.

Dr. Cardoso’s smile stays precisely where it is. “The registry has her at 1802.”

“The registry has her re-registered in 1802. She was re-rigged that winter at Wiscasset. She went in a brig and came out a ship.” He says it the way you’d give someone the time. “The tonnage on the second entry is fifty-one greater than the first. A vessel that gains fifty-one tons in a shipyard has not been built that year. It has been altered.”

“That’s an argument.”