Chapter 5
The following afternoon, Maris pushed open the door to the River Café and found Sylvie already seated in a corner booth with a plate of lemon cake and an expectant look.
“Well?” Sylvie demanded before Maris even sat down.
“It’s big,” she said, shrugging out of her jacket. “And neglected. But it has some very good bones, and there’s some amazing plant material. I found a Madame Alfred Carrière that’s at least fifty years old.”
Sylvie rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking about the garden. I’m talking about him. Garrick. What’s he like?”
“Also big,” she said.
Sylvie snorted but before she could continue the cross-examination, Rona whizzed by and dropped off a plate of hushpuppies and a pitcher of iced tea.
“This’ll keep you going until the catfish is done,” the blue-skinned waitress said cheerfully. Rona was also the owner of the café and famous for knowing exactly what anyone in town wanted to eat at any given time. Maris never even bothered looking at a menu anymore.
“Thanks, Rona.”
“No problem, hon.”
Rona rushed off again, heading for the outside deck overhanging the river, and Maris looked back to find Sylvie giving her an exasperated look.
“Big? That’s all you got? What does he smell like?”
“I have no idea,” she said with immense dignity. She was lying. She knew exactly what he smelled like—an oddly appealing mineral scent with just a hint of smokiness, like a wood fire in a stone fireplace on a cold night.
“You’re going to need an assistant,” Flora announced, suddenly appearing next to the booth.
Maris had noticed her when she walked in, huddled in another booth with her best friend Gladys, a pleasant older woman in a cardigan, pearls, and a witch’s hat.
She had pretended not to see them, but she should have known it was useless.
“I don’t need an assistant. I can manage.”
“You’ll drown,” Flora said, stealing a hushpuppy.
Today’s sweatshirt was white with an enormous sunflower down one side and BE A GROW-ER NOT A SHOW-ER down the other.
“You can’t be up to your elbows in brambles on the far side of that wall and behind the counter selling geraniums to Mrs. Pettimore at the same time. You need help in the shop.”
“I can’t afford help.”
“You can afford it if the mountain of money behind that wall is paying you by the hour to crawl through his shrubbery.”
“I’m not spending his money on my staff.”
“You’re spending your money,” Flora said, “which you are earning from him by doing a job. That’s not charity, dear. That’s a business expanding. You do know that’s allowed?”
She opened her mouth and found she didn’t have a good answer for that.
“There’s the Suggs girl,” Sylvie suggested.
“Junie. She’s nineteen, and she finished a year at the ag college over in Asheville and decided she’d rather learn it with her hands.
She’s been driving her mother crazy ever since.
We’re distantly related and she knows a hydrangea from a hole in the ground.
She’d take a few afternoons a week, more if it works out. ”
“See?” Flora flashed her sharp little teeth. “The universe provides. I provide. Same thing, mostly.”
Rona arrived at the table in her pink uniform, put the catfish down, refilled the tea pitcher, and was gone.
Flora stole another hushpuppy. “I heard Garrick gave you the key code. On the very first day.”
“It was a practical solution,” she said, praying she wasn’t blushing.
“That’s not a male being practical, dear. That’s a male making a nest and hoping you’ll wander in.”
“It’s a large, complicated project. Practicality is essential.”
“So is a nest,” Flora said, entirely untroubled. “Has he opened up the gate in the wall yet?”
“No. Why would he?”
“To make it easier to reach you, of course.”
Flora waggled her eyebrows suggestively and was gone before Maris could come up with a retort.
“She’s impossible,” she muttered.
“She’s Flora,” Sylvie said, as if it explained everything. In Fairhaven Falls, it did.
“She means well,” a new voice added, and Maris looked up to find a slender, red-headed woman with a diaper bag over one shoulder and a baby on the opposite hip. “I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced, although I’ve seen you around town of course. I’m Robin and this is Birdie.”
Birdie had a fistful of her mother’s auburn hair and an expression of deep suspicion that she turned immediately on the plate.
