It is the summer of 1972, and writer Rianne Tavener returns to the seaside village of Port Carlyle, Nova Scotia, her childhood home. Owen Sweeney, an eccentric museum curator and guardian of the local burying ground, hires Rianne to oversee projects for the village's upcoming bicentennial celebrations. He shows her the damaged Victorian-era journal of the young woman who is buried beneath the graveyard's most distinctive headstone. Alyda Teasdale was seventeen and unmarried in 1897, the year she and her newborn baby died under mystifying circumstances.

Intrigued by the journal, Rianne...

It is the summer of 1972, and writer Rianne Tavener returns to the seaside village of Port Carlyle, Nova Scotia, her childhood home. Owen Sweeney, an eccentric museum curator and guardian of the local burying ground, hires Rianne to oversee projects for the village's upcoming bicentennial celebrations. He shows her the damaged Victorian-era journal of the young woman who is buried beneath the graveyard's most distinctive headstone. Alyda Teasdale was seventeen and unmarried in 1897, the year she and her newborn baby died under mystifying circumstances.

Intrigued by the journal, Rianne...