Chapter 19 #2
They got about four steps inside before the room noticed.
It wasn’t loud. Fairhaven was too polite for loud.
It was worse—a small, satisfied lull, two dozen people deciding at once not to say anything and communicating everything with their eyebrows.
A fork paused. A cup hovered. By the counter a fairy she didn’t know murmured something to a troll female she did, and both of them smiled into the menu.
Garrick put a hand on her back and steered them to the corner booth. He folded himself into it with the careful movements of a very large male in a room built for much smaller ones, and Toby scrambled up beside him and started straight in on the skeleton.
“It’s wearing a shirt.”
“It is.”
“Skeletons don’t get cold. They don’t have any skin.”
“No.”
“So why has it got a shirt?”
Garrick considered this seriously. “Dignity.”
Toby thought about that, nodded slowly, and picked up his menu upside down. Rona arrived with the coffee pot a few seconds later.
“Coffee, hon?”
“Please.”
Rona had the cup filled before she’d finished agreeing, and deposited a glass of milk in front of Toby. Then she stopped and crossed her arms. She stood there in her pink uniform with the pot in one hand and looked at Garrick for a good three seconds.
“Rona,” he said.
“Mr. Stonehaven.”
“Ma’am.”
She went away. Two booths over, Gladys Cravets had a clipboard and was informing somebody—this is not an accusation, she said, and she wanted that understood—that the costume contest could not be judged by anyone who had entered it. The somebody said it certainly sounded like one.
Then Rona came back and put a mug in front of Garrick, along with a plate. Eggs, grits, a slab of country ham and three biscuits.
“March,” she said. “I remember.”
Garrick looked at the plate. “I was in a bad mood in March.”
“You were. Eat that.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maris had to put a hand over her mouth. When she looked up Rona had gone and Garrick was cutting the ham as though his antisocial ways had not just been publicly forgiven in front of thirty people.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Little thorn.”
“I said nothing.”
The bell over the door chimed, and a small orc in a lime-green velour tracksuit came in on a gust of cold air, YOU WERE MINT TO BE written across her chest in gold cursive.
“Well.” Flora arrived at the booth without appearing to have crossed the floor and put both hands on the edge of the table. “Would you look at this? A gargoyle, a gardener, and a young man of excellent taste, all in one booth on a fine Sunday morning, exactly as the good Lord and I intended.”
“Good morning, Flora,” she said, in a voice that was only a little strangled.
“Don’t you Good morning, Flora me, dear.
I could roast a chicken by the heat coming off the pair of you.
” She pointed a gnarled finger from Garrick to her, clearly delighted.
“Two months I’ve been telling this town.
Sylvie owes me twenty dollars and there’s a male at the hardware store about to have a very poor Sunday. ”
“You bet on us?”
“I bet on everyone, dear. That’s the business model.” She patted Maris’s cheek with a papery hand, and under all the outrage of it there was something so pleased and so fond that Maris couldn’t work up the will to be embarrassed. “Isn’t that right, Garrick Stonehaven?”
Garrick looked at her over his coffee. “I plead the fifth.”
“You made a joke,” Flora informed him, enchanted. “That’s her doing. You were a stone wall in a nice shirt when you came back to this town.” She rapped the table. “Anyway. Have you people heard about the festival?”
“What festival?” she asked, grateful for any subject that was not the heat coming off her.
“Halloween, keep up. Fairhaven does it properly. Pumpkins the size of tractor tires, and Sam comes up out of the river to judge the costumes, which is a treat, because he takes it very seriously.” She fixed her bright black eyes on Toby.
“You’ll want a costume, young man. Big field this year. What are you going to be?”
Toby put down his upside-down menu with a decisive nod.
“A gargoyle.”
The booth went quiet. She didn’t look at Garrick, but she heard him put his cup down very carefully. When she risked a look, his jaw had gone tight and the gold had come up through the grey as he looked at the top of Toby’s head.
Flora, who missed nothing in this life and probably the next, beamed like the sunrise.
“Excellent choice. Ambitious. You’ll need wings, and I know a woman.” She straightened, gave the table one last approving thump, and sailed off towards the counter to ruin a man’s Sunday.
Rona dropped back by with blueberry pancakes for Toby and avocado toast for her. Perfect as always.
“I can be a gargoyle, can’t I?” Toby asked, suddenly uncertain, looking between them. “For the costume. Is that all right?”
“Yes.” Garrick’s voice dropped, lower and rougher than usual.
“You could help. You know what they look like.”
“I do.” Something worked in his throat. “I’ll help.”
She took a sip of her coffee so she’d have something to do with her face.
The warning hum had stopped altogether. It was very hard to hold anything lightly when her five-year-old had just announced in a café that he wanted to look like the male across the table, and that male had taken it like a blessing.
Doomed, Robin had said, and Robin had been right.
Flora had finished at the counter and stopped to talk to Gladys.
“Maris will do the wreaths,” she told her friend cheerfully, looking over at Maris.
“I will not do the wreaths.”
“She’ll do the wreaths,” Flora said to the clipboard, and was gone. Gladys made a note without even looking in her direction.
“I don’t have time to do the wreaths.”
“You’re doing the wreaths,” Garrick said, and she sighed.
“I know I’m doing the wreaths.”
The door opened again and a wall of red-headed cheer came through it.
Aidan spotted them before the bell finished chiming.
He was in flannel rather than the ranger’s uniform, with a battered field notebook in his back pocket and dried mud up one forearm.
He crossed the room with the ease of a male who had never wondered whether a room was glad to see him.
“There she is.” He dropped into the seat beside Maris uninvited and grinned across the table. “And there he is. Hey, Toby. Give me five.” Toby obligingly slapped the offered hand, and Aidan turned to her. “I heard a rumor about a rug.”
“You did not.”
“I didn’t, I made it up just now to see your face, and wow.
” He looked thoroughly pleased with himself.
“Fine. None of my business. I’m actually here for you, Maris.
Put that look away, Garrick, it’s for professional reasons only.
I found something on the survey line yesterday you’re going to lose your mind over. ”
She put her coffee down, glad to be back on firmer ground. “Found what?”
“I heard you were talking about a lily in this café in July. At some length. A red one that hangs its head.” He got his phone out, thumbed to a photograph, and turned it round. “This it?”
Nodding flowers on tall stems, red-orange, six of them in one badly framed shot, nestled against a wet green slope.
She stopped chewing. “Where did you take this?”
“Told you you’d want to see it.”
“Aidan. Where?”
“Wet meadow up past the old logging cut. There’s a seep coming out under the rock and the whole shelf is soaking.” He pulled the notebook out and flipped it open. “Forty stems. Might be fifty. I only walked the bottom half.”
“You counted them?”
“I’m a ranger, Maris. Of course I did.”
“Lilium grayi,” she said, her hands starting to shake. “Do you know how rare that is? There might be a dozen stands that size in the state. A dozen, Aidan.”
“Then you’ll be wanting to go up there.” He put the notebook down and gestured at Garrick with it, and his smile faded. “It’s on the north face of the ridge above Miller’s Creek. The tract Palisade’s developing.”
Garrick’s face changed.
“Hollow Ridge,” Aidan continued. “The luxury project your company’s bidding on.”
The booth went quiet for the second time that morning.
Toby, oblivious, took a huge bite of blueberry pancake. Maris looked down at the photograph, and then up at Garrick, whose face had shut like a door. Damn.