A Stitch in Time, owned by Mary Beth Brock and the home of the Hook and Needle Club, is in trouble! It is threatened by "progress" in the form of a fast-food restaurant planned for the middle of the quaint downtown landscape in Stony Point, Maine. Mary Beth's problems seem to have a solution when Annie Dawson finds a key in a broken vase in the attic of Grey Gables, the Victorian home Annie inherited from her grandmother, Betsy Holden. The key, linked to an antique table and a beautiful mantle clock, leads Annie to clues that send her and her Hook and Needle Club friends on an adventure that takes them back to the Civil War and an ill-fated love between Mary Beth's great-great-grandmother and a young soldier. When the owner of an antique store shows up with an insistent desire to purchase Mary Beth's the clock—and when her home is then burgled—Annie and her best friend, Alice MacFarlane, begin to suspect that their mystery may be tied into more than a coded love letter from the 1860s.