Chapter 7
“There’s a betting pool,” I say, walking into the Lantern, “on the sidewalk.”
“There’s a betting pool in the ledger.” Theo doesn’t look up from the glass he’s polishing, which is already clean, and which is what Theo does instead of hiding. “The sidewalk’s just marketing.”
“You’re taking money.”
“I’m holding money. There’s a big difference legally.”
I put the tray of hand pies down harder than the hand pies deserve. Outside, there’s a chalkboard that usually tells you the day’s specials. Today the soup is nowhere in evidence. Today the board says, in Theo’s enormous fisherman’s capitals:
HARRINGTON & VOLKOV—WHEN DO THEY ADMIT IT?
BY THE HARVEST SUPPER, THREE TO ONE.
BY THANKSGIVING, EVEN.
BY CHRISTMAS, FIVE TO TWO.
NEVER, TWELVE TO ONE.
I read all four lines three times on the wet sidewalk, in case one of them changed. Twelve to one. Someone in this town has looked at my entire life and priced it as a long shot.
“You’re taking bets.” My voice comes out very flat. “On me.”
“On both of you. It’s not personal. Well.” He considers. “It’s a little personal.”
“We’re just friends, Theo.”
“Sure.”
“We are. He came to a dinner. He came to your chowder night. That’s two events. Mabel’s been to nine hundred of my events and no one’s running a book on—”
Theo sets the glass down. He’s a big man, and when he leans on the bar the whole bar leans with him, and he looks at me with the terrible kindness of someone who has known me a long time.
“Mabel didn’t spend five hours at your dinner and stay afterwards to wash your grandmother’s glasses.”
“He was being polite.”
“He was being something.” Theo says it gently, and gentle from Theo is worse than teasing, because Theo doesn’t do it to be funny.
Behind me someone laughs, and it is unmistakably Lucy, who came in for the free hand pies she was promised and stayed for the humiliation she was not.
“Don’t,” I tell her.
“I put ten on Thanksgiving.”
“Lucy.”
“It’s even money, Pen. That’s practically a savings account.”
Theo picks up another glass.
“We’re just friends,” I tell Lucy, because Theo is clearly beyond reason.
“We’re friends in a very specific way, where one of us talks too much and the other one listens like it’s a job he trained for.
I know almost nothing about him. I went to his house one time a week ago.
He reads shipping journals for fun, and he’s kind to people who’ve done nothing to earn it.
I don’t know where he was born, what he does all day, or why a man who doesn’t eat comes to every single thing that involves eating. ”
“That’s not a romance,” Lucy agrees. “That’s an unsolved puzzle with excellent posture.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not agreeing with you.”
“Take the hand pies and go.”
Lucy takes two, because betrayal makes her hungry. Theo at least waits until she’s out the door before he keeps going.
“He was in here Tuesday.”
“So?”
“Sat right there.” He points at the stool at the end.
My stool. The one I always take. “Nursed a glass of red he didn’t drink for two hours.
Chatted to Wendell about fishing. And then, around nine, he asks me as casually as if he’s asking about the weather whether you’re doing the harvest supper at the grange this weekend. ”
My stomach does something unhelpful. “He asked about the grange?”
“He asked if you’d be there.” Theo picks the glass back up.
“I said far as I knew. He says, ‘Good,’ and pays for a wine he never touched, and goes home.” He shrugs his enormous shoulders.
“A man doesn’t sit two hours on a bar stool to ask about a woman’s weekend plans because he wants tips on chowder, Penny.
I’ve been tending this bar for twenty years. I know why he was sitting there.”
“He’s new in town,” I say weakly. “He’s making friends. I’m his… entry point. His liaison. To local society.”
“Sure.” Theo uncaps his pen and adds a line to his ledger. I watch him write it upside down. TWELVE DAYS — DENIAL PHASE ONGOING.
“You are a terrible person.”
“You want the crab or not?”
I want the crab.
By Saturday evening, I’ve built my defense to a fine point. I’ve said it so many times it’s practically a jingle. We’re just friends. He’s new. I’m friendly. That’s all.
