Page 124 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

And they are off again, for another twenty-five minutes, on the difference between a gutter and a downspout, and whether Walter Ballard was ever formally engaged to do either, and the two of them are so completely delighted with each other and with themselves that there is no conceivable way to accuse either of them of a single thing.

Ben Carter comes into the shop afterwards and buys four cookies and looks like a man who has seen the ocean.

Arthur Finch is not subtle about any of it. Arthur is openly, magnificently hostile, and he is hostile in the exact register of a man of ninety who has decided that a stranger is being rude. He will not have the camera on the grounds. He tells Rowan so at the bar, at volume, twice. When Rowan says—again, reasonably—that he only wants to ask about the gardens, Arthur says that the gardens are none of his business. When Rowan says he understands, Arthur says that he plainly does not, and goes and sits somewhere else.

Then, on the fourteenth, he comes into the Salt & Sage, which he has done perhaps four times in nine years. He stands in the middle of my floor with his hat in his hands.

“Arthur?”

“He going?”

I put down what I’m holding.

“I don’t know.”

“Hm,” says Arthur Finch.

He looks at the counter for a while.

“My father did those gardens from ‘38,” he says. “I did ‘em from ‘71. That’s almost ninety years between us and there’s a copper beech in the south lawn that my great-great-grandfather put in. I’ve had two arborists up there in my life and neither of ‘em believed how old it is.” He turns his hat over. “You never got told and you never asked. That’s manners. I’ve said that to you before.”

“You have.”

“It’s not manners if he’s going because some fella wants a story.”

Then he puts his hat on and leaves, and I have to go and stand in the walk-in for a minute.

And on the fifteenth of January, at about nine at night, Rowan Pierce makes his mistake.

I’m at the Lantern. It’s a Friday and it’s full and Lucy is there and so is Ben, who has now been in Black Harbor for two weeks and is on his fourth conversation with Lucy about apertures. Rowan’s at the end of the bar where he always is and Doris has beaten him at cribbage again. It’s all very warm and ordinary, and then Hollis Baker asks him how it’s going.

And Rowan, who has had two drinks and is honest to a fault and is frustrated, says it.

“Honestly? Not great.” He turns his glass around. “I’ll be straight with you, because you’ve all been decent to me. I think there’s something up on that hill that everybody in this room has decided not to say out loud. And I understand why. I do. But I’ve got to say—I think the people of this town deserve to know who they’ve actually got living up there.”

The room doesn’t go silent. That’s the part I didn’t expect and will never forget. There is no hush. Nobody puts a glass down. Wendell Marr doesn’t even look up, because Wendell is talking to Peg about a dog.

Bess says, “Anybody else want the chowder before I take it off?”

Three people want the chowder.

And Theo Goodwin, who has been drying the same glass for some time, puts it down on the bar and says, in an ordinary voice, from about four feet away, “We know who we’ve got.”

Rowan looks up.

“He’s Julian,” Theo says. “He came down here after a storm in November and stood in the water and put lag bolts in my dock and wouldn’t take a beer, which I’ve stopped offering. He carries Eunice’s chair. He fixed Gil’s gate and told him it was already like that.” Theo picks the glass back up. “Whatever else he is, that’s his business. What I know is he shows up. And I’d say the same about you if somebody came in here asking, and they haven’t, and I’d like to think that’s the difference.”

“Theo—”

“You’ve been good in here,” says Theo. “I mean that. You buy your rounds and you let Doris win and you listen to Wendell, which not everybody does.” He shrugs. “But you asked, so I’m telling you. There’s nothing wrong up that hill. There’s a fella who doesn’t come out much and never has and pays for the roads, and we’ve got about nine of those, and one of ‘em’s Deirdre.”

“I heard that,” says Deirdre Fanning.

“You were meant to.”

Somebody laughs. Somebody else asks about the chowder again. Bess says something extremely rude about the parking lot.

And the whole thing is over in about ninety seconds, and the pub goes on being a pub. Rowan Pierce sits at the end of the bar with a look on his face I have not seen on a person before. He looks like a man discovering that he has walked into a room where the argument he came for finished a long time ago without him.