The side street was lined with small stone houses with a few meager flower boxes under the windows. People with their faces hidden from the wind scuttled in and out of them. One woman carried the dented steel buckets that seemed obligatory in every rural community.
Evan stopped and threw his arms out in a parody of some grand gesture. “And here we are.”
The metal sign over the door featured a large boulder surrounded by the sea. The Rolling Rock Arms was a tavern with rooms for rent on the top floor. The middle floor had been converted into the Governor General’s office. The pub on the ground floor was exactly as Emma had imagined. She checked off the obligatory dark wood paneling from floor to ceiling, a beaten dart board, and a large fireplace for drunk people to burn themselves with. There was a pervasive smell of damp wood and tobacco smoke. The usual country practice of staring at anyone new like they had daisies growing from their foreheads had been suspended. The regulars muttering over pints of bitter paid her no attention. The blue ensign of South Alderney hung motionless from a rafter.
Evan looked around and shouted into the back room.
“Jessie! Customers!”
A young woman in a greasy apron rushed out.
“Oh, you’re here. Lucky the room is ready a little early. Sarah was just cleaning up, but she’s done now. She works nights, the poor dear, so it’s a miracle she can spare the time to help us. I’ve been double checking everything, since it’s not every day we get a new walloper from England. More than our usual share of excitement.”
“Is it always this busy?” David gestured grandly to the dusty room and earned a sharp elbow to the ribs.
“It’s more hectic since His Excellency moved in. You just missed him, by the way. Stepped out.”
David smiled at his wife. “His Excellency must be very busy.”
“Oh, yes, sir. Very. He wouldn't dream of not meeting you at the dock, only he's out.”
“You said, Love. We understand, don't we Em? The man can't very well be in when he's out, can he?”
Jessie nodded enthusiastically at David. Emma put a light but threatening hand on his shoulder.
“Don't listen to him. And don't worry about it. There's nothing wrong with being too busy for idle chit-chat.”
“It's just that, well Constable, Ma'am, he's inspecting the cannery right now, so he couldn't-”
Evan put a firm hand on the bar. “Let’s get PC Cambourne to her room, shall we?”
The room had all the amenities of a charming country inn: bright yellow wallpaper peeling in the corners, an electric kettle that promised to raise water above room temperature, and a bed that sank in the middle anytime a particularly heavy mote of dust settled on it. It threatened to split in half when Emma and David flopped down together. David started to reposition himself, heard a creaking like the final moments of a railway bridge, and thought better of it.
He sighed. “Well, we made it.”
“We did. For a given definition of 'it'.”
The room reminded her of the criminally cheap room in Cuba where they had had a trivial fight over who was supposed to have looked up what sort of plug they use in that country. Subsequent conversations determined that David had no memory of the whole thing. If she was the only one who remembered the argument, did it still count that she won?
David interrupted her train of thought. “Shall we?”
“Alright. Which one is hiding the deep dark secret?”
“One?”
“Yeah, I guess this game doesn’t work as well on the island that time forgot.”
“How about, which of the citizens of this goth beach resort is a werewolf?”
“Ooh, you’re on.”
“I say the fisherman with the squinty eye.”
“That’s cheating.”
“You can’t cheat at a game with no rules, Em.”
“Cheating was invented before rules. And it’s cheating to pick a man with a giant beard that wraps from ear to ear in a werewolf spotting competition. That’s like saying the vampire is the Hungarian fellow in a cape. Takes all the sport out of it.”
“Fine, fine. The girl at the bar.”
“Jessie? Bold choice.”
“She’s got a look about her. I might wave a nice spoon at her and see what she does. Your guess?”
“It’s not a guess. I know.”
“So you do.”
“Go ahead and laugh. The werewolf, is Evan.”
“Right. Famously irritable, those werewolves. Hang about the docks in full… well, in some semblance of daylight.”
“Do you even know what a werewolf is? Anyway, he’s putting on less of a disguise than the rest of them. Some of them looked desperate to hide something.”
“And that makes him somehow more likely to be a flesh-eating monster?”
“Just wait until the full moon. You’ll see. Now what’s the wager?”
“Loser has to spend a night in the abandoned mansion.”
“What abandoned mansion?”
“How should I know? There’s bound to be one. We can ask Squinty where it is.”
“Child’s play. The loser has to admit they are bad at guessing werewolves.”
“You’re mad, woman!”
“Take it or leave it.”
“You realize that’s the loser we’re talking about. What if neither of them is a werewolf?”
“Getting cold feet? You want to back out?”
“Never.”
David reached out a fist and Emma bumped it hard enough to make a smacking sound with their knuckles.
Her eyes wandered over the ceiling. “You should really be better at this game, you know.”
He could hear the smirk in her voice and counterattacked. “Why, because I actually talk to people?”
“No, because your brother is clearly a vampire.”
“He's not either! Just because a bloke works odd hours from home doesn't make him a vampire.”
“And wears nothing but black.”
“Yeah, he's done that since we were kids.”
“Oh, just like in the photo.” Emma cut the last word off too late.
David's tone dropped. “You were watching me?”
Emma shifted and pretended to be interested in the zipper of her suitcase. “I was just in the hallway, packing up the last of the dishes.”
“You don't want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what, David? Lots of people cry over old photos in
