When Stevie Bell, an amateur detective, begins her first year at a famous private school in Vermont, she sets a plan to solve the cold case involving the kidnapping of the founder's wife and daughter shortly after the school opened. Ellingham Academy was founded by Albert Ellingham, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only...

When Stevie Bell is finally able to return to Ellingham Academy after identifying the culprit in the murder of a classmate, she begins to wonder if the case was really resolved and attempts to uncover the truth about the school's founder. Stevie Bell seemed to be on the cusp of the decades-old kidnapping and murder of Albert Ellingham's family. But a classmate's murder-- which Stevie solved-- convinced her parents to pull her out of Ellingham Academy....