Page 136 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I decided to keep it here, but it’s not going anywhere else unless I say so.”

“I don’t want it to go anywhere else.”

I waited, but his hand stayed on the book.

“She should not exist only in my handwriting,” he said.

And that was how it started.

Not with one miraculous uninterrupted record of Black Harbor, because Julian wasn’t here for all of it and nobody remembers everything even when they live for centuries. It started with a small collection of things that survived because one man kept carrying them from house to house and name to name, and with the realization that keeping them safe does not necessarily mean keeping them to himself.

Mabel’s proposal is that the Historical Society will accept selected material from an anonymous private collection.

“Anonymous,” I repeat.

“Entirely.”

“And you’re not going to ask where it came from.”

“I know where it came from.”

“Mabel.”

“I have drawn a distinction between knowing and asking that has served me very well since 2002.”

She opens the folder. She has a system. Of course she has a system. The first material comes down the hill four folders at a time in a canvas bag, and the accession record says ANONYMOUS DONATION, PRIVATE COLLECTION. Some of it Mabel already has copies of. Some of it fills gaps. Some of it contradicts things she has believed for twenty-four years and makes her furious for an afternoon.

And then she starts wanting corrections.

There is a man on that hill who was standing on Water Street when some of the contents of her building happened, and Mabel Libby has decided that she is going to have some of it. She designs a mechanism that permits her to do this without either of them ever saying a true thing out loud. The mechanism is a list of questions.

She writes them out. I carry them up the hill in my van with the soup. Julian writes the answers in the margins in that long slanted hand and I carry them back down. Mabel reads them at her reading table with her glasses on and says things like, “Well. Well, that settles the Peavey business,” and files the sheet of paper in a folder marked CORRESPONDENCE—MISC.

“He’s never seen the exhibit,” I say.

“He is not required to.”

“Mabel, he told you what color the north shed was.”

“A gentleman corresponded with me about the north shed,” Mabel says primly, “and I have accepted his correction on the strength of his evident expertise. If anybody asks me who he is I shall say that I correspond with a great many people, which I do, including a man in Denmark about a hinge.”

“That’s not going to hold up.”

“It has held up since February,” says Mabel, “and I have every intention of dying with it intact.”

One Thursday she sends up a photocopy of the Historical Society’s account of the Great Fire of 1847.

The question in the margin says: Pruitt cooperage?

Julian looks at it for a long moment, then he writes:

Chandlery. The fire marshal was correct.

He stops. Then underneath that, in smaller writing, he adds:

Eli Mercer, nine years old, died behind the east row. He was the chandler’s boy. I helped carry water for six hours. If the Society has no record of him, it should.

My eyes sting, but I don’t say anything.