Page 138 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Do you sleep in the ground?”

“No,” says Julian.

“A bed?”

“A very good one.”

“There,” says Harriet, turning around in triumph. “There. Eunice Ballard owes me five dollars and she has owed me since February.”

And she leaves.

That’s the sum total of the great questioning of Julian Volkov by the town of Black Harbor—one question, in a parking lot, about furniture, for five dollars.

He stands there holding a folding table.

“I had prepared for that,” he says.

“Had you?”

“I have been preparing for that since 1740.”

“How’d it go?”

“There were nine variants,” says Julian, “and none of them was about a wager.”

I laugh so hard I have to put the chafing dishes down on the hood of a car.

That’s the miracle of it, really. Some people know. Some people have known for years. Some people have probably suspected and politely decided not to finish the thought. Some people plainly know almost nothing, because Harriet has Wikipedia and five dollars riding on whether my boyfriend sleeps in dirt. And none of it matters as much as Julian thought it would. Black Harbor keeps asking him about socks.

Arthur Finch behaves, throughout, as though absolutely nothing whatsoever has occurred. He is not warmer. He does not refer to the pub, or the axe, or frightening a photographer from Ohio, or what he said on his way out of the Lantern about the beech. He complains about the parking. He brings the Historical Society a box of hymnals nobody asked for. He tells me on two separate occasions that he does not much care for Rowan Pierce, in the past tense, as though Rowan were a weather system that had gone through.

And then, at the beginning of April, he starts coming up the hill on Tuesdays.

He’s done the Blackthorn gardens since 1971 and for all those years he has done them alone and sent an invoice to a firm in Boston. In April he starts arriving at nine and knocking on the kitchen door.

“Volkov.”

“Mr. Finch,” Julian says politely.

“About that beech.”

“Yes?”

“Come out here.”

Then a ninety-year-old man and a four-hundred-year-old man stand on the south lawn in the rain and look up into a copper beech for forty-five minutes, twice, and then a third time with an arborist from Camden who is told nothing at all.

The verdict is that the tree has perhaps thirty years in it. Maybe forty. There is something wrong at the base that has been wrong for a long time and there is nothing to be done except keep it comfortable.

“My great-great-grandfather put it in,” says Arthur. “Eighteen sixteen.”

“Yes,” says Julian.

Arthur looks at him.

“You’d know.”

Not I know. Not you haven’t changed. Not a question about portraits or fathers or grandfathers or why one Volkov has the same hands as another. Just two words that leave the knowledge sitting exactly where Arthur has apparently preferred it to sit for however long he’s been thinking about it.