Chapter 24 esprit de l’escalier
esprit de l’escalier
As I carried the watering can up the stairs to Eula’s bedroom, I sorted through my feelings from the secret garden.
After crying in front of Rus the other evening, I’d escaped almost immediately without even coming up with a plan, but luckily the door showed itself again yesterday, and we decided to get to work almost immediately.
He would implement the ideas inside the garden, and I would try to figure out where the heck Henry put it.
I found Cyrus exactly where I’d left him the day before, sitting at the stone bench with Henry’s journal, having only just gotten to the end of it by the time I returned.
Time worked in the strangest way in the garden. While it’d been an entire day for me—a day of fending Damnit away with a watering hose—it had been maybe an hour for him. Maybe. It was as if the garden itself was displaced from time entirely.
He had glanced up at me over his round glasses, and he looked so disastrously handsome I immediately worried that I had too much dirt under my nails, which was something I’d never cared about before.
Harrie was always the one who fawned over men in glasses.
I’d never understood it. Not until that moment, as he pinned me to the spot over the frames.
“There’s not much to go by,” he said by way of greeting, and I immediately decided he probably didn’t even notice the dirt under my nails, and quite frankly, it didn’t matter.
I went over to him, my shadow falling across him and the journal, and leaned forward a little to look at it, albeit upside down. “We have less than a month to figure it out.”
“Lucky us,” he agreed, licking his thumb, and flipping the page. “I think the garden might be somewhere on the eastern side. At least, by the dimensions.” Then he frowned and asked, “Do you think you could rent a drone and find it that way?”
“I’ve already looked on Google Maps. No luck,” I replied. “You don’t by chance remember Henry ever saying where it was, do you?”
“Sadly no.”
“Well, that sucks.” I sighed. “A month, then.”
It felt like both an incredible amount of time to find a door hidden in a garden, and no time at all.
“Are you up to the challenge?” he wondered. He met my gaze. The way the sun hit his stormy eyes, it turned them bluer than I’d ever seen.
I nodded. “Let’s find you.”
“If anyone can, I’m sure it’s you.” He said it with such tenderness, I had to look away as a blush colored my cheeks.
As I did, I noticed patches of soft white asters against the walls.
Had they been there before? “And in the meantime, I guess I’ll busy myself here.
The journal’s pretty straightforward, so I’ll start with the gazebo. ”
“Are you sure Tom Ford will appreciate that?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m getting restless just sitting around.”
“You and Oliver both,” I muttered. “It’s a wonder the two of you aren’t related.”
“Best we aren’t. Could you imagine if someone was the worst of both Eula and Henry?”
“Or the best,” I offered.
“I don’t think I’m the best of my uncle.”
“I think you’re too hard on yourself,” I said, realizing the light had shifted on his face. The sun was going to set soon, and I wanted to get out before the garden did that disorienting magic trick again and kicked me out. “When I come back tomorrow, do you want me to bring you anything?”
He stood, too, and decided to walk me to the door. “Gardening gloves, a shovel, and some shears would be a nice start.”
“Any food? Sodas? Updates on your favorite TV show?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “I think you’re forgetting I’ve only been here for a few hours.”
“Ah. Right. To me it’s been weeks.”
“Is that strange to you?”
I gave it a thought. “A little, but I’m sure it’s stranger for you. Do I just leave, and then a few minutes later, I come back?”
He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Basically. I think it’s a little longer, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Weird.”
“A little. Are TV shows what you’d miss? If you were in my shoes?”
“I don’t really watch TV anymore,” I replied.
The only shows I did watch were reality shows, and it was only ever while on the phone with Harriett.
I hadn’t so much as glanced at a TV since she died, so I didn’t know whether Lukas ended up with Tania or Yasmin on the new season of The Bachelor.
Harriett never found out, either. I liked not knowing.
It connected us, still, even though the more time passed the more threadbare that connection became, the less I’d have in common with Harriett anymore, the more I’d experience that she’d never get to.
It was sobering.
He asked softly, “Where do you go, when you get that look?”
Startled, I snapped out of my thoughts. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You look like you’re a thousand miles away sometimes.
