Page 74 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“That’s the reading room,” says Mabel behind me, and I nearly go through the ceiling.

“Volkov.”

“Mm.”

“Mabel. There’s a Volkov on the back of this.”

“There has been a Volkov up on that hill on and off since before my mother was born.” She takes the card, looks at it about as long as you’d look at a bus timetable, and writes a number on a folder. “They come and they go. The money never goes anywhere. That road gets graded every spring whether there’s a soul in that house or not.”

“Who pays for that?”

“The house pays for it,” says Mabel, in exactly the tone you’d use about the tide.

She doesn’t look at me. Mabel Libby has spent fifty years looking at people over the tops of her glasses when they say something interesting, and she doesn’t look at me once.

The third photograph is in the MYSTERY shoebox, which is where it has apparently been since 2004. I go through it at ten past twelve while eating a sandwich I made at six this morning and have entirely lost interest in.

It’s a snapshot rather than a studio portrait. Cheap paper, with a deckled edge and that flat grey of the late thirties. Nine people stand on the steps of the customs house in overcoats, squinting into a March wind, one woman holding her hat on.

Someone has written on the back in pencil:

Customs House, March 1938. Mr. J. Thorne (back, left), has bought it for the town.

I put the sandwich down. He’s at the back on the left. Julian. Again.

He isn’t squinting. No one else in the photograph is standing still. You can see the movement everywhere—a coat blurred at the hem, a hand caught halfway to a hat, the whole line shifting against the wind.

Julian’s face is as sharp as the granite behind him. Dark coat. Hands behind his back. Weight dead center. Thorne. That’s what makes my stomach drop. Not Volkov.

I had already made room for a Volkov in 1892 because a family can be a family. Families stay. There are four generations of Finches on Blackthorn Road. Julian could have been Aleksander Volkov and then another Volkov and another after that, each one a son or a nephew or a cousin who inherited the house and happened to have the same face.

But you do not get a Volkov in 1892 and a Thorne in 1938 and a Volkov again now out of one bloodline. You get that out of the same man with a good lawyer and a lot of time.

I take a photograph of the back with my phone. Then the front. My hands aren’t entirely steady, and I have to do the front twice.

Arthur Finch comes in at half past twelve with a cardboard box of hymnals no one asked for, because Arthur has been bringing things no one asked for to this building since 1997. He stands in the doorway looking at the table with the expression of a man who has found the source of a smell.

“You’ve got the Sturgis stuff out.”

“We have.”

“There’ll be nothing in it.”

“Arthur,” says Mabel. “Sit down or go away.”

He does neither, obviously. He comes over and looks down at the customs house snapshot on the table with his coat still buttoned, and I watch a man of ninety go absolutely quiet for two full seconds.

“That’s the handover,” he says. “My father was doing the gardens up there then. Nineteen thirty-eight when he started. Thorne was the one paying him.”

“You remember him?”

“I was two,” says Arthur, with enormous scorn. “I remember the car.”

“But you’ve seen him. In pictures.”

“Seen the lot of them. Cousins, nephews, someone’s someone. You never got told and you never asked. That’s manners.”

Something inside me catches on that. You never got told and you never asked. Arthur looks at the photograph again.