It was more work than Eula had let on, and more work than my department head had guessed, but I was here, and I didn’t like jobs half done.
Over in the eastern part of the gardens stood the hedge maze with pristine boxwoods at least eight feet high. Thankfully I didn’t have to upkeep those; that was Wykofski’s job. While Lilymoor was rather large, it worked with a very small staff and some volunteers.
I didn’t want to waste any volunteers’ time crawling around, squeezing between shrubs, trying to find vine roots, so I went about it on my own. Technically, I was a degree-carrying hor-ticulturist, and most of us didn’t like to be calledgardeners. But I liked the whimsy to the word. Besides,a gardenerflowed off the tongue a lot easier thana horticulturist.
I kept losing track of the vines in the dense boxwoods, and then when I thought I’d found them again, turned out it wasanothervine from elsewhere.
After a few tries, I threw my hands up in defeat, tore off my gloves, and went to sit in the shade with an aggravated sigh.
There, I took a deep breath.
“Every vine has a root,” I reminded myself. There was no sense in getting frustrated. And if I was being truthful, it wasn’t really the vines at all.
Today, ten years ago, Harrie and I had visited Lilymoor.
Silly, I chastised myself and closed my eyes.You knew today would be hard. No need to make it harder.
Finally, a breeze swept up the cliffs and through the box-woods. It felt good and cool, bringing with it the smell of brine, and the telltale scent of a storm off the coast. I closed my eyes in relief. At least the wind had returned. I just had to waitout the heat, and I had. The bugs hummed around me, as if just as relieved.
Evening sunlight shifted in between the hedges, yellow melting into soft orange. It must have been golden hour already, and Lilymoor—or at least the gardens open to the public—closed at sundown.
There was still so much to do to get ready for the bicentennial in a month and a half. Entire gardens to open back up. Weeds to pull and roses to deadhead and trumpet vines to manage and I was still thinking of introducing ladybugs to take care of the aphid problem in the Wildflower Garden—
There was a soft creak, like a door opening.
My eyes snapped open and followed the sound.
Across the path, bathed in the golden light from the setting sun, a door stood against a wall of thick boxwood hedges. It was faded blue, its hinges rusted, looking old and tired. Another gust of summer wind pushed it open a little more.
Had there been a door there before?
Putting my sun hat on again, I propped my shovel up by the bench and went over to it, more puzzled than anything else. I’d walked this estate inch by inch. Cataloged it as I’d gone through the work to be done. How could I have missed this?
I glanced inside, my confusion mounting. Barren flower beds and snarling vines and half-finished paths. I didn’t remember there being a garden off from the Hedges, but maybe Eula had constructed it in the last ten years, and just forgot to tell me?
Curious, I pulled the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.
3
cafuné
The garden was small and strangely shaped—an irregular rectangle, with a longer wall on the south side where the door was, across from a narrower archway at the other end, where the garden walls encircled a beautiful old willow tree. Oddly, I’d say it was shaped like a keyhole.
But maybe that fit, considering the garden itself was . . .unusual, to say the least.
If I didn’t know where I was, I wouldn’t have guessed it was at Lilymoor at all. It wasn’t overgrown or weed infested like some of the closed areas I had been tending to this last month, which was all the more strange.
Dogwoods and pin cherry trees sat in flush garden beds, their leaves gnawed on by some hungry caterpillar, while the soil at their roots was a soft and rich brown that told me it was somehow still fresh, even though it very much seemed like this place hadn’t been touched in a long time. There was a half-built gazebo, and an overturned wheelbarrow in a barren garden bed, packets of seeds scattered from a fallen wicker basket, seeds, not yet sprouted.
While the rest of Lilymoor hummed with life and colors, this place had … a lot of brown, a lot of dirt, and a lot of ideas that were never planted.
Unfinished, I realized.
How could I have missed this?
The willow tree itself was enormous up close—I wondered how I couldn’t see it from any of the other gardens—but maybe the angle of the walls prevented me. It had to have been here for years. A decade, maybe longer.
But what startled me most was the man asleep beneath it.
