While staying at Elm Creek Manor to finish her thesis, Summer, the youngest founding member of Elm Creek Quilts, instead researches the antique quilts on display for a fundraiser to renovate the headquarters of the Waterford Historical Society, discovering its troubled history of racism, economic injustice and political corruption, past and present.

"Alexandria Tarkington flees a spurned suitor and reunites with her father in Mesquite Springs. She doesn't know that Gabe Seymour, whom she met on the stagecoach, is a private investigator determined to unmask a con man . . . her father"--