Chapter 2
Garrick Stonehaven came down off the scaffolding at the west end of the roof and found the Sheriff of Fairhaven Falls sitting on his front steps with one of Garrick’s coffee mugs in his hands.
“You’re back,” Eric said.
“Since two.”
“Two this morning? Did you drive straight through?”
“There’s nowhere to stop between here and Gainesville that I fit in.
” He set the bundle of slate against the porch rail and rolled his shoulders.
His wings shifted behind him, stiff from a week and a half of chairs designed for humans and hotel rooms where turning around required advance planning.
Atlanta had run long. Atlanta always ran long.
Eric held up the mug in his hand. “Coffee’s cold.”
“I wasn’t offering you any.”
“I needed it. Birdie has discovered that she can refuse things, and one of the things she’s refusing is sleep.
Add that to teething and let’s just say nobody in my house is sleeping.
” It sounded like a complaint, but Garrick knew his friend well enough to hear the deep underlying satisfaction in his voice.
Eric squinted up at him, golden eyes narrowed against the morning sun.
“I hear you’re having the grounds done.”
Garrick stopped with one hand on the balustrade. “No.”
“Funny. Because Robin heard from Sylvie, who heard from Flora, that Maris Calder is coming to see your gardens at ten this morning.”
He glanced at his watch, and Eric grinned. “That’s in forty-five minutes.”
“I haven’t hired anyone.”
“Is that what you’re going with?”
“I had the grounds down for spring. April, after the frosts, before the site work gets busy.” He climbed the steps and sat on the one below Eric, which put them roughly level. “I have a plan.”
“You have a plan.”
“I have a very good plan. Roof, conservatory glass, exterior punch list, then the grounds. In that order.” He picked up the second mug sitting beside Eric and drank. The coffee was cold. He drank it anyway. “Landscaping is always the last step.”
“Uh-huh.” Eric stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles, settling in like he was on his own porch. “So you’ll be calling Flora to cancel?”
He drank more coffee and didn’t respond.
“That’s what I thought.” Eric’s grin deepened, the same grin he’d worn at nine when he’d convinced Garrick to jump off the Miller’s Creek bridge into water that turned out to be four feet deep. “Nobody cancels on Flora. It never goes well. She made a mountain ogre cry once.”
“Flora came up here Tuesday and told me she was sending me a landscaper.”
“And you said yes.”
“I said I wasn’t ready.”
“Garrick.” Eric’s mouth twitched. “That’s a yes. That’s what a yes sounds like when Flora’s in the room.”
“Is it?”
“You know it is. Or do you want to go down there and tell her you meant no?” Eric brightened. “I’d like to watch.”
He didn’t answer because there wasn’t an answer that wouldn’t make it worse.
Flora was barely five feet tall and could, when it suited her, look like the most innocent little old lady in the world.
It was a lie. Flora was a force of nature and anyone who’d encountered her quickly discovered that.
Saying no to Flora was like saying no to the weather.
You could shout at the rain all you liked. It kept falling.
“There’s a newsletter,” Eric added helpfully.
“I’m aware of the newsletter.”
“You’re in this one.”
“I’m aware of that too.” It had been sitting in his mailbox when he arrived home earlier that morning and it was one of the reasons he hadn’t slept.
Our reclusive gargoyle has finally engaged a landscape professional, it had said in Flora’s chatty little typeface.
More on this as it develops. He’d spent way too much time contemplating the many ways that sentence could be interpreted before deciding he didn’t want to know. “Does she have a printer now?”
“She has a printer, a mailing list, and a column at the bottom where people write in.”
“Of course she does.”
“Callan’s in this one too. Callan is furious.”
The leader of Eric’s pack was known for many things, but a sense of humor wasn’t one of them. Garrick couldn’t hold back the laugh, a deep rumble that rolled down the gravel drive, and Eric looked pleased with himself.
“How’d the Charlotte job go?” Eric asked, mercifully changing the subject.
“Finished under budget. Opened two weeks ago. The client wanted glass on three sides of a building that faces due west. I told him he was constructing a greenhouse for people. He didn’t listen.”
“And now?”
“Now he’s complaining about the cooling costs.” He allowed himself the smallest smile. “I quoted him for the retrofit.”
Eric laughed this time. It was a good sound, one Garrick used to hear in this house decades ago, back when the house had still been a house and not a mausoleum his father wandered through with the curtains drawn.
