When Elizabeth Webb, grieving the loss of her husband, arranges with her cousin, Ann, to live in the family homeplace in Todd’s Crossing during the summer, she thinks it will give her a long-desired opportunity to get to know her mother’s family and the place where she grew up. But once established in the Drinkard house, troubling incidents convince her that someone doesn’t want her there. Ann is reticent about family matters, and it is from Mary Agnes Caudill, a fifth-grade schoolteacher, that Elizabeth learns of the gossip surrounding her grandfather’s bringing Ellen Bender to the Drinkard house as housekeeper, and the common belief that old Amos and Ellen were using her attic bedroom as a love nest while his wife lay dying downstairs. But most disturbing of all is that Ellen, who survived both Amos and his wife, continued to live alone in the Drinkard house; and that, though long dead at this point, is sometimes seen sitting at the window of that locked attic bedroom. But it is when Elizabeth, Randall, and Mary Agnes take refuge from a storm in a derelict strawberry campers’ house that they make a discovery that convinces Elizabeth that a murder has occurred forty years ago, unsuspected by anyone, and that the event is somehow linked to the locked attic bedroom in the Drinkard house. |