Page 78 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Okay?”

“Then don’t put it in order. Give me the basket.”

“The basket?”

“That’s my job. People hand me forty things in a basket and no plan and tell me eighty-four people are coming at six. I sort it out.” I hold out both hands. “Give me the basket.”

For about eleven seconds, Julian Volkov stands in his front hall and looks at me.

Then he says, “Very well.”

He turns towards the library, and I follow him. There is a door in the library wall. It is papered exactly like the wall, the seam hidden beside a built-in bookcase, and I have walked past it at least four times without registering that it exists. Julian puts two fingers against the edge and presses. The door opens inward.

“Of course you have a secret room.”

“It’s hardly secret.”

“I have been in this room repeatedly without knowing about it.”

“You didn’t ask about it.”

I point at him.

“This is exactly what we’re working on.”

His mouth moves. I think I almost get a smile.

The room beyond is narrow and windowless, no more than six feet deep, with shelving from floor to ceiling and a single lamp. And it is full of books.

No, that’s the wrong word. It’s full of journals. Hundreds of them. Vellum, leather, cloth, marbled board, black notebooks, a run of ordinary spiral-bound notebooks that look exactly like something I could buy at the drugstore on Water Street. They are shelved in perfect order, of course, and not one of them has a title on the spine.

“Julian.”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“I stopped counting at some point in the eighteen-forties.”

“You stopped counting them in the eighteen-forties.”

“It seemed vain to continue.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. Then I go closer, but I don’t touch them. He notices that I don’t.

“Go ahead.”

I take down a battered brown volume, its leather soft under my fingers. When I open it, the handwriting hits me before the date does. I know that handwriting. I’ve seen it on cream card stock. I’ve held it in my own kitchen with flour on my hands and read it aloud to Lucy. The date at the top of the page is 1847.

“It’s all you.”

“Yes.”

“Every one of these.”

“Yes.”

I turn a page. Same handwriting. Same long slant. Same capital letters.