“How long are you staying this time?” Eric added.
Garrick looked at him and Eric looked back, his expression perfectly blank.
“Six weeks. Maybe longer.”
“And then?”
“They want me in Atlanta for most of the winter.”
“Do you want to be in Atlanta for most of the winter?”
“The work’s where the work is.”
“The work’s wherever you point it, Garrick. You own the company.”
He finished the cold coffee and set the mug beside him.
Stonehaven Construction had projects in four states, several of which needed more attention than the managers overseeing them wanted to admit.
There was always somewhere he could be useful.
A problem that needed solving. A schedule that had slipped.
A client who had ignored his advice and was now surprised by the consequences.
“You’ve been back for what? Two years now?” Eric added. “You’re here maybe half the time.”
He looked out across the drive instead of answering. Beyond the drive, the grounds rolled away in an undisciplined tangle of late-summer green. He’d spent almost two years restoring the house his father had allowed to decay and almost two years finding reasons not to stay in it for too long.
It was easier to leave.
Easier to drive out before dawn with a schedule in his head and a problem waiting at the other end.
Easier to stand on a construction site and know exactly what needed doing and in what order than to sit in the study at night listening to a house that was too big and too quiet and too full of the boy who had grown up believing his family would always fill it.
In spite of the delays, the house was nearly finished now. He’d done it with his own money and, whenever he was home, his own hands. He’d fixed everything money and mortar could fix. The house was still empty.
Eric’s gaze followed his towards one of the overgrown terraces south of the house. “There was a rose garden down there.”
“I remember.”
“It was amazing when it bloomed. My mother used to slow the car down so she could smell it.”
He remembered that too. His mother had loved the gardens. She’d spent whole summers out there with dirt to the elbow, and his father had teased her about it and joined her whenever he could. After she died, he stopped going outside.
Not immediately. That would have been easier to understand.
Instead, the world his father occupied had shrunk a little at a time.
First the gardens. Then whole sections of the house.
Rooms closed, curtains drawn, fires left unlit.
By the time Garrick was twenty-three, there had been four rooms left with anything living in them, and he had been in one of them.
So he’d left.
He’d worked any job he could find and saved his money and built Stonehaven Construction out of a rented office in Atlanta with two draftsmen and a secondhand truck.
Fifteen years later, people liked to talk about the fortune he’d made, as though the money had been the point.
It hadn’t been. Leaving had been the point.
“You should stay put awhile,” Eric said.
“I’ll consider it.”
“That’s a no.”
“It’s an I’ll consider it.” It was the most he was willing to commit, and Eric, who had known him since before either of them could shift, recognized it for what it was.
“How’s Birdie? Other than the not-sleeping?” he asked, and Eric’s face softened.
“Perfect. Loud. Sticky. Currently puts everything she finds in her mouth, which is why Robin isn’t bringing her up here until you’re done renovating. This place is full of interesting objects at exactly the right height.”
“Bring her anyway. I’ll move the interesting objects.”
“I might.”
They sat without speaking for a while. They’d always been good at that.
A catbird worked through the tangle on the far side of the drive.
The lawn had gone to meadow years ago, waist-high and seeding.
The boxwoods his mother had planted along the south walk had grown into shaggy green monsters that had swallowed the path entirely.
The fountain in the center was dry and cracked, full of dead leaves and the exploded remains of last year’s acorns.
Eventually Eric stood and brushed off the back of his jeans. “Well. Ten o’clock. Maris Calder. Widow. One boy. Bought the old Dolan nursery in January and has been quietly putting it back together ever since.”
Garrick looked at him. “You looked her up.”
“I’m the sheriff. I look everybody up. That’s my job.”
“You don’t generally give me reports on my neighbors.”
“You don’t generally let Flora arrange appointments with them.”
“I didn’t let Flora do anything.”
“Of course not.” Eric started down the steps, then turned. “You want to know what Alison says about her?”
“No.”
“She says Maris talks about dirt the way most people talk about their children. Does that help?”
“It doesn’t.”
“No,” Eric agreed pleasantly. “I didn’t think it would.”
Garrick watched the cruiser disappear down the drive and through the iron gates. He had keyed them open earlier and hadn’t gone back to close them. For no particular reason he was willing to admit.
He went inside.