Many children find their grandparents a mystery. The elderly seem to inhabit a strange, slow-moving world of fussy antique furniture, old photographs, and memories. Often, from the viewpoint of children, the elderly seem obsessed with death, both their own impending mortality and that of the loved ones who have gone before them. When young Jenny Reade comes to spend a few months on Cape Cod with her widowed grandmother, it is perhaps natural that she takes her for a mad woman.

Geneva's husband, after all, has been dead a long time, yet the old woman still searches the'shore for clues to his disappearance, and seems to expect his momentary return.

Jenny's own life has not been entirely happy. There has been unspecified trouble in the family, a result, perhaps, of her grandmother and father's inability to accept the elder Reade's death.

Through their contact...