Page 4 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Okay,” she says slowly, handing it back. “So he’s coming.”

“He’s coming.”

“What does I do not dine mean?”

I look at the letter again. At that sloping, absurd, hundred-year-old handwriting and that last line. It’s either the saddest thing I’ve read all year—or a very elegant, very polite way of telling me to lower my expectations.

“I have no idea,” I say.

CHAPTER 2

“He’s not coming,” Lucy says. “The letter was a very fancy way of saying no.”

“The letter was a very fancy way of saying yes. ‘I accept with pleasure.’ Those are the words. In ink. I have it framed.”

“You do not.”

“I have it in a drawer in a protective sleeve. That’s basically framed.”

“People write letters. People also stay home.” She’s crouched by the table with her camera, getting the candlelight on the goblets. “I’m managing your expectations, Pen. It’s what I’m for.”

“You’re for carrying things.”

“I contain multitudes.”

It’s quarter to seven and the Salt & Sage smells like duck fat and black garlic and the particular scorched-sugar smell of blood-orange tarts going right, finally, on the fourth tray. The crimson linen is down. The candles are lit, all forty of them, and the room has gone the color of the inside of a plum.

I have looked at the door eleven times.

“Twelve,” Lucy says, without turning around.

“I hate you.”

“You love me. Look at that door one more time before the guests come and I’m putting it on the internet.”

The Coynes arrive first, because the Coynes always arrive first. Harriet comes in ahead of her sister-in-law with her coat already half off and Dot trotting along in her wake. Harriet’s eyes go straight to the tables.

“Oh, Penny.” She stops dead. “Oh, it’s dreadful. It’s perfect. It looks like a funeral home with money.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week.”

“How’s your hip?”

“I’m thirty-two, Harriet.”

“That’s what I said about mine.” She pats my arm on the way past and takes the seat she takes every year, three down on the left, near the fire and a long way from the mayor.

After that they come in a rush, the way they always do. Theo Goodwin with two bottles under his arm and salt still in his beard from the dock. The Ellises, bickering pleasantly about a parking space they have been bickering about since 2019. Doris Alden and her daughter and, asleep over her daughter’s shoulder, her grandson. Tommy’s nephew is four years old and he was absolutely not invited and I am absolutely delighted to see him.

And Mabel Libby, wearing a brooch shaped like a beetle. Mabel is seventy-five. She ran the library for thirty-one years before the historical society got its hands on her, and she knows more about the people in this town than is strictly legal.

She takes both my hands in the doorway and looks past me at the room.

“You’ve outdone yourself, dear. Now.” Her voice drops about an inch. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“Doris told me at the market. You put an invitation through the gate at Blackthorn House.”