Publisher's Synopsis
Having made his fortune in the Alaska and California gold rushes Joshua Cantwell headed to Cape Cod to build the family summerhouse that had long been his dream. Considered by the locals to be crazy for building on the shore because of the terrible mosquitoes and exposure to the worst weather, Joshua persevered at a time when shore property had no value to anyone but him. Five generations of Cantwells summered at Bay House filling the house with happy children and the bay with catboats. Fifteen year old Teddie Cantwell's mysterious death in the brackish pond behind Bay House in 1925, although called a drowning, altered his sister Beatrice's life by filling her mind with doubts and terrifying images of something evil in the pond. Beatrice's love for Bay House never wavered, however. She chose to live there with her young child after she was widowed, although she made the pond off limits. Only after there were other "drownings" in the pond did she call upon an old family friend at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to investigate. Befriending marine biologist Nancy Folger and journalist Frank Benson began, for all of them, a friendship that put Beatrice Cantwell's fear of the pond in a new perspective and brought her new hope for her dreams for Bay House. A family saga, a house with its own story, both joyful and terrible, and a friendship that would outlive the last Cantwell of Bay House, this is a story that will fill the heart and challenge the reader's beliefs.
