Page 81 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“Trogar,” she said.

He looked up.

“Trogar. He draws the digger books Toby makes me read every single night, and he draws bridges the rest of the time, and Sylvie says he keeps his used nails sorted by size.” She was already reaching for her phone. “You want him standing over it telling everybody where to put their hands. Robin too. She’s moved gravestones. Don’t ask.”

“—Robin.” He was making the list now, the way he made every list, fast and complete. Except this one had all his friends’ names on it, and none of them knew yet that they were about to spend a Saturday carrying his father through the halls. He put the phone to his ear. It rang.

“Aidan,” he said, when it picked up. “I need a favor.”

There was a startled silence on the line, and then Aidan’s voice, delighted and incredulous. “Say that again. Slower. I want to remember where I was standing.”

CHAPTER 28

“You cannot put rollers under a grieving male’s father.” Trogar said it without heat, but he moved the steel pipes to one side anyway with the toe of his boot. “You put timber. Oak. Rollers dent the base. You want him to sit right in the roses for a hundred years, you set him on oak and you take your time.”

“Whatever Trogar says,” Houston rumbled from the doorway of the west wing, filling it entirely, horns tipped forward to clear the lintel. The minotaur mayor had shown up at eight with a flatbed and a tarp and a thermos and had not asked a single question. “You point, I lift. That’s the whole of my expertise.”

Maris stood in the corridor with a mug of Rona’s coffee going cold in both hands. She watched half the town she loved arrange itself around a closed door she’d thought was a secret.

It wasn’t a secret. That kept hitting her, over and over, all morning, like something coming loose from a shelf. Aidan had turned up with a coil of rope and Eric behind him, and neither of them had so much as glanced twice at the statue. Grondar had walked straight to it and respectfully put a broad green hand on the shoulder for a moment, the way you’d touch a headstone. Then he got to work assessing the weight.

Trogar had arrived with a canvas kit, every wedge and block and pad in a labeled pocket, and had not spoken to anybody at all until he had walked the route twice, from the room to the roses. Robin had arrived with a roll of felt and a coil of webbing, all business, and said something to Garrick too low for Maris to hear. Whatever it was, it made him nod and put his hand briefly on her shoulder. Nobody was surprised. Nobody was solemn in the wrong way. They were solemn the way you were at any grave—which was to say, they were also drinking coffee and arguing about oak.

“You’re going to want to widen the doorway,” Trogar told Garrick.

“I know.”

“You’re not going to like widening the doorway.”

“I restored the house. I can rebuild a doorway.” He crouched at the base of the statue, running one clawed finger along the join where his father met the plinth. He read it the way he read everything made of stone. “Cut here. He’ll come free cleanly.”

She drifted back a step to let Houston through with the first of the oak timbers over his shoulder, and found Flora at her elbow. Today’s tracksuit was the color of a traffic cone, with GRAVE SITUATION printed across the front in glitter that Maris chose, for her own sanity, not to examine.

“You did that on purpose,” she said.

“The shirt? Obviously. I’ve been saving it.” Flora patted her arm with one small green hand. “Fifteen years I’ve had that shirt waiting for the day Corwin came out of that room. Worth every moth hole.”

Corwin. Maris looked down at her. “You know his name.”

“His name was Corwin Stonehaven and he built half the drystone walls in this valley and he could not carry a tune in a bucket.” Flora said it easily, the way you’d mention anyone’s dead, with no drama attached. “He and Elowen used to fight like cats out in that rose garden every June and be sweet as anything by July. Whole town knew it. Why are you looking at me like I sprouted a second head, girl?”

“I thought—” She stopped, suddenly reexamining what she thought she’d known. “Garrick never talked about him. He kept the door shut. I thought it was private. Something nobody was supposed to know.”

Flora peered up at her, comically baffled, her black eyes bright and sharp.

“Nobody was supposed to know what? That Corwin went to stone? Dear, this town fed that male for years. Rona sent dinners up the hill. I sent Annie twice a week to open the windows. Houston carried his chair out to the roses every spring while he would still sit in it.” She shook her white curls. “He’d go under for a day, then a week, then a fortnight, and we’d all say he’ll be down for his mail on Tuesday. And mostly he was.”

“And then he wasn’t?”

“And then he wasn’t, and not one of us knew for sure. A gargoyle asleep and a gargoyle gone look the same from the outside. Only another gargoyle knows, and the only other one was three states away building a company.” Her voice softened a degree, which for Flora was a landslide. “So there was never a day for him. No service. Nobody carried a casserole anywhere, because who would we have carried it to? And by the time we understood, he’d gone and done it indoors instead of out in the open like a sensible person, where folks could get at him.”

She sighed. “There was never anything strange about the statue, dear. Most gargoyles choose to go to stone at the end, everyone knows that. There’s a whole family of them up past the old mill that’s been standing since before my grandmother’s day and folks leave flowers. It wasn’t the statue we found strange. It was the door. Fifteen years shut. A grave’s a place you go, Maris. You go and you sit and you say your piece and you leave the door open behind you. Shutting it—” She made a small, dismissive gesture at the corridor, the dust, the long dark. “That’s the strange thing. That’s what this whole town’s been quietly worried about since we knew. Not that Corwin went to stone. That his boy stopped visiting him.”

Maris looked past her into the room. Garrick knelt at his father’s feet with Grondar’s hand on his shoulder. Grey dust rose in the light from windows they had just thrown open for the first time in a decade and a half.

And she suddenly understood the morning in a completely different way.

She’d just spent two days having her son’s life measured and found small by two people from a city four hours south. You must find it limiting. A place held at a private school. A house near them. A trust released early to cover the cost of a childhood that fit their expectations, that had the right people at the right parties. All of it delivered so kindly, so reasonably, in that tone she knew in her teeth—the tone that meant this life you’ve built is a phase, dear, and we’re being patient about it.