Page 116 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Maybe.”

He says it so easily that for half a second I don’t know what to do with it.

“Maybe it is,” Rowan continues. “That’s why I’d like to talk to Julian.”

“He doesn’t do interviews.”

“I know. I’ve written twice.”

“And?”

“Very polite replies. Both declining. Both extremely well written, which is unusual. I get about eighty declines a year and most of them are from lawyers.”

Julian hasn’t told me about the requests. I push that aside and give Rowan an equally polite smile.

“Then you have your answer.”

“I do.” Rowan sets down his glass. “And I’ll respect it. I want you to know that. I’m not going to sit outside his gate. I’m not going to put a camera over his wall. But I’m going to be in Black Harbor for six weeks, and if he’s in the same room as me at some point, I’m going to say hello to him like a person.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

I don’t believe that’s all, but the problem is that I believe he believes it. Then he glances across the room towards Ines Cardoso.

“He didn’t come tonight.”

“He doesn’t come to things.”

“He came to the museum benefit in December.”

Everything in me goes a little colder.

“Dr. Cardoso told me. She’s been telling me about it for an hour and she’s thrilled. She thinks she’s telling me about a donor.”

She is. That’s the terrible part.

“She told me about the bell,” Rowan says. “He read a date off the waist of it, under the crown, turned three-quarters away from the glass. A date nobody in this building has been able to read since at least the sixties.”

I put the knife down because I don’t think holding it is a good idea.

There’s something happening in my chest that I don’t have a good word for. It’s the feeling of watching somebody kind cause damage. Ines Cardoso in her good shoes, telling a man with a microphone about the best ninety seconds of her professional life, and Julian standing at that case in December with a glass of champagne he never drank and doing a generous thing he couldn’t help doing. And then paying for it in January in a building he has kept the roof on for eighty years.

“Ines thinks she’s met a very clever man who reads a lot,” Rowan says. “I’m not going to tell her otherwise.”

“But you’ll use it.”

His expression changes slightly.

“I don’t know yet.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agrees. “It isn’t. But it’s true.”

Chloe is watching him now, not me, and I suddenly understand something. She knew about the records. She found the records. She came here in October and did exactly what she was supposed to do, politely and carefully and entirely inside the public archive. But there is a difference between a name in a ledger and Ines Cardoso’s delighted face, and Chloe Ramirez has just realized it.

“He hasn’t done anything,” I say. “Whatever you think you’ve found, Julian hasn’t done anything to anyone.”