Making Peace with the Dead: Deep, Dark, and Dangerous: A Ghost Story by Mary Downing Hahn

In classic ghost stories such as Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story (Avon Camelot Books) and The Old Willis Place, Mary Downing Hahn as established herself as head woman of the haunting tale. But Hahn's novels are not horror stories: her stories are atmospheric, occasionally a bit creepy in a controlled way, but the relationships of her characters with each other and with the spirits with which they become enmeshed are really the theme of her writing.

Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story is such a tale. The story opens with thirteen-year-old Ali, searching for something to read, looking through a box of old books packed up after her grandmother's death five years before. Glancing through an old Nancy Drew, Ali finds a photograph of her mother Claire and her Aunt Dulcie as young girls taken at the family's Maine lake cottage. The photo is curiously torn, showing only the shoulder, arm, and a bit of hair of a third girl. In her grandmother's writing on the back Ali finds a tantalizing inscription.

Gull cottage, 1977, Dulcie, Claire, and T...

Like her face the rest of the girl's name was missing.

When Ali asks her mom about the missing girl, Claire turns defensive and pretends not to remember anything about the photo.

When Aunt Dulcie announces that she has decided to renovate Gull Cottage and spend her summer painting there, she invites Ali to come along to help take care of her four-year-old cousin Emma, and Ali, who is eager to escape her depressive and over-protective mother, glady accepts. Strangely, though, Aunt Dulcie's reaction to questions about the torn photograph and the identity of the mysterious girl is even more vague and fearful. But arriving at the cottage, with chilly, stormy weather outside, when Ali pulls out the family's old Candyland game to play with Emma, she sees, along with the names of Claire and Dulcie in childish handwriting on the board, a third name--Teresa--scribbled over but still legible in a third corner. Ali is sure that Teresa must be the missing girl from the torn photo and determines to find out more about her.

Ali questions some of the year-round neighbors and discovers that Teresa Abbot was her mother's friend who died in a mysterious drowning thirty years ago, a date which curiously coincides with the family's last visit to the lake cottage. Then Emma meets a strange little girl who calls herself Sissy, a nine-year-old with pale blonde hair who always wears a old and faded blue bathing suit. Sissy is a complex personality, obviously lonely, yet prickly, trying to drive a wedge between Ali and her young cousin, alternatively engaging and teasingly cruel to Emma, and both Ali and Dulcie try to keep them apart to no avail. Sissy, too, hints darkly that Dulcie and Claire know more about Teresa's death than they revealed at the time. Ali slowly comes to suspect that Sissy is Teresa, a restless spirit who cannot rest until the truth is told and her bones are recovered from the deep, dark lake and laid to rest beneath the monument her grieving family placed in the town cemetery.

Hahn allows the reader to move through the same process of recognition as does Ali, and the climax of the story is both chilling and cathartic for Ali's family and for Sissy. What makes Hahn's ghost characters so different and so compelling is that she gives them their own personalities, a real life in the present, a part in the conflict and loyalties still going on between the living characters as well. A toxic family secret, one which has for years darkened the lives of Claire, Dulcie, and their children, is brought up into the light of day along with the bones of the long-dead Teresa, returned from the darkest, deepest part of the lake to be put to rest where she belongs.

When an author can put together a whopping good ghost story, skillful character development and a setting perfectly tailored to the plot, that's a good read. When she can also lay down a unifying theme that speaks truth to the poisonous nature of secrets dangerous to the soul, that's even better. Deep and Dark and Dangerous: A Ghost Story does the job.