Can someone come back from the dead?
It all starts with a torn photograph, tucked in a Nancy Drew mystery, that 13-year-old Ali finds, as she is digging through a box of old books from her grandmother's house. It's a picture of her mother, her aunt and someone else. Just an arm shows in the picture and on the back of the photo someone has written Claire, Dulcie and T.... Ali heads to the kitchen to ask her mom about the mysterious T and suddenly her mom is shrill and tense and slamming her bedroom door with a headache.
Ali's life turns when her Aunt Dulcie shows up to ask if Ali can come to the old cabin in Maine to watch her young cousin Emma this summer. For Ali this is a chance to escape her mother's control.... a chance to breathe and explore the world. Mom and Aunt Dulcie are quick to say neither one of them can remember the other girl in the photograph. Why?
Ali finds herself spending the summer at the old house by the lake where her mother had always vacationed as a child. She's there with her aunt and her cousin, Emma. Ali is hoping to solve the mystery, and one day a new girl, Sissy, shows up. Sissy with her anger and her spitefulness, casting a shadow on the summer days and exuding mystery with every step and every word. Where does she come from? Who is Sissy, and who was the third person in that photograph?
200 pages 978-0547076454 Ages 10-13
Keywords: mystery, supernatural, thriller, suspense, summer, family, 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old, 13 year old
Recommended by: Barb Langridge, abookandahug.com
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Mary Downing Hahn is at her chilling best in this supernatural tale, where the long-buried secret of a young girl's death in a canoe accident relentlessly makes its way to the surface of an idyllic vacation.
A family secret is at the root of Mary Downing Hahn's story of supernatural events in Maine. Thirteen-year-old Ali is eager to spend her vacation with Aunt Dulcie, helping to care for her little niece, Emma, in the lake house where Dulcie and Claire, Ali's mother, spent summers. Claire, who is phobic about water, is dead set against her going but is forced to agree. The vacation by the lake turns unpleasant when Ali and Emma meet a mean, spiteful kid named Sissy. Emma idolizes and imitates Sissy, becoming bratty and hostile and accepting Sissy's dangerous dares. Sissy keeps talking about Teresa, a girl who drowned under mysterious circumstances when Claire and Dulcie were kids. At first Ali thinks Sissy is just trying to scare her with a ghost story, but soon she discovers the real reason why Sissy is so angry: she is the ghost of Teresa and blames Claire and Dulcie for her death.---from the publisher
