Page 73 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Ten names, eleven men. Someone didn’t rate.”

“That happens constantly,” says Mabel. “Whoever wrote it knew nine and guessed the tenth, and by the time anyone thought to ask, they were all dead. That’s most of local history, dear. It’s a list of the people someone could be bothered to name.”

I turn it back over.

The extra man is at the left end of the back row, and he isn’t quite standing with them. He’s a half step off. Everyone else has arranged themselves carefully for the length of the exposure and he simply hasn’t. He is the only man in the photograph properly in focus, and the only one not looking at the camera. He’s looking off to the right, patiently, as though he’s waiting for something.

Dark coat. High collar. Dark hair pushed back off a high forehead. His hands behind his back, and his weight absolutely dead center while the ten other men shift around him.

I know that jaw.

I’ve had my hands on that jaw. I know the curve of that mouth doing the thing it does right before it decides something is funny and refuses to say so. I have watched someone stand exactly like that at the end of my prep counter for weeks, and three nights ago I put both hands on his face and told him I wanted him.

It’s Julian.

Not a man who looks like Julian. Not a Julian-ish ancestor with a family resemblance and a fortunate arrangement of chromosomes. Him. In 1904.

Some part of me has known since October and he told me himself on Monday, so it isn’t the shock that gets me. What gets me is that he’s the extra one. Ten names, eleven men, and the one nobody bothered to write down is standing half a step off the end of the back row with his hands behind his back, looking at something that none of the others have noticed yet. He came. He stood on the steps for the length of the exposure with ten men who were going to be named. He was already standing at the edge of a group of people in this town.

“Find something?” Mabel asks.

“No,” I say too quickly. “The library opening.”

She looks over. And then she takes the photograph out of my hand. She does it with no drama at all, mid-motion, the way you take scissors off a child.

“Library set. Those all go in blue. There’ll be more. The Sturgises were library people. Her grandfather put up the money for the clock.”

“Mabel, look at the⁠—”

“Blue folder. Number seventy-one.”

Then the photograph is in the folder. The folder is in the box. There’s a lid on the box, and Mabel Libby’s hand is flat on top of it.

“Now,” she says, “are you going to help me with the hair, or are you going to make me do the hair alone?”

“You love the hair.”

“I do love the hair,” Mabel admits, and pours the tea.

I find the second photograph at about half past eleven, out of the fifth box, and I find it because Mabel has gone to answer the telephone.

I’m not proud of the timing.

It’s a stiff card, gone brown at the corners, with the studio’s name in gold along the bottom edge. Six men and two women stand in front of a brick building that is unmistakably the old reading room, because the reading room still has that window and the same idiotic little iron rail.

On the back, in ink, in a careful nineteenth-century hand:

Opening of the Reading Room, October 1892. J. A. Volkov, Esq. (center), the benefactor.

The benefactor is in the middle of the group with his hands behind his back. Julian.

I sit down.

Nineteen-oh-four was one thing. Nineteen-oh-four was a nameless man at the back of a crowd, and even Monday, some part of me could have made room for coincidence if I’d demanded it hard enough. This is a name.

Volkov.

His name, or one of them, written in ink in 1892 in a town of two thousand people who notice when someone paints a porch.