Page 62 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“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.

CHAPTER 20

The problem is solvable. That was Garrick’s first thought, and his second, and his third. It was how his mind worked—a problem arrived, and he took it apart until he found a solution. He’d spread the Hollow Ridge file across the long table in the study by Monday morning, and by Monday afternoon he had a list.

“There are studies for this,” he told Maris. She stood on the other side of the table with her arms crossed, still dressed for the garden, dirt drying pale on her knees. She’d knelt in the rose bed all day and then come up to the house because he’d asked her to. “Environmental impact studies. You bring in a botanist, document the colony, define a buffer. If the population’s viable you fence it and route the grading around it. If the seep’s the only issue, you protect the recharge zone. It’s a hydrology question. Those are answerable.”

“And if it can’t be routed around?”

“Then you transplant.” He turned the survey so she could see it and tapped the north slope. “There are firms that do nothing but move sensitive species. You lift the whole stand, soil column intact, and set it down on protected ground. I’ve done it before, on a wetland job outside Asheville.”

He’d expected her to be relieved. He’d built the list for her. She’d looked so stricken over that photograph, and he’d wanted to hand her a solution the way he’d hand a foreman a fix. Here. This works. Stop worrying. He was good at this. It was the one form of help he trusted—find the fault, price the fix, get it done.

She didn’t look relieved. She looked at him the way she’d looked at the Bobcat in her driveway.