Kirjahaku

May, 1968. Expelled from school and mourning the sudden death of her father, Elli flees to the family summerhouse overlooking Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod. There she learns to fish, works a chambermaid, and meets the clan of dropouts who live on Sipson's Island, a mile away across the water. Dodging the Vietnam war draft, they are sheltered there by Martin, a wealthy eccentric art collector and the island's owner. Martin believes his beloved dead wife still roams its shores, and thinks he has discovered a way to bring her back. Meanwhile, Elli gets to know the real owner of Sipson's Island, the last sachem of the native Nausets, who lived there two centuries before. She and Martin each find their gateway to the past through the spontaneous alchemy of abstract painting, which connects them to other, older stories of art, love and family.

Cape Cod artist Owen Langbroek receives a letter from Greece, a lawyer notifying him that he has inherited a house on one of the islands. The house belonged to his father, a man who vanished when Owen was small, never to be seen or heard from again. Owen travels to the island to see the house and there he finds a journal written by his father. As he becomes involved in the details of daily life among the island's Greek and ex-pat community, Owen reads the journal and begins to know his father. One of the main characters in the journal was the great love of his life. Another is still living on the island, a scam artist who involved his father in various illegal schemes and now challenges Owen's rightful ownership of the house. Eventually the two stories begin to knit together as Owen makes some startling discoveries that force him to step into his father's shoes, confront their shared enemy and unravel the mystery of his desertion.

Theo meets Ria in 1939, at summer camp on Cape Cod. One day Ria finds an historic bronze medallion given by English settlers to the Indians who helped them. She gives it to Theo's friend Casco, a hermit who lives in a wigwam in the woods. Casco has run away from civilization to live like his ancestors, the Indian tribe who once occupied the area. When Theo finds Casco dead, apparently murdered, and the medallion missing, he buries his friend there in the woods, then hides in the wigwam, trying to piece together what happened. The mystery of Casco's death becomes the enduring theme of Theo and Ria's friendship as the years go by. Searching for Casco's murderer leads them through the Cape's Indian and Pilgrim past, into the world of art and antiquities, and ultimately to some shocking revelations.