Chapter 15
“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.
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.”
“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.”