"Louisa Hilliard is the last descendant of one of Charleston's oldest and most prominent families. A sixty-year-old spinster, she has spent her life doing good works, volunteering, and, more recently, tending to the needs of her aging mother. But when a hurricane floods the city, Louisa's life is turned upside down. Trying to put her house back in order, she comes upon the diary of one of her ancestors.

The diary describes Charleston in the 1830s, when it was a vibrant port city of whites and blacks, and recounts the story of Diana, a nineteenth-century slave who worked for the Hilliards but sought to improve her life and her means and was severely punished.".

"As Louisa reads the diary and Diana's fate gradually is revealed, she begins to sense that a presence is roaming through her house - objects are missing, moved, dented, and seemingly handled. Louisa attempts to appease this presence and set right age-old wrongs, and in the process discovers how her own life is entangled in her family's haunted history."--BOOK JACKET.