A once fashionable, now fading resort hotel. A spinster aunt living in the attic. A house full of secrets, uninhabited for almost 50 years. A neglected lake, covered with water lilies. Pettiness and cruelty in small-town America. And Emma Graham, a 12-year-old girl with a passion for double-chocolate ice-cream sodas and decaying lakefronts, and an obsession with the death of another girl 40 years earlier.