The Meadow 21 scar ran across his forehead, cleanly bisecting his right brow. “Do you know him?” Gaelan asked softly. Alannah started to shake her head, but stopped. There was something there, someone there who her mind was trying to bring forward from the past. Then she had it. In Playdoh flesh, the boy’s cleft chin looked weak and misshapen. In bronze, it created a beautiful, whimsical dimple. “Come with me,” she ordered, and started across the rows at a run. One of the deputies was so startled that he actually unsnapped his holster. The others stared at her fleeing figure with open-mouthed astonishment. Luckily, Gaelan Newman, running to catch up, was too winded to say all the nasty things he was no doubt thinking. Crossing into one of the older sections of graves, Alannah stopped and pointed at one of the most expensive, and most haunting, statues in the cemetery. “My God,” Gaelan whispered. He wasn’t staring at the woman, forever frozen in the act of running on bare feet. He was looking at the two little boys holding her hands, identical in their bronze cast innocence and big eyed beauty. They were the forever children of Evelyn Ludlow and one of them had come home. In the Walsh house, daily life happened in the kitchen with its high ceilings, pastel blue walls and wonderful smells. Alannah’s mother was chopping onions and carrots while her father sat at the table, peeling and carving potatoes into perfect wedges. Alannah loved to watch her father work with his hands, but that hadn’t always been the case. When she was eleven, Alannah discovered that her waif frame fit perfectly in the window well of her father’s embalming room. After thirty hellish minutes on the school bus, she found solace in her private world behind the oleander bushes. Her quick mind worked to make sense of her father’s actions in the dark little room below the old chapel. At dinnertime, she would watch his hands—watch them carving meat or sopping up gravy with bread slices—and remember where they had been and what they had been doing to the lifeless forms
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