A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason.
A week later, her son--beautiful, troubled fifteenyearold
Mark Underbill--vanishes from the
lace of the earth. To his uncle, horror novelist Timothy
Underbill. Mark's inexplicable absence feels like a second
death. After his sister-in-law's funeral, Tim searches his
hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help him
unravel this mystery of death and disappearance. He
soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in
the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother's suicide
Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house
where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge.
No mere empty building, the house on Michigan Street
whispers from attic to basement with the echoes of a
long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underbill
comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history,
Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly
lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy
into her mysterious domain.
