Page 72 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I would also like it recorded that I have been no use to anyone before ten in the morning since Monday.

Monday night I spent in a very good bed at the north end of the second floor of Blackthorn House. Tuesday night Julian spent in mine, where we established that my grandmother did not purchase a mattress in 1987 with a six-foot-four vampire in mind. Last night we didn’t make it past my kitchen for reasons that began with him offering to help put away groceries and deteriorated from there.

This is apparently my life now.

Twice this morning I have picked up a piece of another woman’s mourning jewelry and gone somewhere else entirely—to a cool hand flat between my shoulder blades or a mouth on the inside of my elbow. My breath goes shallow and my pulse races in a church annex, over hair, at a quarter to ten. I have no composure left at all. I want that man with a thoroughness that would humiliate me in front of witnesses.

There are no witnesses. Mabel is looking for a pencil. I take the four seconds.

We do the letters first. Eleanor Sturgis wrote to a woman called Bea for fifty-one years, and Bea wrote back, and by ten thirty I know that Bea’s husband was a disappointment and the Sturgis boys were considerably worse.

“Fifty-one years, Mabel.”

“Mm.”

“Who does that? Every few weeks, for fifty-one years, and half of them are about a cardigan.”

“That’s what it is, dear,” says Mabel. “No one keeps a friendship going on the big things. There aren’t enough of them.”

I have to go and look out at the church parking lot for a moment after that, holding a letter about a cardigan, with my chest doing something warm and ridiculous about Lucy Carver, who has been my friend since we were twelve and who has never once written me a letter in her life.

“What happened at the church supper?”

“We may never know,” Mabel says, with enormous satisfaction.

“You know.”

“I know a version.”

“Tell me the version.”

“Not before eleven. It involves a Ballard.”

“Mabel.”

“In 1968 there was a supper at the Congregational church to raise money for the organ, and Eleanor Sturgis made two hundred rolls,” she says, taking her glasses off, which means we are going to be here a while. “It was a hundred and eighty too many. She knew it, but she did it anyway to make a point about a woman who is still alive and whose name I will not say in a public building. There was an incident with a raffle drum.”

“What kind of incident?”

“The kind that involves a Ballard,” says Mabel serenely. “There’s a better version and you’ll get it when I’m dead. I’ve written it down so you can’t be fobbed off.”

Then we get to the photographs.

There are four hundred of them and roughly ninety have anything at all written on the back. Most are family—a wedding in a garden, a baby of enormous seriousness, and twenty-seven separate pictures of the same lilac bush across what I estimate to be thirty years, which is either dementia or devotion. I choose devotion, and I put every one of them in the same folder so they stay together.

Then the town ones start. That’s the thing about old families here. In every generation someone ends up on a committee, gets photographed on the steps of something, and eventually dies, and then the photograph goes into an attic.

The library one is near the bottom of the third box.

It’s a good print, better than most, and someone kept it perfectly flat between two pieces of cardboard for more than a hundred years, which is a small kindness done by a person no one will ever identify. Eleven men stand on the granite steps of the Black Harbor Free Library in frock coats and watch chains, arranged in that formal way where no one is quite looking at the same thing.

On the back, in pencil: Dedication, Free Library, 1904. Underneath it, a list of ten names, left to right.

I count the names. Then I count the men.

“There’s an extra one.”

“Mm.”