Chapter 26 #2
“Thank you for saying it to my face.”
“You’re welcome.”
Julian turns towards the door. Theo Goodwin, who has been drying the same glass the entire time, leans forward.
“Hey, Julian.”
Julian stops.
“That barrel needs to go through to the back.”
There is a tiny pause.
“Yes,” Julian says, and goes to move a barrel.
The Widow’s Lantern goes back to being a pub.
Not all at once. There is a moment when everybody has to remember how, and then Bess asks whether anyone wants the chowder before she takes it off and three people do.
Deirdre says something to Peg about the mailman.
Wendell orders another beer. Doris demands a new cribbage opponent.
Arthur Finch finishes his beer, puts on his coat, and pauses on his way past Julian to say, to nobody in particular, “That beech is two hundred and ten years old.”
Then he leaves.
I find Julian outside in the parking lot at about ten past ten. He’s standing at the top of the steps with his coat over his arm, looking down at two hundred yellow lights reflected in the black water. He is not moving at all.
“Hey,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. I come and stand next to him, and I can feel the cold coming off him down the length of my left side. After a while he says, “I’ve never done that.”
“I know.”
“In four hundred years. I have never once stayed in the room.” His voice is not right.
“I have left at least fifty times. I have left in the middle of the night with a bag and I have left over the course of a year with lawyers and I have left in the most beautiful ways you have ever seen. I have never stayed in the room.”
“You moved a barrel.”
“Theo asked me to move a barrel.”
“Julian.” I get in front of him because I need to see his face. “Theo asked you to move a barrel afterwards.”
I watch him process that. He looks over my head at the pub door and the light shining from the window. Something happens on his face that I have never seen and am not going to be able to describe properly however long I have.
“Yes,” he says.
“That’s the answer right there, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t even look up.”
“He didn’t look up,” says Julian Volkov, “because there was a barrel.”
Then he laughs, unguarded and much too loud for a parking lot, and Deirdre Fanning looks out of the window at us, and I put both arms around him in the freezing cold and hold on.
After a while he says, “You didn’t come and get me.”
“No.”
“You wanted to.”
“God, I wanted to so much.”
“Why didn’t you?”
I lean my head against his arm.
“Because I wanted it to be your table,” I say. “Not mine, with a place set for you. Yours.”
He’s quiet for a few seconds before his hand closes around mine.
“I think,” he says slowly, “that I may have found one.”
“A table?”
“A place.”
My throat closes.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think you might.”
Behind us the door bangs open.
“Volkov,” Theo bellows. “If you’re done having a moment, there’s another barrel.”
Julian closes his eyes, and I laugh into his coat.
“Your neighborhood needs you.”
“So I gather.”
He kisses the top of my head, turns, and walks back inside.
It takes ten days before we know. They are not comfortable days.
Rowan doesn’t come to the shop and he doesn’t go to the hill.
The production team stays in town. Ben films the lighthouse and the breakwater and, on one occasion, a hundred and twenty pounds of Lucy Carver’s darkroom equipment being carried up a flight of stairs.
Chloe comes into the Salt & Sage twice. The first time she buys coffee and doesn’t mention Rowan. The second time she buys a lemon tart and actually eats it.
Julian doesn’t pack another journal. He doesn’t unpack one either. I don’t mention that.
Then, on the twenty-ninth of January, the website changes.
Season Nine. A Harbor Full of Ghosts. Six episodes.
The photograph across the top is the Widow’s Lantern at night, taken from the street, with the window burning.
There’s no section called THE OWNERS OF BLACKTHORN HOUSE.
There is no four-image progression ending with the man I love standing outside Harbor Books. There’s no photograph of Julian at all.
I sit at my desk in the back of the Salt & Sage and stare at the screen until Lucy comes around the counter and looks over my shoulder.
“Oh,” she says. “Is that—”
“Yeah.”
“Should we call him?”
I look at the page again.
“No,” I say. “I think I’m going to tell him in person.”
Rowan comes into the Salt & Sage the next afternoon and orders a coffee and two cranberry things.
“I’m not going to tell you I was wrong,” he says.
“I didn’t ask.”
“I want to, actually, and I’m not going to, because I don’t think I was and I’d rather not lie to you in your own shop.
” He takes his glasses off and cleans them on his scarf.
“I’ve got four pictures and no funerals, which is compelling and isn’t proof.
I’ve got a producer who won’t put her name on the episode and who I’m not prepared to lose.
I’ve got a town that has closed like a fist. And I’ve got a man who sat next to me in a pub and told me no to my face. ”
“That’s four things.”
“It’s four things.”
“Which one did it?”
Rowan puts his glasses back on.
“I’m still working that out.”
I slide his coffee across the counter, but he doesn’t pick it up immediately.
“I still think I’m right, and I think he knows I think I’m right.”
“He definitely knows.”
“And I think you know I’m right.”
“I wouldn’t place any money on that.”
“Which is why I’m not a gambling man.”
I smile despite myself, and Rowan looks down at the coffee.
“There’s a version of this where I run the episode exactly as written and never make a claim I can’t substantiate.
Every fact is public. Every photograph is real.
Every question is fair. And six months from now I could sit across from anybody who complained and explain, accurately, that I never said the thing they’re accusing me of saying. ”
“But two million people would say it for you.”
“Yes.”
He is quiet for a moment.
“Chloe said something to me last week that I didn’t like.”
“I imagine she said several.”
“She did. But one of them stuck.” He turns the cup around. “She said finding out isn’t the same as telling.”
I don’t say anything.
“I still don’t know if I agree with that as a rule.”
“Maybe it isn’t a rule.”
“That’s what Volkov said.”
“Julian. His name is Julian.”
Something in Rowan’s face shifts.
“Julian,” he says.
“Thank you.”
He picks up his coffee.
“I’m still going to do the town.”
“Six mysteries?”
“Five mysteries and one episode about why an entire town spent three weeks lying to me without technically saying a single untrue thing.”
I grin.
“Mabel’s going to love that.”
“Mabel Libby is terrifying.”
“Correct.”
He gets as far as the door before he stops.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I don’t think I’m letting him off.”
“No?”
“No. I think I’m choosing not to turn a man into a puzzle just because I know how.”
Then he goes. I stand behind my counter for a long time after the door closes. Finding out is not the same as telling. Maybe it isn’t a rule. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there are only people, and choices, and the question of what you do with something once you know it.
But Rowan Pierce knows. Mabel knows. Arthur knows. I know.
And Julian is still sitting at the end of my counter.