The child garden - Catriona McPherson

A long-lost friend is a stranger you think you know

Eden
was its name. "An alternative school for happy children," said the
brochure.
"A load of hippies running wild in the woods," said the
locals.
After a suicide it closed its doors and the children scattered.

Thirty
years later, it's a care home; its grounds neglected and overgrown, its
only neighbour Gloria Harkness, who acts as tenant-caretaker in a
rundown farmhouse to be close to her son.
Nicky lives in the home,
lighting up Gloria's life and breaking her heart every day.

Nicky
and a ragbag of animals aren't enough to keep loneliness at bay, and
when Gloria's childhood friend and secret sweetheart, Stephen "Stig"
Tarrant, turns up at her door one night, all she can see is the boy she
knew. She lets him in.

Stig's being stalked by an Eden girl, he
says. She has goaded him into meeting her at the site of the suicide.
Except that suddenly, after all these years, the dead are beginning to
speak and suicide is not what they say.


When the children of
Eden were sent out into the world they took a secret with them. And
someone is making sure they take it to the grave.