Page 12 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“They’re pretend ones.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the wings are wrong,” he said. “They’d never get off the ground.”

Toby studied the roofline with the gravity of a building inspector, then turned back to him.

“Can you get off the ground?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Toby said, and went back to looking up at the house.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Maris asked quietly.

“Why would I mind?”

She opened her mouth, and then shut it again.

She started on the south side, where the roses were, but all of the beds were buried under twenty years of brambles, and the tape kept snagging. She crouched and swore under her breath and shook it loose and crouched again.

“Hold this,” she said to Toby, on the fourth bed, and gave him the end of the tape.

The boy took it in both hands and walked backwards down the bed with his eyes on his mother’s face. He stopped well short of where the bed actually ended and stood there gripping the tape like it might get away from him.

Maris wrote down the number without a flicker, and Garrick, who had spent fifteen years correcting measurements taken by experts, said nothing at all.

He followed them as they moved through the garden, the air full of the scent of greenery, and honeysuckle, and sun-warmed stone. At some point he took over the clipboard so he could write down the numbers Maris called out. Toby carried the other end of the tape from bed to bed with tremendous seriousness. And Garrick stopped thinking about the roof or the board or the door at the end of the west corridor.

“There are steps over here,” Maris said as she reached the edge of the rose garden and pushed aside another thicket of brambles. “Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Someone terraced this garden. That’s why the water isn’t sitting on the upper beds. If your mother did it, she knew exactly what she was doing.”

“She knew what she was doing,” he said quietly, and she looked at him and nodded.

“I can put two of my crew on the brush clearance,” he said, when they finally circled back to the house. “It’s a week’s work with a brush cutter and they’re idle until the Asheville job starts.”

She took the clipboard out of his hand and frowned at him.

“I’d rather do it myself.”

“It’s five acres of brush.”

“I know exactly how much it is.” She started winding in the tape, her voice just a hair short of irritated. “But clearing the brush is when you find out what’s underneath. If you turn a crew loose with brush cutters I’ll lose half the plants I’m meant to be saving. I’m planning to do most of it myself, but if I need to hire someone, I’ll hire them and I’ll bill you for it.”

He wanted to argue—it was going to be a long, difficult job—but he forced himself to nod instead.

“All right.”

“All right?” Her face was so suspicious, he had to bite back a smile.

“I’m the one who hired you to find out what’s under there,” he said. “I trust you know the best way to do that. It isn’t a complicated arrangement.”

She looked at him for a second longer, as though checking the ground for a trap, then went back to winding up the tape.

“Mama.” Toby walked towards them with the other end of the tape wound twice around his wrist. “Dot says her nana can fly but only downhill.”