Chapter 20 #2
The fourth was taken this year. It’s a slightly soft long-lens photograph of Julian coming out of Harbor Books on a cloudy day with a paper bag in one hand. He’s wearing his good coat on a perfectly ordinary morning.
Underneath the four images is a single line.
Four owners. One face.
And below that:
The Volkov family have held Blackthorn House for more than two hundred years, and their remarkable resemblance across generations has been noted locally for just as long. We think it’s more interesting than that.
I put the phone face down on the quilt. Then I pick it up again, because of course I do.
I stare at the four images. I found three photographs of Julian in one afternoon at the Historical Society, most of which I spent sorting through a dead woman’s hair.
I wasn’t even looking for him when I found the first one. But these aren’t Mabel’s photographs.
One is in the museum. One came out of a shipping registry. One came from a newspaper archive in Bangor. And one was taken by somebody standing on Water Street this year. Four different sources. Four different places.
Once, you could not have put those four images on the same table without spending years trying. That was Julian’s whole method. He never hid. He hid in the gaps between other people’s paperwork, and there are no gaps anymore.
I get out of bed.
I show up in his kitchen at seven with my coat still on and hand him my phone.
He stands beneath the copper pans and looks at the screen for a very long time without saying a word.
His face does nothing. I have seen him surprised.
I have seen him grieving. I have seen him come apart completely on a boat in the dark. I have never seen this.
Then I understand. He isn’t reacting. He’s working. This is the face of a man reading a chart.
“Julian.”
“A moment.”
He scrolls back through the four images, studies the Voss engraving, then returns to the photograph of Blackthorn House.
“Say something.”
“The Voss engraving is in the Mystic register,” he says.
“I did not sit for it. The artist drew it from a wharf at some distance, and I allowed it because a drawing was not a likeness and there was no possibility of anyone ever placing it beside anything else.” He hands the phone back.
“That was a correct assessment for one hundred and seventy-five years.”
“They have a picture of you outside Harbor Books.”
“That’s the least important one.”
“It’s your face, Julian. As you are now.”
“It is a photograph of a man buying a book. It means nothing without the others.”
I look at the four faces again.
“How did they do this?”
His eyes come to mine.
“Think about how you did it. How long did it take you?”
The Historical Society. The photographs. One face, decade after decade, until there was no possible explanation except the impossible one.
“A few hours,” I say.
“You did it in one local archive, without intending to. They have digitized newspapers, property records, photographs from repositories all over New England, and an audience of—how many did you say?”
“Two million a week, Lucy says.”
Julian goes very still.
“A week.”
“Yes.”
He looks back at the phone.
“For two hundred and thirty years, my method worked because no one could put the pieces on the same table. A shipping registry in Connecticut. A newspaper in Bangor. Deeds in the county building. A portrait hanging forty yards from your kitchen. Every one of them public. Every one of them meaningless by itself.”
“But now somebody can find all four from a laptop and compare the faces.”
“Yes.”
The kitchen is very quiet.
“It used to cost years,” he says. “Travel. Letters. Permission. Enough effort that no one had any reason to spend it on the question of whether the owners of Blackthorn House resembled one another.”
He glances at the phone.
“Now it costs an evening.”
“And two million people can help.”
“That,” Julian says, “is the part I dislike most.”
I put the phone on the counter.
“So what do we do?”
He answers immediately.
“I close the house.”
I freeze.
“The collection can go to Boston. The journals go with me. Arthur remains on the grounds and continues to be paid through the fund. I stop appearing in town, but gradually. Immediately would attract attention. Over a month, perhaps.”
He isn’t improvising. That’s the worst part. The plan comes out smooth and complete, an old tool lifted from its place on the wall.
“And then?”
“By the time they arrive, Blackthorn House is closed and there is no current Volkov to interview. They have six episodes about a family resemblance and a locked gate. Eventually the audience gets bored.”
“And you?”
“Lisbon,” he says. “For a while. It’s a great deal better than it was.”
The sea moves below the kitchen windows.
I look at him. The book about the Newfoundland cod fishery has moved from my cottage to the end of my prep counter.
There’s an apron of mine hanging beside this kitchen door and a hairbrush upstairs that he bought because I kept leaving mine at home.
His name is written on my calendar twice before Christmas.
And a week ago, Julian Volkov walked into my grandmother’s house without pausing because, after four hundred years, he has finally started to believe he is expected somewhere.
Now his answer to danger is to make all of it disappear.
He told me Black Harbor is the only place on earth where he isn’t a guest. His plan is to become one again. I could say that. I have the whole argument lined up in my head, and I think I could win. I don’t say anything.
Because I have known about this for thirty minutes and Julian has spent centuries knowing exactly what happens when somebody starts looking too closely.
A man who has just been shown the end of his only hiding place is entitled to reach for the one thing that has always kept him safe without me trying to take it away from him inside the hour.
So I walk around the counter, take his cool hand, and put it flat against my chest.
“Okay.”
His eyes come to mine.
“Okay?”
“You’ve had thirty minutes and a shock and gone straight to the plan that has worked every other time.
I’m not going to fight you about it at seven in the morning.
” I keep his hand where it is. “I’m going to go and start on the hundred and forty covers for the Trasks.
You’re going to think about it. And tonight I’m coming back and we’re going to talk properly. ”
He studies me.
“You are being extremely reasonable.”
The suspicion in his voice almost makes me smile.
“I’m being strategic instead.”
His mouth moves. It isn’t much, but I’ll take it.
I go into town. I do the walnut order. I speak to Loretta about the ham, finally and definitively.
I portion cranberry filling and answer three emails and discover at half past one that I have been standing in front of my prep bench for some time holding an empty bowl.
Because there is one thing in all of this that keeps bothering me.
Mabel. Eleven days ago, in the reading room of the Black Harbor Historical Society, Mabel Libby gave me four names without having to think about them.
Blackthorne. Voss. Volkov. Thorne.
Then she told me it was all in the town book and that in seventy-five years I was only the second person to ask about it. I asked who the first was. Mabel pushed a box of a dead woman’s hair towards me and told me to do the hair.
I take off my apron. The Historical Society is four minutes away if you don’t stop. I don’t stop.
Mabel is at the reading table with the second ledger open and her glasses on. She looks up as I come through the door, and I watch her understand why I’m there about a second and a half before I open my mouth.
“You’ve seen it,” she says.
“Who was the first person to ask you?”
Mabel takes off her glasses.
“She came in October. The nineteenth. A very polite young woman with dark hair and a notebook. She said she was a researcher.” Mabel closes the ledger.
“She wanted the transfers on the north point property. They’re public, so I gave them to her.
She sat in that chair for four hours and did not once ask me for anything I could have refused. ”
A cold feeling starts at the base of my spine.
“She was thorough,” Mabel continues. “I’ve watched a great many people be thorough in this room, and she was the best of them. She thanked me twice. She even wrote her name in the visitors’ book, which nobody does.”
“What name?”
Mabel pulls the visitors’ book towards her, turns it around, and puts one finger on a line.
Chloe Ramirez.
“October nineteenth.”
“Mm.”
“Mabel, that was two months ago.”
“It was.”
“They’re not planning this. They’ve already started.”
“I telephoned the number on the website this morning,” Mabel says. “A very nice young man thanked me for my corrections and told me the location team arrives on the second of January. He asked whether I would consider being recorded.”
January second. Less than two weeks.
“What did you say?”
Mabel puts her glasses back on.
“I said I would think about it.”
I stare at her, and Mabel folds her hands over the ledger.
“Which,” she says, “is something I have never once said to anybody in my life.”