When Adam Cauliff's new cabin cruiser, Cornelia II, blows
up in New York harbor with him and several close business
associates aboard, his wife, Nell MacDermott, is not only
distraught at the loss but wracked with guilt because she
and Adam had just had a serious quarrel and she had told
him not to come home.
The quarrel was precipitated by Nell's decision to try to
win the congressional seat long held by her grandfather
Cornelius MacDermott. Orphaned at age ten, she had been
raised by "Mac," as she called him, and was always at his
side on Capitol Hill. Politics was in her blood, and Adam
had known her ambitions when they married. Suddenly,
however, he became opposed to her plan to run for Congress.
Nell, like her great-aunt Gert, possesses psychic gifts,
which her grandfather scoffingly dismisses as "flights of
fantasy." As a child she had been aware of the deaths of
both her parents and grandmother at the exact moment they
died. She knew because at that very moment she sensed
their presence near her.
Even though Nell has the rare gift of extrasensory
perception, she is much too levelheaded to accept most of
the claims made by many so-called psychics and is
skeptical about Aunt Gert's fascination with mediums.
After Adam's death, however, Gert begs Nell to see a
medium, Bonnie Wilson, who has contacted her, claiming she
is in touch with Adam. Still regretting her last angry
words to Adam, Nell agrees, hoping that she will be able
to reach him through the medium and part from him in peace.
As the investigation into the boat's explosion proceeds,
Nell is shocked by the official confirmation that it was
not an accident but the result of foul play. Adam, an
architect, had been involved in a major construction
project on land he had recently purchased and which had
since had a spectacular rise in value.
Was Adam the target of the explosion? Or was it Winifred
Johnson, his self-effacing, fifty-two-year-old assistant,
who knew too much about bribery in the construction
business and who was openly in love with him? Or was it
Sam Krause, a builder with a questionable reputation who
was involved in the new project? Or Jimmy Ryan, the debt-
ridden construction foreman whose wife, after his death,
discovers money hidden in their home? Or was it Peter
Lang, the wealthy man-about-town real-estate entrepreneur,
whose minor traffic accident caused him to miss the fatal
meeting on the boat?
As Nell searches for the truth about Adam's death, she
carries out instructions from Adam transmitted through the
medium. What she does not know is that she is being
closely watched, and the nearer she comes to learning what
actually happened on the boat that night, the nearer she
is to becoming the next victim of a ruthless killer.
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