A hauntingly beautiful pre-sunrise dawn assaults Frank Dole's senses as he sets out on his accustomed early morning fishing ritual at a remote shoreline near his island summer home. Tiring of the age-old routine of ocean surfcasting - the fruitless casting out and reeling in, he wanders aimlessly along the shore and is soon confronted by a mirage, both real and alive - a mysterious young woman sleeping supine on a green towel up near the dunes. Despite deep confusion and hesitation, he screws up enough courage to approach and engage her in conversation. Awakening later to an empty beach with no hint of the woman except for the green towel draped over his legs, he proceeds home completely stymied as to who or what she was and why he had fallen asleep. Meanwhile, in the nearby Village Elizabeth Geary and her daughter Merritt have recently arrived on the island for the summer to participate in the reopening and dedication of a long abandoned rural church built far out on the desolate moors some fifty years earlier by Elizabeth's eccentric grandfather, Matthew Fox. What follows can only be described as a virtual treasure hunt replete with impossible apparitions, obscure clues, false leads, surprising discoveries and a cast of local Village characters each holding partial ill-fitting pieces to the growing puzzle of the chapel's existence.
Duncan Dempster is a freelance writer who, having spent the better part of a lifetime employing words and language as a matter of vocational expedience, has discovered late in life the joys and challenges of juggling words and ideas in a purely avocational mode. A retired career Naval officer and later a part-time property manager and internet technician, he is now fully retired in the institutional sense and totally immersed in his newfound career of developing his dream retirement home on the Big Island of Hawaii. His passion for writing in general and fiction writing in particular knows few bounds save those imposed by the necessary daily routines of eating, sleeping and exercising, and even then, words and ideas rattle around in his head like stray atoms vying for escape.