Fun and a little hard work. That's all Tess Haviland has in mind when Ike Grantham pays her for her graphic design work on the run-down nineteenth-century carriage house on Boston's North Shore. Then Ike disappears and Tess finds herself with much more than a simple weekend project to get her out of the city. It's not just the rumors that the carriage house is haunted-it's the neighbors: six-year-old Dolly Thorne, her reclusive babysitter, Harley Beckett ... and especially Dolly's father, Andrew Thorne, who has his own ideas about why Tess has turned up next door. But when Tess discovers a human skeleton in her dirt cellar, she begins to ask questions about the history of the carriage house, the untimely death of Andrew's wife ... and Ike's disappearance. Questions a desperate killer wants to silence before the truth reveals that someone got away with murder.