” The way he watched me, gently, made the heat rise on my cheeks as I remembered that, for him, it wasn’t even an hour ago that he’d held me while I sobbed.
I’d put distance between me and that disaster, but it was still fresh for him, and that made me even more embarrassed.
“I don’t go anywhere,” I reiterated stubbornly. It wasn’t embarrassment making my heart flutter, because it wasn’t fluttering, it couldn’t flutter, it was just—just—
Indigestion.
“Haven’t really thought about food much,” he said, his eyebrows furrowing.
“But now that I think about it … that feels odd, right? I must be hungry. I might be.” He barked a laugh.
“I really don’t know. Bring me whatever you’d like, I guess.
” Then his mouth twitched into a ghost of a smirk, and not the good kind.
“On the outside, you should probably get to know Oliver a bit more.”
My mind blanked. I froze in my footsteps. “I—I’m sorry. What?”
“He knows this place better than he lets on, trust me. He’ll be a help to you. I doubt he’d say no if you asked.”
I . . . didn’t know what to say to that.
“Besides,” he went on, folding his arms over his chest again and cutting his eyes away, “I fear you are exactly his type.”
As I stood there in my dirty coveralls, shoulders pink and sun hat tipped back on my head and not looking the least bit flattering, my mouth dropped open silently. He must be joking. “I’m . . . what?”
He planted his hand on the small of my back and steered me toward the door.
As he did, he bent toward me from behind and whispered into my ear, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sophie.
” Then he guided me out the door, and before I had the where-withal to turn around and demand an answer, the door had shut and the sun sank below the tree-lined horizon, and the secret garden was gone.
Oliver’s type? He must have been mistaken. I was a woman with perpetual dirt under her nails, who smelled of freshly turned soil and sweat, who cared more about flowers than almost any person I could name—
I glanced down at my dirty hands, at my stained coveralls and work boots.
He had to be mistaken.
Though the next morning I woke up with his voice in my ear still, murmuring in that low, delicious voice, I’ll see you tomorrow, Sophie.
My heart fluttered. It was, decidedly, not indigestion.
But Rus was so very off-limits, not only because he was related to my employer, but because he was stuck in a timeless garden, and he’d just pushed me toward Oliver.
And that shock carried me through the rest of the evening.
I decided that Rus was just being nice. But then why did I feel so—so—frustrated at his suggestion?
As I arrived at Eula’s room, I shoved my tender thoughts to the back of my head and knocked on the open door. “Good morning, I’m here to water your plants. I’ve decided to mix the water with some grow nutrition, too, just to make sure they’re healthy and all.”
Eula was sitting up in a high-back chair in the far corner of the room, reading an Ann Nichols book—the latest and last one, apparently.
She put her bookmark in and looked at me over her round glasses.
They reminded me very much of the glasses Rus had on in the garden, except his had a scratch in the top corner of the left lens.
“Ah,” said Eula, “my savior! Thank you very much, dear. I hear clearing out the Willow Grove is going well?”
“We found a colony of voles, but Wykofski’s in the process of relocating them,” I said, deciding not to go into the method of Wykofski’s relocation process.
He may or may not have rented a vole costume and decided to serenade them with Billy Joel (who he was convinced was a family of voles operating a fleshy mech suit).
I refused to ask questions. As long as he got the job done, that’s all that mattered.
“Delightful. And the lawn itself?”
“Surprisingly green and healthy, though we’re going to treat it a bit to make sure,” I said, watering her pothos, and then the snake plant.
“Good, good. And … how is the wall?”
The wall was, I suspected, the scarred portion of the Willow Grove that was charred by the greenhouse fire.
A few meters of it had to be knocked out for the fire crew to get to the greenhouse itself, which was probably why it burned down almost completely, but nature had overtaken it so thoroughly that if I hadn’t known the wall had been knocked down there, I would’ve guessed the thicket of decade-old trees was purposeful.
“No one will notice, I don’t think. If we want to repair it, we’ll have to dig all this up, so I’m hesitant to . . .”
Her shoulders sagged with relief. “No, no. It feels . . . fitting,” she added with the echo of a smile. “The fire stole so much. It’s nice to know that the garden healed itself regardless. I wish we were half as resilient.”
