Summer, 1926. A young woman alights from a bus in a Cape Cod village and embarks on an odyssey she cannot foretell. The new art teacher at Chatham School, Elizabeth Channing, has come from an exotic and liberated world, a world so different to this small town. She moves into a cottage beside Black Pond, and from that moment, the ripples she causes move outwards with an increasing ferocity until they create a terrifying storm of lust, anger and, ultimately, death. Seven decades later, the bodies are buried, the headlines are dust, proud Chatham School little but a memory. Only one living soul knows the answer to the questions that tore the soul from the town. Only now can he summon the courage to piece together the jagged fragments of a once tranquil world.