After the funeral for her parents, Jim and Margaret Tilford, twenty-two-year-old Maggie Tilford is left alone in their Indiana farmhouse to grieve. An only child, Maggie is now in charge of preparing the estate for sale. In the dusty attic, a place where she was never allowed as a child, she discovers a trunk that holds the secrets to her past-a past of which she was unaware.  Maggie, a school teacher, is shocked to learn that she was adopted. Once she knows this, she is determined to learn the complete truth. Old photos lead her to Boston and eventually, with the help of Boston attorney Dan Kippington, to Nantucket, a tiny island thirty miles off the coast of Cape Cod.  Their investigation leads them into encounters with a haunted inn, a sinister innkeeper, a deserted Victorian house, a German spy, and an ailing old woman who holds the key to Maggie's past. Maggie's search begins in Boston and ends on Nantucket Island, a place where magical things happen and people fall in love-not only with each other, but with the island as well.