Page 115 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I don’t know.”

“Would you have gone?”

“I’d have catered it.”

Rowan laughs and taps the table twice with two fingers.

“That’s the answer, isn’t it? In a town this size the caterer would know. And nobody knows.”

And I stand there with a knife in my hand and understand, all at once and much too late, that I have got this entirely the wrong way round. I have spent two weeks thinking about discovery. I’ve been frightened of a man arriving in my town and finding something out. I’ve thought about archives and search boxes and a photograph of Julian coming out of Harbor Books. I’ve been braced for the moment when Rowan Pierce understands what those four faces side by side mean.

But he did that in October.

He isn’t here to find out. He came here knowing. He found out from an apartment somewhere with a laptop, the same way I found out in a church annex with a pencil, and he has come to Black Harbor in January with a van and a videographer for the only thing he cannot get off a screen.

He has come for confirmation in the present tense.

“Penny?”

“Sorry. It’s cold in here.”

“It’s always cold in here. Dr. Cardoso told me it’s structural.” He picks up a crab thing. “Can I ask you something else?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

“I am, but I’d rather you knew I knew that.” He eats the crab thing. “You know him.”

It isn’t a question and there is no version of no I’m willing to say.

“I do.”

“How well?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

I haven’t said it out loud to a stranger before. It comes out of me in the flattest possible voice, in a granite hall with seventy people in it, and I watch it go into Rowan Pierce like a coin into a slot. Something in his face changes. Not triumph. That’s what I expect and it isn’t there. What crosses his face is closer to sympathy, which is worse.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “Then I’m going to be straight with you.”

Behind him, Chloe stops moving.

“We originally came for six stories,” Rowan says. “That’s what we pitched. The fog, the lighthouse, the Cordelia, the sea witch, the bell, the curse. And then Chloe pulled the property records in October because Chloe pulls everything.”

Chloe’s mouth tightens as she steps up next to him. “Rowan.”

“I’m not saying anything we haven’t already published.”

“No,” she says. “You’re not.”

But there’s a crease between her brows now that wasn’t there over the parsnip soup.

Rowan turns back to me. “The records are a puzzle, Penny. Puzzles are fun. I could build an episode out of deed transfers and photographs and never say a word that isn’t sitting in a public archive. But a story needs a person.”

I don’t say anything.

“Four different names,” he says gently. “Two hundred and thirty years. No funerals, no obituaries, no probate anybody can point at. One face.”

“Family resemblance.”