"Don't you 'Oh, Sister' me," Kathleen says. "I'm sick of this pretending you don't remember what life was like here. Even for you, the fair-haired daughter, it was no bed of roses."

Gertrude is hyperventilating. "Should I get your smelling salts?" Lola asks.

It is 1918, and the three Holloway sisters have gathered at the family homeplace to determine the identity of the human skeletal remains found in the millpond. Fifteen years ago, their sister Rhoda, a free spirit who heard ghosts on the wind and loved to climb the waterwheel at the family's gristmill, vanished into the night, never to be heard from again.

Though Hackberry Hill is only a couple of hours distant from the thriving Alabama city where two of the sisters now live, it exists worlds apart. For Gertrude, the society matron, coming home means confronting strictly repressed memories. For Lola, the young sophisticate, it brings deep mourning for a lost loved one. For Kathleen, the bitter sister who stayed behind, the gathering is an interruption to both her public routine and her private passion.

Over the course of two days, the Holloway women peel back the layers of a complicated past to arrive at a truth that will begin to reconcile a family that has too long been apart.

In this richly textured novel, people—from the urbane Jason Howard to the long-dead Miss Lucy to the earthy George Craven—are not at all what they seem on the surface. Though often at odds, together they hold the key to solving a mystery that is both painful and liberating.