Chapter 24
Without one single person organizing it, Black Harbor closes ranks.
I don’t see it happen. That’s what I keep coming back to.
There is no meeting. Nobody says a word to me, and I am, technically, the person with the most reason to be told.
It simply starts happening around the eleventh of January, in a dozen places at once, in a town of two thousand people who have known each other for most of their lives.
It starts, as far as I can reconstruct it, with Mabel.
Chloe Ramirez goes to the Historical Society on the eleventh to look at the town book.
Mabel Libby is delighted to see her. Mabel makes tea.
Mabel spends thirty-five minutes on the Cordelia, all nine hands, in detail, with the correction about the brother, and gives Chloe a photocopy of pages four through nine of the indexed document.
And the town book, Mabel explains, with enormous regret, has gone to a conservator in Portland.
“It went out in December,” she tells me, when I corner her about it on the twelfth. “The binding is in a shocking state.”
“Mabel, it’s been in a shocking state since 1994.”
“All the more reason to get it done.”
“When’s it coming back?”
“They are extremely busy,” Mabel says serenely, “and it is a small building. I’ve been on the waiting list for a very long time, and I don’t intend to hurry a professional.”
“And the Sturgis boxes?”
“Not accessioned.”
“I accessioned them. I was there. I did nineteen folders and a box of hair.”
“You processed them, dear. Processing is not accessioning. Accessioning requires the committee.” Mabel turns a page in her ledger. “The committee meets in March.”
“Who’s on the committee?”
“I am on the committee,” says Mabel. “I am, in point of fact, the entire committee, and I have been since Vaughn Dunn stopped coming. I’m not going to convene myself in January over a podcast.”
I stand in that reading room and look at a woman of seventy-five in a cardigan with an enamel raven on it, and something goes through me that I cannot name. Because I’ve heard this before.
Not one word she has said to Chloe Ramirez is a lie.
Every single sentence is true. The binding is bad.
The conservator is busy. The committee does meet in March.
She has answered the specific question she was asked, precisely and completely, and given away nothing at all, and I have watched somebody else do exactly that in a kitchen and a hall and a hidden room since October.
“Mabel.”
“Mm.”
“How long have you known?”
Mabel Libby takes her glasses off.
“Known what, dear?”
“Don’t.”
She looks at me for a good while. Then she puts her glasses down on the ledger, which she does not do.
“I have run this Society since 2002,” she says.
“Before that it was Ruth Sowerby and before that it was just a cupboard in the church. I know what is in every box in this room and I have known since I was fifty-one. My mother cleaned at Blackthorn House in 1960 for a Mr. Thorne, and came home one evening and said something to my father in the kitchen that I was not supposed to hear and did not understand for another forty-two years.”
“Mabel—”
“I never thought that it was any of my business,” says Mabel.
“That’s my position and I am not going to elaborate on it.
If you tell me anything now I shall be extremely cross with you, because at present I can say to that young woman quite truthfully that I have never discussed it with anybody, and I would like to go on being able to say so. ”
Then she puts her glasses back on and asks me whether I have any opinion about the parking.
Theo refuses the Lantern on the thirteenth.
Rowan asks properly, in advance, in the afternoon, when there’s nobody in the pub. He wants to film the bar, and the window, and Theo pouring, and Theo says no.
“Why not?” says Rowan, entirely reasonably.
“It’s my bar,” says Theo Goodwin.
And that, apparently, is the whole conversation. Rowan tells me about it himself two days later, with real appreciation, because he has been doing this for nine years and has never had a cleaner no.
Harriet Coyne and Eunice Ballard do something far worse.
They agree. They agree enthusiastically.
Harriet has been waiting for the interview since the eighteenth of December and has had, by her own standards, sufficient notice.
Eunice brings her own folding chair. They sit down in the church annex with Ben Carter’s camera and Rowan Pierce and a microphone, and they talk for four hours and eleven minutes.
From what I’ve heard, the tape does not contain one single usable sentence.
Harriet does the hip. All of it. The original injury, the misdiagnosis, the second opinion in Rockland, the physiotherapist she did not care for and the one she did.
Eunice does the Buick. Eunice does the Buick for what Ben Carter later describes to Lucy, in tones of genuine awe, as “forty-five minutes, and it’s green, and that’s the whole thing, that the car was green. ”
Three times Rowan asks gently and professionally about the family up at the house.
“Oh, they’ve always been up there,” says Harriet.
“Always,” says Eunice.
“Walter did their gutters.”
“He did not.”
“He did the gutters, Harriet.”
“He did the downspout.”
And they are off again, for another twenty-five minutes, on the difference between a gutter and a downspout, and whether Walter Ballard was ever formally engaged to do either, and the two of them are so completely delighted with each other and with themselves that there is no conceivable way to accuse either of them of a single thing.
Ben Carter comes into the shop afterwards and buys four cookies and looks like a man who has seen the ocean.
Arthur Finch is not subtle about any of it.
Arthur is openly, magnificently hostile, and he is hostile in the exact register of a man of ninety who has decided that a stranger is being rude.
He will not have the camera on the grounds.
He tells Rowan so at the bar, at volume, twice.
When Rowan says—again, reasonably—that he only wants to ask about the gardens, Arthur says that the gardens are none of his business.
When Rowan says he understands, Arthur says that he plainly does not, and goes and sits somewhere else.
Then, on the fourteenth, he comes into the Salt & Sage, which he has done perhaps four times in nine years. He stands in the middle of my floor with his hat in his hands.
“Arthur?”
“He going?”
I put down what I’m holding.
“I don’t know.”
“Hm,” says Arthur Finch.
He looks at the counter for a while.
