Chapter 20
After that night, Julian starts walking through my front door without stopping.
I realize it two days later, standing in my hallway with one boot off and my keys still in my hand. He comes in behind me in the middle of a sentence about Wendell Marr’s grandfather, hangs his coat on the hook that used to be my mother’s, and keeps talking as he heads for the kitchen.
He used to pause.
Not because he had to. I know that now. The invitation I gave him the night of the storm still holds and will until I take it back, which I have no intention of doing.
But every single time he came to my house, there used to be a tiny half-beat at the threshold.
Nothing anyone else would have noticed. Nothing I noticed until it stopped.
Some old careful part of him was checking. Making sure he was still wanted on this side of the door. Now he doesn’t. Now he’s certain.
“Penny,” he calls from the kitchen. “Your kettle has a fault.”
“My kettle is fine.”
“It boils, and then it thinks about it, and then it boils again.”
“That’s not a fault. That’s a personality.”
I come through with one boot on and stand in my kitchen doorway, looking at a vampire filling my teapot with his back to me.
There’s a book on the table that isn’t mine, a hardback about the Newfoundland cod fishery with his place held by a strip of till receipt.
It’s been here for four days. Yesterday I moved it four inches to get at something underneath and then put it back exactly where it had been, which is the sort of thing you do with a book that lives somewhere.
There’s also a hideous black toothbrush beside mine upstairs.
His name is on my chalkboard calendar under Thursday: J.
—dinner @ mine. There’s an apron of mine hanging in the Blackthorn kitchen and a hairbrush in the bathroom off the north bedroom that I did not buy, which means Julian did, although he has refused to discuss the matter.
This is what December looks like now.
Some nights he comes to Salt & Sage and sits at the end of my prep counter with his book while I work. He has learned where the sheet trays go and will carry anything I point at, although he refuses absolutely to touch my knives.
“They are yours and they are sharp and I am strong,” he told me when I finally asked why, in the tone of a man reading a warning label.
I had to go into the walk-in for a minute.
He volunteers things now, too. Small things, usually, slipped into other conversations as though they cost him nothing.
The name of a ship that used to moor where the ferry does now.
The fact that he once tried to make his own ink and ruined a carpet he apparently still remembers with irritation.
His opinion that the dock repair Theo made without him will not survive spring.
Feeding has settled into our life the same way everything else has.
It isn’t a summit meeting anymore. Sometimes it happens because his mouth is already at my throat and we both want it, and afterwards the gold still hums through me while I fall asleep with his cool arm heavy across my waist. In the morning there is sometimes a mark I hide under a scarf.
Mabel notices anyway and says nothing, which for Mabel Libby is an act of heroic restraint.
It’s easy. Settled. Ordinary in the best possible way.
And Julian has stopped pausing at my door. I open my mouth to tell him I’ve noticed. Then I don’t. Because I have learned some things about this man, and one of those is that the surest way to make him self-conscious about doing something is to announce that I have caught him doing it.
He looks over and sees me watching him. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say. “There’s shortbread.”
Damn it.
I’m going to have to marry him.
Lucy blows into Salt & Sage three days later on a gust of cold air with her camera bag over one shoulder and her phone already held out in front of her.
“Okay,” she says. “Don’t panic, but Black Harbor is about to be famous.”
I look up from a bowl of cranberry-orange filling. “Define famous. Famous like the time the paper ran that photograph of Theo holding a lobster the size of a toddler, or—”
“The Veil is coming here.”
She slaps her phone down on the counter and spins it towards me.
I know a lot more about The Veil than I ever wanted to because Lucy has been listening to it while she works ever since the harvest supper, and she has insisted on sharing.
She usually listens to it in the darkroom, which I have told her is how people end up convinced they heard breathing behind them.
The Veil is all about hauntings and cryptids and is your neighbor secretly a selkie.
It’s the kind of show that treats the supernatural world like one enormous mystery even though such creatures exist and everybody knows such creatures exist, even if they choose to ignore them.
“They’re doing a whole season,” Lucy says. “Six episodes. On Black Harbor.”
I scroll through the announcement. Fog. Lighthouse. The Cordelia. A ghost ship. A sea witch. Some sort of curse involving a bell that I’ve never heard of and Mabel is going to have opinions about.