The grange smells like cider and hot rolls and twenty different casseroles.
Strings of little lights cross the rafters, the old radiators are clanking like they’re trying to escape the walls, and the folding tables are packed close enough that getting from one side of the room to the other requires either patience or a willingness to climb over Wendell Marr.
I have neither, so I stay where I am.
I’m at the long table across from Lucy, with a plate of Loretta’s ham and a cup of Wendell’s alarming punch.
Mabel is three seats down in a lighthouse brooch, arguing with the mayor about the church roof fund.
Eunice Ballard has brought her own folding chair because the grange chairs are, in her words, an insult.
Harriet Coyne is telling someone about her hip.
Everything is exactly as it has been at every harvest supper since I was old enough to carry a plate.
Lucy leans across the table and points her fork at me.
“Do you want to hear something interesting?”
Given Lucy’s idea of interesting, it’s a dangerous question.
“No,” I say, but of course she continues anyway.
“I heard this podcast about a lighthouse in Nova Scotia, and four keepers who went missing between 1927 and 1930. I listened to the whole thing in the darkroom on Tuesday and slept with the hall light on.”
“You’re thirty-two, Lucy.”
“And the man has a voice like a warm bath. It was still spooky as hell.” She stabs a piece of Loretta’s ham. “It’s called The Veil. He goes to all these different places and investigates weird things.”
“Mm.”
“He went to a place in Vermont last season and found out all about—”
I sigh. “Lucy. It’s the harvest supper. Halloween is over.”
“I’m just trying to educate you.”
“You’re trying to freak me out.”
She rolls her eyes at me.
“I just wish Black Harbor had something mysterious to investigate.”
“The most mysterious thing to happen in the last twenty years was the Aldens’ garage.”
She immediately assumes an expression of complete innocence. “That was arson.”
“That was a space heater. Doris has never forgiven you.”
Somebody down the table starts in about the church roof, and we both concentrate on the ham. Everything is fine.
Then the room does that small hitch. It’s not quite silence. Black Harbor is incapable of actual silence in a public building. It’s more like a ripple, a collective half-turn towards the door, half the conversations in the room missing the same beat.
I know before I look. My whole body knows before I look, which is something I choose to ignore.
Julian is standing in the doorway in a dark grey coat, and he’s scanning the room. I understand with shocking clarity that he isn’t scanning it the way a stranger checks an unfamiliar space. He’s looking for something specific.
Then he finds me, and something eases around his eyes, and some tension I hadn’t noticed he was carrying goes out of his shoulders. It’s not a big thing. Julian doesn’t do big things. He immediately starts towards me.
When he came to my dinner party, I thought the most unsettling thing about Julian Volkov was that he didn’t eat. I was wrong. The most unsettling thing about Julian Volkov is watching six feet four inches of broad-shouldered, dark-coated man cross a crowded room while looking directly at you.
My face gets hot. Something warm and heavy turns over low in my stomach, and I want, with my whole ridiculous body, to be closer to him than I am.
Peg Halloran slides down the bench before he gets there. She doesn’t say anything. She just picks up her plate and moves two feet to the left, like the whole town has been holding that space open for weeks and she’s tired of waiting for him to take it.
“Penny,” Julian says.
“You came to the harvest supper.”
“I was told you’d be here.” He says it perfectly plainly. He doesn’t dress it up. He takes off his coat, folds it over one arm, and looks at me. “I hoped you’d be here.”
Across the room, Theo catches my eye. Very slowly, with great ceremony, he lifts one hand and taps an imaginary piece of chalk against an imaginary board. I consider throwing a roll at him.
Julian sits beside me. And stays there.
I keep track of it at first, the way you’d keep track of an alibi.
He could get up. There are fifty people in this room and at least twenty of them would happily claim an hour of him.
Mabel has been trying to get him to attend Historical Society meetings since June.
Wendell wants to talk boats. Harriet wants to know whether he has any brothers.
The mayor wants money for the roof. There is an entire room full of Black Harbor in front of him.
