When twelve-year-old Emma Graham, a waitress at her motherś decaying resort hotel and now the youngest cub reporter in the history of La Porteś 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. The sumptuous Belle Rouen,...

Twelve-year-old Emma Graham becomes obsessed with the story of Mary-Evelyn Devereau--a girl just Emma's age who drowned in Spirit Lake forty years earlier. In the course of her investigation, Emma learns secrets best left untold and must make some grown-up decisions about right and wrong.