Gerry Coneybear is back from vacation and settling in for the last three months of her pregnancy—or trying to settle. She's busy with her work as a cartoonist and children's book author; looking after the twenty cats her aunt bequeathed her along with the big old house on the Ottawa River; and trying to blend her solitary life with her cats with that of her boyfriend Doug and his three almost adult sons. Gerry is nervous about navigating motherhood for the first time without her mom but finds support from her new friends at her prenatal yoga class. Baby showers, candy-making, and prepping the nursery fill her free time—but things take a dark turn when Gerry stumbles upon a body at a local archeological dig site, soon followed by news of the suspicious suicide of her new friend's husband. As a massive winter storm brews, Gerry—now almost nine months pregnant—finds herself snowed in, with a missing cat and a couple of ghosts. With danger lurking close to home, can Gerry piece together the clues before her due date?

As she entered the dark peacefulness made by aisles of trees, she remembered the songs' words, or bits of them. "Oh, my old man's a dustman," she sang as she approached the large main site of the glassworks that she'd already explored. What a funny way to describe a garbage man, she idly thought. Remembering that this was where she'd been seen by Robert Graveman, she lowered her voice. She thought of another of her father's favourites and hummed bits of "The Quartermaster's Store."

Doug had said she should turn left at the main site. Now she must be facing the lake. Not that she could see it; beyond the trees, a mountain of excavated dirt loomed between her and it; the place from which Robert Graveman had surveyed her. She threaded her way between the trees as there was now no path to follow. She began another tune, singing it under her breath. "It's a long way to Tipperary." She stopped, not quite believing what she was seeing.

This must have been what Doug had decided was worth a second look. What seemed to be a wall had appeared at her feet--two rows of mortared stone ran parallel to each other about eighteen inches apart. Earth filled the space between except where the archeologists had removed it to have a better look. She wondered what the structure had been. The wall went on for a good forty or fifty steps before turning right and continuing for a similar distance. Had it been the foundation of a really big building? She guessed the long-ago owners would have needed a warehouse for the finished glass. Somewhere horses and carts could pull up into, load, then take the goods down to the river. In some places the diggers had been unable or unwilling to cut large tree roots and there, only the top of the wall was visible, but elsewhere it had been fully excavated.

She dumped her knapsack and her jacket on the ground, leaned against a tree and made a few sketches. Then, lunch forgotten, she sat on the wall itself and let her imagination go, drawing, as though she was standing to one side of it, a long low building with an unimpeded view of the lake. She was just beginning to add people to give a sense of scale when her stomach growled and the baby kicked her, hard.

"Oof. Okay, okay. I get it. You're hungry." She rummaged in her knapsack, and devoured her ham and cheese sandwich while swigging down a bottle of water. Then she gave a huge belch. "Oh God. How rude. I hope I don't do that at the engagement party. Anyway--" She gathered up her belongings. "I can finish these sketches at home."

As she slowly retraced her steps, she noticed how many smaller digs had been done over a quite large area. Some were just holes--from deep pits you wouldn't want to fall into, to trenches barely a foot down--which showed nothing to her inexperienced eye; others were quite extensive, revealing small bits of human-placed stone. "This was like a, a whole complex," she said.

Some of the diggings were covered in black tarps while others lay open to the elements. Why would they cover some? she wondered. Something special about them?

The edge of one tarp fluttered in the breeze. Gerry looked around. It wouldn't hurt, she thought, if I just took a peek. She lifted the edge of the tarp, then pulled it half off of what lay beneath. "Oh!" A pile of old metal objects was revealed: washtubs, basins, bits of machinery. She replaced the tarp, securing the fluttering edge with a nearby stone.

As she wandered from pit to pit--and later she would decide there must have been at least twenty or thirty of them--clouds darkened and the breeze picked up. "Uh-oh. Don't want to get caught in rain." She stopped and put her jacket on, and began to sing "I've Got Tears in My Ears" softly to herself. She'd barely completed the second line before she caught her breath and stopped.

At first, Gerry thought the figure in the oversized shallow grave was someone's bad idea of a Halloween joke. Or maybe the woman herself, dressed in ankle boots, jeans, a fleece and a puffy vest, was fooling around, trying to scare Gerry. She lay on her back, arms crossed over her chest. Her skin colour convinced Gerry this was no joke. It was white with a green-blue tinge.

Surprisingly, considering how nauseous her pregnancy had made her for the first trimester and well into the second, she didn't throw up or even retch. She knelt at the side of the grave by the woman's head, and whispered, "I'm so sorry." Then she walked slowly to the nearest house while the rustling trees kept a sombre guard over the body and the first rain drops began to fall.