The Meadow 17 call to law enforcement would bring the death circus, an especially ugly piece of “out there” into her sanctuary. And with it would come a man she’d been avoiding since the eighth grade. Pale and wispy girls who live in small town cemeteries don’t have friends. At least not living ones. Alannah’s mother had helped her learn the Greek alphabet so she could greet the stern looking men and women pictured on the tombstones in 6A and B. At ten, she’d studied the Japanese tea ceremony and sown a kimono so she could perform the ritual for the residents of section 14. Survivor’s guilt had kept her away from the babies and children until she learned to imagine their joy in her company and in the little beaded trinkets she made for them. If her grandmother was to be believed, Alannah was the shadow child left by fairy beggars in exchange for a silver coin and a sip of red ale. Mind full of poetry and angst, ears full of music, she had fluttered like a heath moth through the midnight cemetery. In all seasons, it had been a wonderland filled with squirrels and rabbits, woodpeckers and magpies, and twenty thousand immovable friends. At school, however, Alannah Walsh was the shadow child who hadn’t been ransomed from the underworld. By thirteen, she had become colorless and cobwebby enough to earn the unimaginative nickname of Elvira and to be serenaded by badly hummed renditions of The Addams Family theme. Even the weird kids shunned her once they learned she wouldn’t be their ticket to high-stakes shenanigans in the cemetery. When she stopped a pack of Junior Varsity football players from stoning a wounded Canada goose, she became a leper. One of those fourteen year olds was Gaelan Newman. In the ridiculous tradition of small town, small school deities, he never travelled without an entourage of worshipful boys sucking at the popularity teat. To Alannah, though, he seemed like a herd-bound beast surrounded by oxpeckers. Circling and diving, they picked off the ticks and scabs of an ill-fitting, molting coat of arrogance. Roaming the cinder block hallways,
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