A neglected lake, covered with water lilies and rimmed by blowing grass. A once fashionable, now fading resort hotel. A derelict house full of secrets and dusty furnishings, uninhabited for almost half a century. The death-by-drowning of a twelve-year-old girl forty years in the past. And another twelve-year-old girl who grows increasingly obsessed with this death. With her knack for encouraging adults to reminisce, she begins to put together the...

When twelve-year-old Emma Graham, a waitress at her mother's decaying resort hotel and now the youngest cub reporter in the history of La Porte's Conservative newspaper, discovers the crumbling shell of a fabulous hotel hidden in the woods near her small town of Spirit Lake, she never imagines that the mysteries it holds will bring her one step closer to solving a forty-year-old crime and force a new transgression to light.