“My father did those gardens from ‘38,” he says. “I did ‘em from ‘71. That’s almost ninety years between us and there’s a copper beech in the south lawn that my great-great-grandfather put in. I’ve had two arborists up there in my life and neither of ‘em believed how old it is.” He turns his hat over. “You never got told and you never asked. That’s manners. I’ve said that to you before. ”
“You have.”
“It’s not manners if he’s going because some fella wants a story.”
Then he puts his hat on and leaves, and I have to go and stand in the walk-in for a minute.
And on the fifteenth of January, at about nine at night, Rowan Pierce makes his mistake.
I’m at the Lantern. It’s a Friday and it’s full and Lucy is there and so is Ben, who has now been in Black Harbor for two weeks and is on his fourth conversation with Lucy about apertures.
Rowan’s at the end of the bar where he always is and Doris has beaten him at cribbage again.
It’s all very warm and ordinary, and then Hollis Baker asks him how it’s going.
And Rowan, who has had two drinks and is honest to a fault and is frustrated, says it.
“Honestly? Not great.” He turns his glass around.
“I’ll be straight with you, because you’ve all been decent to me.
I think there’s something up on that hill that everybody in this room has decided not to say out loud.
And I understand why. I do. But I’ve got to say—I think the people of this town deserve to know who they’ve actually got living up there. ”
The room doesn’t go silent. That’s the part I didn’t expect and will never forget. There is no hush. Nobody puts a glass down. Wendell Marr doesn’t even look up, because Wendell is talking to Peg about a dog.
Bess says, “Anybody else want the chowder before I take it off?”
Three people want the chowder.
And Theo Goodwin, who has been drying the same glass for some time, puts it down on the bar and says, in an ordinary voice, from about four feet away, “We know who we’ve got.”
Rowan looks up.
“He’s Julian,” Theo says. “He came down here after a storm in November and stood in the water and put lag bolts in my dock and wouldn’t take a beer, which I’ve stopped offering.
He carries Eunice’s chair. He fixed Gil’s gate and told him it was already like that.
” Theo picks the glass back up. “Whatever else he is, that’s his business.
What I know is he shows up. And I’d say the same about you if somebody came in here asking, and they haven’t, and I’d like to think that’s the difference. ”
“Theo—”
“You’ve been good in here,” says Theo. “I mean that. You buy your rounds and you let Doris win and you listen to Wendell, which not everybody does.” He shrugs.
“But you asked, so I’m telling you. There’s nothing wrong up that hill.
There’s a fella who doesn’t come out much and never has and pays for the roads, and we’ve got about nine of those, and one of ‘em’s Deirdre. ”
“I heard that,” says Deirdre Fanning.
“You were meant to.”
Somebody laughs. Somebody else asks about the chowder again. Bess says something extremely rude about the parking lot.
And the whole thing is over in about ninety seconds, and the pub goes on being a pub.
Rowan Pierce sits at the end of the bar with a look on his face I have not seen on a person before.
He looks like a man discovering that he has walked into a room where the argument he came for finished a long time ago without him.
I go up the hill at half past ten. Julian is in the library. There are nineteen journals in the crate now and he is standing over it doing nothing at all.
“Say it again,” he says, when I finish telling him about the Lantern.
“Julian—”
“The exact words. Not what he meant. What he said.”
So I say it again.
“‘We know who we’ve got. He’s Julian.’”
He asks me who was in the room. He asks how many. He asks whether Theo said it to Rowan or to the room. I say he said it to Rowan, but at the volume you use for a room, and something moves in his face. He asks whether anyone left afterwards. He asks whether anyone went quiet.
I answer all of it, and about halfway through I understand what he’s doing, and it takes the legs out from under me.
He’s checking for the trap. He’s going over it the way you’d go over a hull.
He has been in one form or another of this situation many times in four hundred years and every single time the room has gone quiet and somebody has left.
Now he’s standing in his library at eleven at night looking for the part where it turns.
“Nobody left,” I say. “Nobody went quiet. Bess sold three chowders.”
“Bess,” he says.
“Bess said, anybody else want the chowder before I take it off, and three people did, and that was the loudest thing that happened.”
Julian sits down. He does it rather suddenly, in the chair by the fire, the way I sat down in the same room three weeks ago. He puts one hand flat over his mouth and stays like that.
“Theo Goodwin,” he says eventually, from behind his hand.
“Yes.”
“Theo asks me to move things because I am tall.”
“I know.”
“He has asked me to move things approximately thirty times and I have always assumed that was the whole of it.”
“I know.”
“Penny.” He takes his hand down. His eyes are wet, which I have not seen, and which I am not going to describe further because it belongs to him.
“I have spent two hundred and thirty years believing that this town was only conditionally mine. That wasn’t fear.
It was experience. I have been asked to leave places I had been useful in, by people who liked me, and it didn’t take very long, and it didn’t require anyone to be cruel. ”
“I know.”
“I built all of it on the assumption that the moment they knew, I would have to go.” He looks at the fire. “I have never once considered that they might have known for some time and simply—”
He stops.
“Gone on selling chowder,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Mabel’s mother worked in your house in 1960.”
“I know,” says Julian. “I hired her.”
I go and sit on the arm of the chair. He puts his head against my side, which he has never done, and I put my hand in his hair and hold him against me.
“This doesn’t fix it,” I say after a while, because somebody has to. “Rowan’s still here. It doesn’t fix any of it.”
“No.”
“Do you want it to?”
Julian is quiet for a very long time.
“Yes,” he says.
Which is not a plan. But it is, as far as I can tell, the first time in four hundred years that man has wanted something out loud instead of thinking about what it costs, and I would like the fifteenth of January recorded somewhere, ideally in brown ink.