Chapter 26
Julian shows up at the Widow’s Lantern the next evening at seven o’clock.
I’m not there when he arrives.
I hear about it from Lucy, who texts me a single line—get down here—and I leave a tray of something in the oven that I will throw in the trash later and I run.
Because Julian Volkov has never once in four hundred years walked into a public room knowing somebody inside is waiting to ask him the question he has spent four centuries avoiding. Tonight, he’s done it on purpose.
By the time I get there the pub is full.
The room hasn’t stopped. Nobody in Black Harbor has ever stopped for anything.
But a great many people are looking towards the end of the bar while pretending not to, and conversations are happening at the slightly lower volume people use when something has occurred that they intend to discuss thoroughly later.
Julian is on the stool beside Rowan Pierce, and his coat is hanging on the peg by the door like it belongs there. I make it as far as the fire before Julian sees me. His eyes find mine and stay there for half a second, and that’s all. No rescue requested. No rescue offered.
Rowan has his recorder on the bar between them. The red light is off.
“Can I buy you a drink?” Rowan asks.
“No,” says Julian. “Thank you. I do not drink and I would rather not pretend for you for an hour.”
Rowan’s eyebrows go up about a quarter of an inch.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Thank you.”
“Ask me your questions.”
“Right here?”
“Here, or on the road outside in the cold, or at my gate at some point in February when you have run out of other things to try.” Julian folds his hands on the bar. “This is warmer, and there are people I know in the room, and I find I prefer that. Ask.”
Rowan looks at the recorder.
“May I?”
“Yes.”
The red light comes on. And for the next forty minutes I watch a man who has spent four hundred years perfecting one single technique take it out into the open and use it in front of the entire town. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t lie once. I am listening for it the whole time and it never comes.
“How long have you lived in Blackthorn House?”
“I have lived in that house since it came to me.”
“When was that?”
Julian raises an eyebrow. “The transfer is in the county record. You’ve read it; Ms. Ramirez pulled it in October.”
“Two years ago.”
“That is what the record says,” he agrees. “I moved in in June.”
“Where were you before?”
“Boston, most recently. Before that a number of places. I have moved a great deal.”
“Your family’s held that house for a long time.”
“There has been somebody up there under one name or another since the seventeen nineties,” says Julian. “Everybody in this room could have told you that and several of them have.”
Rowan smiles slightly. “That’s not quite an answer.”
“It’s exactly the answer,” Julian says. “It is simply not the one you wanted, and I would rather be honest about the difference than pretend I haven’t noticed.”
Doris wins something at the other end of the bar and there is a small commotion about it.
I stand by the fire with a warm glass in my hand and love him so much it is difficult to remain upright.
Because I know what I am watching. This is the same thing he has done to me since October—the tiny portion, the exact corner I happened to point at—and I have been furious about it in a hall and a hidden room and my own kitchen.
And here it is being used, at last, in front of everybody, by a man who has walked into the town he has spent two hundred and thirty years being careful about and sat down.
“Okay,” says Rowan. “Let me try it the direct way, because I think you’d prefer that.”
“I would.”
“I think the man in the 1816 portrait at the Maritime Museum, the man in the 1851 engraving, the man in the Bangor paper in 1938, and the man sitting on this stool are the same person.” Rowan says it quietly and levelly and without any relish whatsoever.
“I’ve thought that since the first week of October, and everything since has made me think it harder. ”
The pub goes on. Wendell is talking to Peg about the dog again.
“I am not going to answer that,” says Julian.
“I know.”
“I would like you to understand that I am not declining because I think you are a fool, or because I think the question is absurd.”
“That’s generous.”
“It is not generosity. You’ve done very good work.”
Rowan studies him for a moment. “Then help me understand something. I’ve spent two weeks here and everyone in this room would apparently take a bullet before they’d let me get within ten feet of an old photograph. Why?”
“Because you keep asking about their neighbor.”
“That’s not enough.”
“Why not?”
“Because people don’t close ranks like this over nothing.”
“No,” Julian says. “They close ranks over people.”
Rowan leans an elbow on the bar.
“That’s a nice distinction.”
“It is also the correct one.”
“Then explain it to me.”
Julian is quiet for a moment.
