The sun shone overhead and the families milling around outside the wall laughed and yelled. Inside the wall was an unusual seclusion that still allowed her to feel a part of things.Then she saw how much work Ryan had done, mostly without the help of his crew, and her heart trembled. Bags of rocks sat nearby. Clear buckets held rocks that had been sorted by color. The white turtleheads that formed the back border were beginning to bud and would be blooming by the parade.Lining the turtleheads, stretching from one set of steps to the other, a horizontal row of black rock formed a line. Vertical lines delineated sections that would be individual pictures with another horizontal line forming the bottom of the frame.The individual squares would depict the shared history of Whispering Cove and Maine. At the base of each square, the decade had been chiseled into a flat white stone and then smaller black stones had been glued in the outline. Only a few squares waited for her more artistic eye—according to one of his voicemails.Starting with the 1950s, the first square had a large, flat stone sitting on a bed of blue mulch.
