Follows fifth grader Max as he searches for his best friend who disappeared, leaving behind a strange note.

After her father is convicted of embezzlement, Becca Jones, fourteen, and her mother flee Georgia for small-town Ohio but three years later she learns that his misdeeds may have jeopardized not just her future but also her life.

In 1927, at the urging of twenty-one-year-old Harriet, Mrs. Livingston reluctantly recalls her experiences at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, including miserable working conditions that led to a strike, then the fire that took the lives of her two best friends, when Harriet, the boss's daughter, was only five years old. Includes historical notes.

A sixteen-year-old boy arranges a housesitting job for the summer, but he starts acting strangely after his family moves in, and his sister begins to suspect they are not supposed to be there.