Page 6 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

He remembered that too. His mother had loved the gardens. She’d spent whole summers out there with dirt to the elbow, and his father had teased her about it and joined her whenever he could. After she died, he stopped going outside.

Not immediately. That would have been easier to understand. Instead, the world his father occupied had shrunk a little at a time. First the gardens. Then whole sections of the house. Rooms closed, curtains drawn, fires left unlit. By the time Garrick was twenty-three, there had been four rooms left with anything living in them, and he had been in one of them.

So he’d left.

He’d worked any job he could find and saved his money and built Stonehaven Construction out of a rented office in Atlanta with two draftsmen and a secondhand truck. Fifteen years later, people liked to talk about the fortune he’d made, as though the money had been the point. It hadn’t been. Leaving had been the point.

“You should stay put awhile,” Eric said.

“I’ll consider it.”

“That’s a no.”

“It’s an I’ll consider it.” It was the most he was willing to commit, and Eric, who had known him since before either of them could shift, recognized it for what it was.

“How’s Birdie? Other than the not-sleeping?” he asked, and Eric’s face softened.

“Perfect. Loud. Sticky. Currently puts everything she finds in her mouth, which is why Robin isn’t bringing her up here until you’re done renovating. This place is full of interesting objects at exactly the right height.”

“Bring her anyway. I’ll move the interesting objects.”

“I might.”

They sat without speaking for a while. They’d always been good at that. A catbird worked through the tangle on the far side of the drive. The lawn had gone to meadow years ago, waist-high and seeding. The boxwoods his mother had planted along the south walk had grown into shaggy green monsters that had swallowed the path entirely. The fountain in the center was dry and cracked, full of dead leaves and the exploded remains of last year’s acorns.

Eventually Eric stood and brushed off the back of his jeans. “Well. Ten o’clock. Maris Calder. Widow. One boy. Bought the old Dolan nursery in January and has been quietly putting it back together ever since.”

Garrick looked at him. “You looked her up.”

“I’m the sheriff. I look everybody up. That’s my job.”

“You don’t generally give me reports on my neighbors.”

“You don’t generally let Flora arrange appointments with them.”

“I didn’t let Flora do anything.”

“Of course not.” Eric started down the steps, then turned. “You want to know what Alison says about her?”

“No.”

“She says Maris talks about dirt the way most people talk about their children. Does that help?”

“It doesn’t.”

“No,” Eric agreed pleasantly. “I didn’t think it would.”

Garrick watched the cruiser disappear down the drive and through the iron gates. He had keyed them open earlier and hadn’t gone back to close them. For no particular reason he was willing to admit.

He went inside.

The foyer rose three stories above him, filled with morning light that gleamed on the newly refinished floors. The library was finished, along with the study and the ballroom. The conservatory off the kitchen had taken nearly a year and most of a glazier’s patience. Now, four lemon trees stood in enormous pots beneath the restored glass, and he sometimes sat there in the mornings and read contracts. Most of the house looked like a home again.

At the end of the west corridor there was an oak door whose brass handle had gone dull while every other handle in the house gleamed. He walked past the corridor every day on his way to the kitchen. He didn’t slow down and he didn’t look at it. None of that took any effort anymore.

The kitchen looked much as it always had. It still had the old marble counters and the big old-fashioned range. He’d repainted the wooden cabinets and Robin had scrubbed everything within an inch of its life and he’d called it good. He put on a new pot of coffee and moved to the big window overlooking the garden. From there he could just make out the boundary wall beneath a tangled mass of honeysuckle and Virginia creeper, the solid grey stone that separated his property from the old Dolan place. The place had been empty when he’d gone into stone in December.

It wasn’t sleep, exactly, not the way humans understood it, but his kind occasionally needed to let body and consciousness sink deep into the stone. He had chosen the six weeks over the end of the year when business was slow and he had no other responsibilities. He’d planned to remain that way until the end of January. Instead he’d surfaced two weeks early.