I often wished that, too.
“I wish it’d never happened, obviously, but I wish more that I had handled it differently,” she went on, setting her book down on the end table beside her, and poured herself a cup of tea from the floral teapot there. “Hindsight is always a curse, dear.”
I thought about my last conversation with Harrie, the coldness of her fingers, the soft and hazy whisper of her words.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I had said, when I could have said anything else—everything else.
That I loved her. That I would miss her.
That I already did. But I kept kicking the can down the road, thinking that if I put it off, if I refused to acknowledge the end, it’d never come.
“Sophie . . .” she’d said, as if she wanted to say something else, but she was so weak, and her words were too heavy.
“Tomorrow,” I had repeated.
And that tomorrow never came.
I blinked, surprised at the tears that burned in my eyes. “Sorry, I should get back to work.” I excused myself quickly and headed down the hall to give a receipt to Yafir for the mulch I’d bought for the Wildflower Garden.
Shake it off, I told myself, wiping under my eyes. I hadn’t thought about that last day in so long—I often refused to let myself. It was a mistake this time. I was just tired and stressed.
That was all.
Halfway to the office, I quickly came to regret even coming up here this morning, because Yafir made a strangled noise in his throat as he stormed out into the hall, jabbing a finger behind him. “That—that blond jock is ransacking my office!” he cried. “He’s tearing it apart!”
To which I heard Oliver shout from the office, “I’m organizing it! Have you seen your files?”
“I know where everything is!” Yafir cried, and then in a panic he ran back in. “You better not touch anything! I have it all where I can find it!”
“That doesn’t help when someone else needs to find it, my guy.”
“I am not your guy.”
“Are those chocolate chips in the bottom of this filing cabinet? And what’s with all this shredded paper down here? Wait, is that—”
There was a sudden shriek, and both men threw themselves out of the office as quickly as they could and slammed the door closed.
Oliver couldn’t figure out how to lock it, while Yafir dragged a chair from the hallway and propped it under the doorknob.
The door opened inward, so it was a shit barricade, anyway.
Oliver told Yafir, “We’re going to need dynamite.”
“At least a bazooka,” Yafir agreed.
“Maybe some machetes. The National Guard. Did you see that thing? It was huge. The size of a cat.”
“I knew something had been rustling around in there, but I thought this house just made noises. You were very brave.”
“Thanks, my guy. I saw my life flash before my eyes.”
As they commiserated, Juliette came up the stairs, clipboard clutched to her chest. She asked me, “What’s going on?”
I sighed. “I think they found a mouse.”
Juliette blinked. “In our office?”
“Sadly.”
I waited for her to gasp and join the men in their dramatic upheaval of being bested by a rodent, but she just asked me to hold her clipboard and went up to the door.
She removed the chair and surveyed the battlefield.
“I’m going to need a broom and two oven mitts,” she told them, like a surgeon preparing for work, as she closed the door again. “And a container.”
An hour later, Juliette had captured the mouse and let it go outside. When Oliver asked her how she’d managed to get so brave, she simply shrugged and told him that she’d lived in New York City most of her life, and those rodents were actually the size of cats.
I agreed. “And some of them even like pizza.”
Oliver declared, “I will never live in New York for as long as I live.”
“You just need a rat wrangler,” Juliette supplied.
“Good thing I know one,” he replied with a wink.
She hid a blush behind her clipboard, and excused herself down the stairs. I gave him a look, and he shrugged.
“What? I’m being truthful.”
“You’re a tease,” I pointed out.
He smirked and leaned into me. “You like it,” he purred, and slipped down the hallway toward his bedroom.
I was glad to see him retreat, because I think my cheeks blushed as red as Juliette’s skirt today, and I fled out of the house and into the garden, where I would rather contend with Damnit than any feelings I definitely did not want to inspect.
I had not imagined that Lilymoor would be a summer of firsts, but I think this was the first time in my life I’d ever been this flustered by not one man but two.
Rus’s voice echoed in my head—I fear you are exactly his type.
If that was true, then who was Rus’s type? And why did I even care?
Somewhere—wherever dead people went—I was sure Harriett was laughing at me. I hoped she liked the view.