Historian Gillian Adams drops both her academic career in Vancouver and her plans to spend her sabbatical in London with policeman lover Edward in order to return to her childhood home up the Hudson and care for her aging mother whose heart is giving out. Gillian keeps her hand--and brain-- in with a light guest-lecturer load at sleepy rural Stanton College, a campus that seems serene but is soon unsettled by the murder of a student on a lonely stretch of road. It's a shocking act breaking the rural peace of the area. No less unnerving are the revelations that follow about the girl's double life and its implications for those known to Gillian since childhood. Facing both her past and her future as her mother's life moves towards its close, Gillian copes with the opening--and healing--of old wounds.