“Have a seat,” Sylvie offered, and Robin sank into it with a grateful sigh, settling Birdie on her knee. She gave Maris a friendly smile, and Maris smiled back, liking her immediately.
“What did I miss?” Robin asked.
“Flora’s pairing Maris off to Garrick,” Sylvie said.
“Oh, yes. I saw that in the newsletter.” Robin snagged a hushpuppy and pinched a soft crumb off it for Birdie, who accepted it like a queen accepting tribute. “I kept house for him for the better part of a year. You want the inside scoop?”
“No,” she said. “What newsletter?”
“He works all the time,” Robin said, ignoring the question.
“There’s a room at the end of the west corridor that he wouldn’t let me enter.
He restored the whole library himself and I caught him in there one evening just standing, not doing anything.
Looking up at it.” She fed Birdie another crumb.
“He’s the loneliest male I’ve ever met and he’d rather chew glass than say so. ”
Her chest suddenly ached. Down on the river a boat motor coughed and caught. Birdie mashed her crumb against her cheek and looked pleased with the result.
“He’s not lonely,” she said finally. “He’s got a company and a mansion and hundreds of employees.”
“Sure.” Robin gave her a sympathetic smile. “And you’ve got a shop and a son and a whole town that likes you. Doesn’t stop you spending the evening alone after Toby’s down, does it?”
She looked at her tea.
“Leave her be, Robin.” Flora walked by in time to hear Robin’s question. She reached over and patted Maris’s hand with one small, surprisingly gentle hand. Then she ruined it entirely by adding, “I give it a month.”
“There’s nothing to give,” she protested, but Flora had already moved on. Birdie began to howl about the injustice of a finished hushpuppy. And Maris found, to her irritation, that she was smiling.
Half an hour later she left Sylvie and Robin talking and walked home to pick up her moisture meter and the case of little numbered flags she used for marking specimens.
She threw them in her work tote and slung it over her shoulder and walked around to the mansion gates.
They were open but she couldn’t see anyone around.
She told herself she wasn’t disappointed.
She let herself through and up the drive, past the scaffolding and the freshly raked gravel that hadn’t needed raking.
Around the south side of the house lay the rose garden, where she’d left off the day before.
The measurements were done, but she wanted to mark off the specimens she’d already discovered and see where the water wanted to go.
She came around the corner of the house with her arms full of equipment and stopped dead.
Garrick sat on a low stone bench on the terrace next to the house, wings folded, head bowed, hands on his knees.
He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. In the sunlight his skin had gone the flat, dead grey of the bench beneath him and the carved creatures crouched along the eaves overhead.
A leaf had settled on one broad shoulder and stayed there.
Stone.
She dropped the tote. The moisture meter hit the gravel, and the case of flags burst and scattered bright little pennants across the path. She was moving before she’d decided to move, dropping to her knees in front of him and pressing her hands to his chest.
Hard. Cold. As cold as the bench, as the wall, as—
“You’re—” Her voice cracked as her hands scrabbled up to his throat, feeling for a pulse, for warmth, for him, and finding only grey stone. “No. No, no, no—Garrick—Garrick—”
Warmth blossomed under her palms, moving across him the way sun moves across a floor. In the space of a single breath she felt the stone turn to skin and heat and the vibration of a living person. His pulse throbbed under her hands.
Gold flooded his eyes when they opened, blazing in the sunlight before they settled slowly back to grey.
For a moment neither of them moved. Her hands were still on his throat, and his breath stirred the loose hair at her temple.
She was close enough to see the faint striations in his skin, like grain in polished marble.
Close enough to catch that warm-mineral-and-woodsmoke smell which she had sworn up and down she hadn’t noticed.
She had noticed it immediately, and thought about it at least twice since.
“You’re alive,” she said stupidly.
“Yes.” His voice came out rough, like the first turn of an unused engine. His gaze dropped to her hands, still framing his neck, and something moved in his face that she couldn’t read. “And you’re touching me.”