Thorns and Roses

Helena Rose Amhearst did not survive the sea voyage back to America from England in 1934, but that did not prevent her from returning to the home in which she had been born. Cast off by her husband's wealthy family upon his death, Helena's mother Victoria took her two children and boarded a steamship to return to her home in Connecticut. When the ship sank during a terrible storm, Victoria was forced into a lifeboat and torn away from her son and daughter, who slept in a cabin on the ocean liner's upper deck. Lost to grief and drifting further and further from reality, Victoria died alone in the house her husband had built for her, her spirit trapped between life and death, as if still waiting for her children to be restored to her. Helena, a fierce and formidable girl in death as in life, was determined to reach her mother, bearing as she did a long-lost secret that she knew could make all the difference. Unable to reach her mother despite the fact that both of them are now spirits, Helena enlists the aid of fourteen-year-old Lia Jennings, whose family purchases the old Amhearst mansion nearly eighty years later. Terrified of the secrets walking the halls of the shadowed old house her father is renovating, Lia hesitates to help the spirit of a girl who died at the same age she is now, but is forced to face her fears when her own family begins to come apart at the seams, haunted and manipulated by things in the house that they can neither see nor understand. When Lia's mother, her father, and finally her baby brother are threatened by the memories that weep in the dark halls and rooms of the mansion, she seeks out the determined, angry ghost of Helena Amhearst, prepared to fight to death and beyond in order to save her family. What she encounters is not at all what she expectecd.