Honestly, my first reaction is delight.
“Oh, this could be fun.”
Lucy stares at me.
“What? It could. Tourists. I could do a haunted harbor menu. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use squid ink.”
“Penny. Two million people listen to this show every week.”
“Two million people could eat squid ink.”
By seven that night, apparently every person in Black Harbor has heard.
The Widow’s Lantern is packed. Nobody in Black Harbor listens to podcasts.
Everybody in Black Harbor now has an opinion about podcasts.
Theo has printed the announcement at the library and brought it to work with him, which is how I know he is more interested than he is pretending to be.
“It’s ridiculous,” he says, sliding a bowl of chowder in front of me that I did not order and will not be allowed to pay for.
“You printed it out.”
He shrugs. “It’s ridiculous and I printed it out. Both things can be true.”
At the far end of the bar, Doris and Hollis Baker are already arguing over which of them has the better story about the storm of '78. Wendell wants to know whether the podcast people will need a boat. Someone near the window says tourism in the reverent voice you’d use for a saint.
Then Mabel arrives. She is wearing a small enamel raven on her coat and carrying a folder approximately thick enough to stun a burglar.
“I have prepared corrections.”
“Of course you have.”
“It is indexed, Penelope.”
“What are you correcting? They haven’t said anything yet.”
“They will get the Cordelia wrong. They always get the Cordelia wrong. They’ll say eleven hands when it was nine and they’ll say the lantern was lit for a brother when it was a husband, and I have been correcting that since the Nixon administration.”
Harriet Coyne leans across the nearest table towards me. “Will they interview people?”
“No one knows, Harriet.”
“Because I should have notice if that’s what they intend.”
I give her a confused look. “Of what?”
“The interview.”
“You just asked whether there was an interview.”
“I should have notice either way.”
Theo looks at me. “Two million people are going to listen to this.”
“To Harriet and Wendell? They’d be lucky.”
“They’d be bored, is what they’d be, and then they’d go home.”
I laugh and eat my chowder.
Because there is nothing to find. That’s what I think that night, sitting in a warm loud room full of people I have known my whole life.
Supernatural creatures are not a secret.
If somebody with a microphone eventually works out that the man on the hill doesn’t eat anything, the worst thing that happens is that a certain kind of tourist drives up Point Road to stare at his gate until Arthur Finch yells at them about parking.
Arthur is sitting at the end of the bar with a beer he has been nursing since five.
“I don’t like it,” he says.
The room doesn’t hear him. Arthur speaks at the volume of a man addressing a dog.
I lean towards him. “Why not?”
“They’ll want the house.”
“Why would they want the house?”
“Because it’s the one place in this town nobody’s ever been inside.”
“I’ve been inside.”
Arthur looks at me for rather a long time.
“I know,” he says.
Then he puts on his coat and goes home. I think about that for maybe four seconds before Bess arrives with an opinion about where a podcast van will park, and then Harriet has another question about interviews, and I go back to my chowder.
It’s another three days before I look at the actual website. I’m in bed, it’s six thirty in the morning, and Julian has already gone up the hill. I have a hundred and forty covers on the twenty-eighth and I’m the kind of person who checks her phone before she puts one foot on the floor.
The site is not what I expect. No dripping letters. No cartoon ghosts. It’s calm and grey and beautifully made, with more than two hundred episodes, a research section, source lists, transcripts, and listener submissions. It looks like something a museum would make if a museum had money.
Season Nine. A Harbor Full of Ghosts. Host: Rowan Pierce. And across the top is a photograph of Blackthorn House from the water. I sit up.
The photograph was taken at dusk from somewhere near the Sisters, and Blackthorn House rises out of the bluff with the last light behind it. Not one lamp shows in the windows. It looks exactly the way that house looked to me my entire life before October.
Then I scroll down.
THE OWNERS OF BLACKTHORN HOUSE
There are four images.
The first is the painting from the Maritime Museum. Gentleman with a Chart, c. 1816. Julian.
The second is an engraving from an 1851 shipping registry. Mr. E. Voss, financier of the Black Harbor marine railway. Julian.
The third is a newspaper photograph from Bangor in 1938. Mr. J. Thorne at the customs house handover. Julian.