Chapter 22 #2
“Sure,” I say, in a voice that comes out completely normal, and I am so grateful to whatever part of me produced it that I nearly have to sit down.
“How long has the current one been up there?”
“About six months.”
“Six months.” He nods. “And before that the house was empty?”
“On and off. It’s been on and off my whole life.”
“But somebody’s been paying for it the whole time.”
“The house pays for it,” I say, which is Mabel’s line, and I hear how much it sounds like a line as it comes out of my mouth.
“That’s a great sentence.” Rowan smiles, not because he’s caught me but because he’s genuinely delighted by it. “Everybody in this town has said a version of that to me tonight. Four people since I got out of the van.”
He turns his glass slowly by the stem.
“Different question. The one before this one—the previous Mr. Volkov. Was there a funeral?”
The hall carries on around us. Somebody laughs by the punch table.
“I don’t know.”
“Would you have gone?”
“I’d have catered it.”
Rowan laughs and taps the table twice with two fingers.
“That’s the answer, isn’t it? In a town this size the caterer would know. And nobody knows.”
And I stand there with a knife in my hand and understand, all at once and much too late, that I have got this entirely the wrong way round.
I have spent two weeks thinking about discovery.
I’ve been frightened of a man arriving in my town and finding something out.
I’ve thought about archives and search boxes and a photograph of Julian coming out of Harbor Books.
I’ve been braced for the moment when Rowan Pierce understands what those four faces side by side mean.
But he did that in October.
He isn’t here to find out. He came here knowing. He found out from an apartment somewhere with a laptop, the same way I found out in a church annex with a pencil, and he has come to Black Harbor in January with a van and a videographer for the only thing he cannot get off a screen.
He has come for confirmation in the present tense.
“Penny?”
“Sorry. It’s cold in here.”
“It’s always cold in here. Dr. Cardoso told me it’s structural.” He picks up a crab thing. “Can I ask you something else?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“I am, but I’d rather you knew I knew that.” He eats the crab thing. “You know him.”
It isn’t a question and there is no version of no I’m willing to say.
“I do.”
“How well?”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
I haven’t said it out loud to a stranger before.
It comes out of me in the flattest possible voice, in a granite hall with seventy people in it, and I watch it go into Rowan Pierce like a coin into a slot.
Something in his face changes. Not triumph.
That’s what I expect and it isn’t there.
What crosses his face is closer to sympathy, which is worse.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Then I’m going to be straight with you.”
Behind him, Chloe stops moving.
“We originally came for six stories,” Rowan says. “That’s what we pitched. The fog, the lighthouse, the Cordelia, the sea witch, the bell, the curse. And then Chloe pulled the property records in October because Chloe pulls everything.”
Chloe’s mouth tightens as she steps up next to him. “Rowan.”
“I’m not saying anything we haven’t already published.”
“No,” she says. “You’re not.”
But there’s a crease between her brows now that wasn’t there over the parsnip soup.
Rowan turns back to me. “The records are a puzzle, Penny. Puzzles are fun. I could build an episode out of deed transfers and photographs and never say a word that isn’t sitting in a public archive. But a story needs a person.”
I don’t say anything.
“Four different names,” he says gently. “Two hundred and thirty years. No funerals, no obituaries, no probate anybody can point at. One face.”
“Family resemblance.”
“Maybe.”
He says it so easily that for half a second I don’t know what to do with it.
“Maybe it is,” Rowan continues. “That’s why I’d like to talk to Julian.”
“He doesn’t do interviews.”
“I know. I’ve written twice.”
“And?”
“Very polite replies. Both declining. Both extremely well written, which is unusual. I get about eighty declines a year and most of them are from lawyers.”
Julian hasn’t told me about the requests. I push that aside and give Rowan an equally polite smile.
“Then you have your answer.”
“I do.” Rowan sets down his glass. “And I’ll respect it.
I want you to know that. I’m not going to sit outside his gate.
I’m not going to put a camera over his wall.
But I’m going to be in Black Harbor for six weeks, and if he’s in the same room as me at some point, I’m going to say hello to him like a person. ”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
I don’t believe that’s all, but the problem is that I believe he believes it. Then he glances across the room towards Ines Cardoso.
“He didn’t come tonight.”
“He doesn’t come to things.”
“He came to the museum benefit in December.”
Everything in me goes a little colder.
“Dr. Cardoso told me. She’s been telling me about it for an hour and she’s thrilled. She thinks she’s telling me about a donor.”
She is. That’s the terrible part.
“She told me about the bell,” Rowan says. “He read a date off the waist of it, under the crown, turned three-quarters away from the glass. A date nobody in this building has been able to read since at least the sixties.”
I put the knife down because I don’t think holding it is a good idea.
There’s something happening in my chest that I don’t have a good word for.
It’s the feeling of watching somebody kind cause damage.
Ines Cardoso in her good shoes, telling a man with a microphone about the best ninety seconds of her professional life, and Julian standing at that case in December with a glass of champagne he never drank and doing a generous thing he couldn’t help doing.
And then paying for it in January in a building he has kept the roof on for eighty years.
“Ines thinks she’s met a very clever man who reads a lot,” Rowan says. “I’m not going to tell her otherwise.”
“But you’ll use it.”
His expression changes slightly.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agrees. “It isn’t. But it’s true.”