Page 123 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I am on the committee,” says Mabel. “I am, in point of fact, the entire committee, and I have been since Vaughn Dunn stopped coming. I’m not going to convene myself in January over a podcast.”

I stand in that reading room and look at a woman of seventy-five in a cardigan with an enamel raven on it, and something goes through me that I cannot name. Because I’ve heard this before.

Not one word she has said to Chloe Ramirez is a lie. Every single sentence is true. The binding is bad. The conservator is busy. The committee does meet in March. She has answered the specific question she was asked, precisely and completely, and given away nothing at all, and I have watched somebody else do exactly that in a kitchen and a hall and a hidden room since October.

“Mabel.”

“Mm.”

“How long have you known?”

Mabel Libby takes her glasses off.

“Known what, dear?”

“Don’t.”

She looks at me for a good while. Then she puts her glasses down on the ledger, which she does not do.

“I have run this Society since 2002,” she says. “Before that it was Ruth Sowerby and before that it was just a cupboard in the church. I know what is in every box in this room and I have known since I was fifty-one. My mother cleaned at Blackthorn House in 1960 for a Mr. Thorne, and came home one evening and said something to my father in the kitchen that I was not supposed to hear and did not understand for another forty-two years.”

“Mabel—”

“I never thought that it was any of my business,” says Mabel. “That’s my position and I am not going to elaborate on it. If you tell me anything now I shall be extremely cross with you, because at present I can say to that young woman quite truthfully that I have never discussed it with anybody, and I would like to go on being able to say so.”

Then she puts her glasses back on and asks me whether I have any opinion about the parking.

Theo refuses the Lantern on the thirteenth.

Rowan asks properly, in advance, in the afternoon, when there’s nobody in the pub. He wants to film the bar, and the window, and Theo pouring, and Theo says no.

“Why not?” says Rowan, entirely reasonably.

“It’s my bar,” says Theo Goodwin.

And that, apparently, is the whole conversation. Rowan tells me about it himself two days later, with real appreciation, because he has been doing this for nine years and has never had a cleaner no.

Harriet Coyne and Eunice Ballard do something far worse.

They agree. They agree enthusiastically. Harriet has been waiting for the interview since the eighteenth of December and has had, by her own standards, sufficient notice. Eunice brings her own folding chair. They sit down in the church annex with Ben Carter’s camera and Rowan Pierce and a microphone, and they talk for four hours and eleven minutes.

From what I’ve heard, the tape does not contain one single usable sentence.

Harriet does the hip. All of it. The original injury, the misdiagnosis, the second opinion in Rockland, the physiotherapist she did not care for and the one she did. Eunice does the Buick. Eunice does the Buick for what Ben Carter later describes to Lucy, in tones of genuine awe, as “forty-five minutes, and it’s green, and that’s the whole thing, that the car was green.”

Three times Rowan asks gently and professionally about the family up at the house.

“Oh, they’ve always been up there,” says Harriet.

“Always,” says Eunice.

“Walter did their gutters.”

“He did not.”

“He did the gutters, Harriet.”

“He did the downspout.”