After a troubled childhood, Seventy-three year old Fabian Grant was able to escape his past and become a revered educator in Southeast Pennsylvania. His success as a teacher afforded him a rewarding and prosperous career, most of which the lifelong bachelor has spent at his estate in Montgomery County. Now retired and enjoying a life of solitude, he is approached by a college professor and novelist named Cyrus Chambers, who is interested in a series of events that have haunted Grant his entire life. The details of the events become the inspiration for ChambersÕ next novel, but the exchanges between the elder and the professor prove to be much more than the stimulus for ChambersÕ next best-seller.