Shadow Valley is a small, isolated farming community known to few. There is little there to attract the attention of passers-by, but within one of the ramshackle old farmhouses, set in a swale some distance from the rest, there dwells a power that threatens death and destruction to any who might broach its secrets. Now, decades of tenuous stability are at risk when young Lila Ellis arrives to make the final arrangements for a project that will culminate in Shadow Valley being flooded to create a reservoir. She alone must enter the old Stevenson place, and she alone must face its terrors-beginning with a pile of seventy boxes of chocolates, one piece missing from each, delivered to the front door of the decaying house each and every year on St. Valentine's Day. Can Lila escape the evil that haunts the old place? Or will the curse continue for another generation?