Page 103 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I put the phone face down on the quilt. Then I pick it up again, because of course I do. I stare at the four images. I found three photographs of Julian in one afternoon at the Historical Society, most of which I spent sorting through a dead woman’s hair. I wasn’t even looking for him when I found the first one. But these aren’t Mabel’s photographs.

One is in the museum. One came out of a shipping registry. One came from a newspaper archive in Bangor. And one was taken by somebody standing on Water Street this year. Four different sources. Four different places.

Once, you could not have put those four images on the same table without spending years trying. That was Julian’s whole method. He never hid. He hid in the gaps between other people’s paperwork, and there are no gaps anymore.

I get out of bed.

I show up in his kitchen at seven with my coat still on and hand him my phone. He stands beneath the copper pans and looks at the screen for a very long time without saying a word. His face does nothing. I have seen him surprised. I have seen him grieving. I have seen him come apart completely on a boat in the dark. I have never seen this.

Then I understand. He isn’t reacting. He’s working. This is the face of a man reading a chart.

“Julian.”

“A moment.”

He scrolls back through the four images, studies the Voss engraving, then returns to the photograph of Blackthorn House.

“Say something.”

“The Voss engraving is in the Mystic register,” he says. “I did not sit for it. The artist drew it from a wharf at some distance, and I allowed it because a drawing was not a likeness and there was no possibility of anyone ever placing it beside anything else.” He hands the phone back. “That was a correct assessment for one hundred and seventy-five years.”

“They have a picture of you outside Harbor Books.”

“That’s the least important one.”

“It’s your face, Julian. As you are now.”

“It is a photograph of a man buying a book. It means nothing without the others.”

I look at the four faces again.

“How did they do this?”

His eyes come to mine.

“Think about how you did it. How long did it take you?”

The Historical Society. The photographs. One face, decade after decade, until there was no possible explanation except the impossible one.

“A few hours,” I say.

“You did it in one local archive, without intending to. They have digitized newspapers, property records, photographs from repositories all over New England, and an audience of—how many did you say?”

“Two million a week, Lucy says.”

Julian goes very still.

“A week.”

“Yes.”

He looks back at the phone.

“For two hundred and thirty years, my method worked because no one could put the pieces on the same table. A shipping registry in Connecticut. A newspaper in Bangor. Deeds in the county building. A portrait hanging forty yards from your kitchen. Every one of them public. Every one of them meaningless by itself.”

“But now somebody can find all four from a laptop and compare the faces.”

“Yes.”