It's a long, hot Halifax summer in 1959 and twelve-year-old Rosalie Norman has a guilty secret. Her no-nonsense, authoritarian mother has fallen and fractured her ankle—and it's all Rosalie's fault. But news that her teenaged cousin has vanished pushes the accident from everyone's minds. Now, to help out, the family has hired the strange new neighbor, a boy named David—or the "Gravedigger" as the other kids cruelly call him—who becomes a key to the mystery. As Rosalie and David search the city's historic North End for her cousin Johnny, Rosalie discovers something about the love and the secrets that bind her family.