Daring and impulsive, Laney McCall lived for the moment. And now she was dead. Her battered body had washed ashore in mist-enshrouded waters below desolate Crybaby Bridge. An accident, they said.

After three months of plaguing misgivings, Laura Graham, Laney's cousin and lifelong friend, returns to their small hometown of Redpath, South Carolina, and her high school reunion, determined to find some answers to Laney's puzzling death.

When a search of Laney's bungalow reveals a locket belonging to the long-dead child Amanda, Laura realizes she is enmeshed in not one mystery, but two. Then, at a class picnic at Willowbend, home of the locally prominent Squires family, she is lured to the cupola by a haunting music box tune. Later, the same fragile song entices her to follow an elusive figure in white to Amanda's lonely grave in the Squires Family cemetery.

"I'm going to meet Amanda," Laney had said before she died. Had she discovered a dangerous secret?

Now, in what she assumed was the sheltering town of her childhood, Laura must uncover the secret of Amanda's life before she can come face to face with her irrational fear of Crybaby Bridge and the truth about her cousin's death.