Page 71 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Mabel. This box is full of hair,” I complain.

“Mourning jewelry. Don’t be squeamish, dear, it’s only people.”

“It’s a braid.”

“It is a very well-made braid,” says Mabel, without looking up. “You’d have been glad of that woman at a wedding.”

I put the lid back on. Slowly. Respectfully.

There are eleven banker’s boxes on the reading table of the Black Harbor Historical Society, it’s twenty past nine on a Thursday morning, and against my own expectations I am extremely happy.

Mabel got me at the fish counter yesterday, which is where she gets everyone, because you cannot run from a woman at a fish counter. There’s a queue behind you and a man holding a haddock in front of you.

“Two mornings,” she said, over the haddock. “Three at the outside. You have excellent handwriting and a genuine interest in other people’s business, which is exactly what I need.”

“That’s an insult.”

“It’s a job description, dear. Half of them are.”

I agreed before I’d worked out that she had complimented and insulted me in a single sentence. I’ve thought about it a good deal since and still can’t take it apart.

Eleanor Sturgis died in September at ninety-six. Her family emptied the house on Vine Street and, instead of putting the attic in a dumpster, which is what any sensible family does with an attic, they put it in a truck and drove it four blocks to the Historical Society. Photographs and ledgers, dance cards, three hundred letters, a christening gown, and the hair.

The system is Mabel’s and it is not negotiable. Blue folders for photographs, buff for correspondence, green for anything with a verifiable date, and a shoebox marked MYSTERY, in actual capitals, which she treats with visible affection. Everything gets a pencil number. Everything goes into a ledger in her own hand, because she does not trust a laptop and will not be argued with.

“Orrin Tibbetts donated his father’s entire correspondence in 2011,” she says, filling in a number. “Nine days later he came back and asked for the interesting half of it.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That it had been accessioned.”

“Had it been accessioned?”

“It had been in a carrier bag under that table for nine days,” says Mabel, “but he doesn’t know what accessioned means, and neither did his father.”

I told Lucy on Tuesday afternoon, standing in my kitchen, with the kettle clicking off behind me and neither of us doing a thing about it. I asked Julian first, and he said yes before I’d finished the question, which is a reaction I intend to think about for some time.

Lucy was quiet for about nine seconds, which she manages roughly four times a year, and I held my breath through every one of them.

“Honestly?” she said. “I thought you were going to tell me he was married. I had a whole thing prepared.”

“Lucy.”

“I was going to be lovely to you tonight and extremely cruel about him in about a week.” She picked up her mug and put it down again without drinking any of it. “Does he know I take pictures of him at things?”

“He knows you’ve tried.”

“I’ve tried a lot.”

“Have you looked at them?”

There was a pause you could have parked a van in.

“He turns his head,” she said slowly. “Every single time. I have hundreds of event shots where that man is either looking away, behind someone taller, or suddenly very interested in a wall. I thought I was losing my touch.”

“It has never once been you.”

She went home eventually and hugged me at the door for about four seconds longer than she usually does.