Instead, Julian turns his shoulders towards me. He asks about the anniversary lunch and remembers that Fern wanted whipped cream on the parsnips, because I mentioned it once, days ago, and he tucked it away the way he tucks everything away.
“She surrendered,” I tell him. “There will be no whipped cream.”
“A victory for root vegetables everywhere.”
“June Purley is furious.”
“I don’t know June Purley.”
“Jarred garlic.”
His expression goes grave. “I understand.”
Eunice Ballard catches his attention sometime during the ham. This isn’t difficult. Eunice has moved her folding chair closer to our end of the table and is talking about her back surgery to anyone within range.
“I had Walter then,” she says. “He drove me to Portland every week for six weeks. He was a terrible driver, but a good man.”
“What did he drive?” Julian asks. The question is so unexpected that Eunice freezes.
“A green Buick,” she says, and something happens to her face. “A green Buick,” she repeats. “Ugliest car you ever saw. He loved that thing.”
“Then he had taste as well.”
Eunice laughs once, and then she has to look down at her plate.
I’ve heard people talk to Eunice about Walter for years. They tell her he was a lovely man. They tell her how much everyone misses him. They say all the kind things people say about the dead, and they mean every one of them. No one asks what he drove.
Lovely man is a thing you say. A green Buick is a memory.
Julian went straight past the sympathy and into the driveway and gave her six weeks back for the cost of one question.
I look at him. He feels it, and his eyes come back to mine.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
That isn’t true, but I’m getting better at letting things be.
The mayor tries to draw him into a discussion of the church roof. Wendell asks him something about wooden hulls. Mabel waves a fork at him from three seats away and says she has questions about the Historical Society archives.
Julian answers everyone, and then he turns back to me. Every time. That’s the part I can’t explain away.
He’s good with people. Better than good. He gives whoever is speaking the sense that for the next thirty seconds there is nowhere else in the world he needs to be. But with me, the thirty seconds don’t end.
He doesn’t eat. Of course he doesn’t eat. Peg loaded a plate for him before I could stop her, and it sits there while the evening goes on around us.
For the first time, I don’t care. I don’t mean I don’t notice. I notice everything about this man. I notice the untouched food and the glass he never lifts. I notice the coolness coming off him along my whole left side. I notice the line of his wrist where his sleeve pulls back.
I just don’t need to solve it tonight. Because he doesn’t eat, and he’s still here.
He’s sitting on a hard wooden bench at the loudest, most casserole-scented table in Maine, listening to me explain why Fern Tibbetts cannot be trusted with a piping bag. His whole attention is focused on me as if I’m the only lit thing in the room.
Somewhere between the ham and the pie, I stop keeping track of the alibi.
I just stop. I let the room get loud around us.
I let Mabel argue about the roof fund and Wendell tell a story everyone at this table has heard twice.
I let Julian’s low, careful voice wash over me while he asks a follow-up question about a catering job nobody else would remember I mentioned.
I look at his mouth when he talks. I look at the corner of it that moves when he’s amused. I look at his hands six inches away from me. I am having a serious problem with his hands.
I finally realize Lucy has been watching me from across the table for an unknown amount of time. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to.
Oh, no.
Because I’ve been telling everyone we’re just friends. I’ve told Lucy and Theo and Mabel and half this town, over and over, with total conviction. And I can’t say it anymore. Not the just part.
Julian stays through coffee. He stays through pie. He stays while half the room leaves and the other half begins stacking chairs. Eventually I look at the untouched plate in front of him.
“You didn’t eat anything.”
“No.”
“You’ve been here three hours.”
“Have I?”
“On a hard bench.”
“It is not the worst bench I have encountered.”
“You listened to Mabel talk about roof flashing for eleven minutes.”
“She feels strongly about it.”
“Wendell told you the lobster-pot story.”
“Twice.”
“You didn’t even get pie.”
His eyes meet mine.
“I got the evening,” he says simply, like it’s obvious, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
Across the room, Theo is helping fold tables, and I think about his chalkboard. Twelve to one on never. I would take the other side at any price. With money I don’t have.
Julian shifts beside me, and his knee comes to rest against mine.
Neither of us moves.