In a riveting psychological thriller, Mary Higgins Clark takes thereader deep into the mysteries of the human mind, where memories may bethe most dangerous things of all.At the center of her novel isKay Lansing, who has grown up in Englewood, New Jersey, daughter of thelandscaper to the wealthy and powerful Carrington family. Their mansion-- a historic seventeenth-century manor house transported stone by stonefrom Wales in 1848 -- has a hidden chapel. One day, accompanying herfather to work, six-year-old Kay succumbs to curiosity and sneaks intothe chapel. There, she overhears a quarrel between a man and a woman whois demanding money from him. When she says that this will be the lasttime, his caustic response is: I heard that song before.Thatsame evening, the Carringtons hold a formal dinner dance after whichPeter Carrington, a student at Princeton, drives home Susan Althorp, theeighteen-year-old daughter of neighbors. While her parents hear hercome in, she is not in her room the next morning and is never seen orheard from again.Throughout the years, a cloud of suspicionhangs over Peter Carrington. At age forty-two, head of the familybusiness empire, he is still a person of interest in the eyes of thepolice, not only for Susan Althorp's disappearance but also for thesubsequent drowning death of his own pregnant wife in their swimmingpool.Kay Lansing, now living in New York and working as alibrarian in Englewood, goes to see Peter Carrington to ask forpermission to hold a cocktail party on his estate to benefit a literacyprogram, which he later grants. Kay comes to see Peter as maligned andmisunderstood, and when he begins to court her after the cocktail party,she falls in love with him. Over the objections of her belovedgrandmother Margaret O'Neil, who raised her after her parents' earlydeaths, she marries him. To her dismay, she soon finds that he is asleepwalker whose nocturnal wanderings draw him to the spot at the poolwhere his wife met her end.Susan Althorp's mother, Gladys, hasalways been convinced that Peter Carrington is responsible for herdaughter's disappearance, a belief shared by many in the community.Disregarding her husband's protests about reopening the case, Gladys,now terminally ill, has hired a retired New York City detective to tryto find out what happened to her daughter. Gladys wants to know beforeshe dies.Kay, too, has developed gnawing doubts about herhusband. She believes that the key to the truth about his guilt orinnocence lies in the scene she witnessed as a child in the chapel andknows she must learn the identity of the man and woman who quarreledthere that day. Yet, she plunges into this pursuit realizing that thatknowledge may not be enough to save my husband's life, if indeed itdeserves to be saved. What Kay does not even remotely suspect is thatuncovering what lies behind these memories may cost her her own life.