Page 17 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“There he is!” Theo abandons his sacred pot—the one night a year Bess lets him near a stove—wipes an enormous hand on his flannel, and crosses the floor to grip Julian’s hand like they went to school together. “Volkov! You made it. Glad you did. Come in, come in, sit yourself down. We’re about to descend into anarchy.”

“Theo.” Julian shakes the offered hand. “Thank you for having me.”

“Course, course. Any friend of Pen’s.” Theo claps him on the shoulder, which would stagger most men, and Julian doesn’t move an inch. “You a chowder man? No, don’t answer that. Nobody’s a chowder man until they’ve been to one of these and lived. Sit. You want a—” Theo catches himself. “Right. Nothing. Water?”

“Water would be perfect.”

“Did you decide on the boat?” Julian asks, sitting where Theo’s steered him, at the long table by the fire.

Theo blinks. “You remember what I said about the boat?”

“At Penny’s dinner you mentioned you’d been thinking of selling the Marguerite. You did not sound entirely certain.”

“Yeah.” Theo scratches his beard. “No. I didn’t sell her. Couldn’t do it. Sit with the idea long enough, you realize some things you keep even when they don’t make sense on paper.”

“Yes,” Julian says quietly, and for a second something passes over his face that I don’t understand and want to. “You do.”

He takes off his coat. His sleeves are already pushed up, and I’d like to state for the record that this is a deliberate act of aggression. My whole body goes stupid. I’d love to dress it up, but I have nothing to dress it up with. I am holding a ladle with my face on fire and my mouth slightly open when Lucy raises the camera and takes a photograph of me doing it.

“Delete that.”

“I’m not deleting it,” she says. “I’m having it framed.”

I’d braced myself for the whole night to be a rescue operation. At my dinner, Julian was a guest, and a guest is a project. Everyone at that table was quietly working on him and he was quietly working back. In here he’s just in the room.

Wendell and Hollis have been arguing about bacon since 1991 and they simply widen the argument to include him, the way you’d shift over on a bench. They adopt him inside four minutes. He turns out to have views. His view is that bacon in a chowder is a Portland habit, which is the most inflammatory thing anyone has said in this building this year, and Hollis nearly comes over the table.

“A Portland habit!”

“I stand by it,” Julian says calmly.

“My mother put bacon in a chowder and she wasn’t from Portland.”

“Then your mother,” Julian says, “was ahead of her time, and I am behind mine, and we would both have enjoyed the argument.”

Hollis laughs so hard he has to sit down. I go and get more bread, mostly so I have somewhere to put my hands.

The Cordelia comes up, because the Cordelia always comes up.

She’s why this pub is called what it’s called, and every child in Black Harbor learns it by age six. The schooner Cordelia went down off Gull Ledge in a November gale in 1817, with all hands, and Abigail Rood put a lantern in that window every night for the rest of her life. On a foggy night, if you’re a certain kind of person, you can still see it out past the point.

There’s a painting of her over the bar. It is not a good painting. No one minds.

Hollis tells it every year and he does the voices badly. Forty-one people go quiet the way they always do.

“It was not Gull Ledge,” Julian says into the silence, and everyone turns to him.

“Come again?”

“It was the Sisters. Three miles farther south.” He sets the water down on the table, untouched. “Gull Ledge would have put her in plain sight of this window, and no one on shore saw anything that night, which is the part of the story that has never made sense. And it was not all hands. Four men came off her. Two died on the rocks. The third walked into Wiscasset ten days later. The fourth was picked up by a Halifax vessel.”

Not one person says a word.

“And,” Julian says, “Abigail Rood was not a widow.”

I’m watching his mouth while he says it, which is not the correct place to be looking during the town tragedy, and I know that, and I go on doing it.

Wendell Marr sits up so fast his chair barks on the floor.