“You have interpreted everything that has happened here as evidence of a conspiracy. Mrs. Libby will not give you records, so she must know what they contain. Mr. Goodwin will not let you film his bar, so he must know what I am. Mr. Finch objects to your camera, so he must have inherited some great secret from his father.” Julian glances down the bar.
“Perhaps they do. Perhaps they don’t. I have no intention of answering for them. ”
Arthur Finch, without turning around, raises his beer approximately an inch.
Julian looks back at Rowan.
“What I can tell you is that Theo Goodwin does not need my biography to know whether I am the sort of man he wants in his bar. I helped fix his dock in November. I carry Mrs. Ballard’s chair because she is eighty-two and it is heavier than she thinks.
I have paid for parts of the roads because I use them and because the town needs them.
I have listened to Mr. Marr explain a sailmaker’s palm more times than either of us can count. ”
“Thirty-three,” says Wendell from somewhere behind him.
“Thirty-three,” Julian says, and someone laughs.
“I have lived here a very long time, Mr. Pierce. I have done every unglamorous thing a man can do for a place that will never be in an episode. These people have done the same things for me. That is not a conspiracy. It is a neighborhood.”
Rowan looks around the room.
“That still doesn’t answer the question.”
“No. It answers a different one.”
“Which is?”
“Why they will not help you.”
Rowan is silent for a second. Then he says, “You understand my problem.”
“I believe so.”
“If you’re right about what I think—and I’m not asking you to confirm that—then this is extraordinary. This isn’t somebody’s affair or tax return. This changes what we know is possible.”
“Vampires are already known to exist.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
“Then where’s the line?” Rowan asks. “Because everybody tells me their thing is private. The company dumping chemicals in a river says it’s proprietary, which is just private with a lawyer attached.
” He turns his glass a quarter turn on the bar.
“In the second season I went to a town in Michigan which had a ghost story about a girl in the lake. It was a great story, and everybody and their grandmother claimed to have seen her. It took me four hours in a county office to find out she was real and she had died in nineteen sixty-one. And the reason nobody had said her name in sixty years is that everybody knew whose boat she’d gone out on, and that family still lived there. ”
He pauses to stare down into his glass.
“People don’t tell a ghost story instead of the truth because they’re stupid.
They do it because the ghost is easier to live with.
My mother grew up in a mill town in Georgia, and there was a man there that everyone knew about.
Everyone. Forty years of a whole town knowing and no one saying it out loud.
Do you know what that cost?” He looks over at Julian.
“If I start from the position that people get to decide which truths about themselves belong to everyone else, then secrets stay buried and I don’t have a job. ”
“No,” Julian says. “You have a difficult job.”
Rowan gives an unamused laugh.
“That’s not an answer either.”
“I don’t have one.”
That makes Rowan look up, and Julian quietly returns his gaze.
“I do not know where the line is in every case. I would distrust anyone who claimed he did. But this isn’t a mill town in Georgia.
You’ve been here for two weeks, and you have found no crime.
No victim. No one asking you to expose me because I have harmed them.
You have found a private man with an unusual history whose neighbors would prefer you leave him alone. ”
“An unusual history.”
“I am allowing you the phrase.”
Rowan almost smiles. Julian does not.
“You are a man who mistook a truth for something you were owed,” he adds. “I am asking you to consider whether those are always the same thing.”
For once Rowan Pierce doesn’t have an immediate answer. The recorder’s red light sits between them, and eventually Rowan looks down at it.
“That’s a good argument.”
“It’s not an argument. It’s a question.”
“No,” says Rowan. “It’s an argument. And it’s a good one.”
Julian inclines his head.
“I’m not saying you’re right,” Rowan adds.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“And I’m not promising anything.”
“I didn’t ask you for that either.”
“What are you asking for?”
“Nothing.”
Rowan looks at him, and Julian gets to his feet.
“I came because you asked to speak to me, and I had declined three times without ever having the courtesy to do it to your face.” He pauses. “No.”
Rowan’s expression changes.
“No?”
“No. You may investigate Black Harbor. You may investigate my house. You may believe anything you wish about me. But I will not confirm your theory, I will not sit for your camera, and I will not open my private records to you. This is me saying no in person, on the record, so there can be no confusion afterwards.”
For a second neither of them moves. Then Rowan reaches over and turns the recorder off.