Ingrid Boone is five years old and what her parents call a smart-ass, but she still doesn't know why her father is sending her and her mother to upstate New York in a plane with his war buddy Vaughn Brownlee. They're going into hiding, but from what, she has no idea. After a gut-wrenching flight and a rickety landing, the trio find themselves in a roomy, half-dilapidated cabin. All Ingrid can do is hug her mother in terror. The context is still unclear. Why is Ingrid's father so frequently absent? What is her young, attractive mother's relationship to Brownlee? The waters only become muddier when a woman friend of Brownlee's, Maude, and two other men join them. The adults begin to drink, smoke, and gamble, and Ingrid has no idea what's happening. Terrified, she runs off to bed. Hours later, her mother, dead drunk, stumbles in to join her. In the middle of the night, Ingrid looks out the window and sees something terrifying -- two young girls she doesn't know, whispering incoherently to each other. She tells her mother and the others the next day, but none of them believe her until horror dawns on Maude's face. Years ago, she remembers, a man named Meltzer in the area took his kids from his mother-in-law's house to this lodge, killed them, and then shot himself. Brownlee, a friend of Meltzer's, screams that she shouldn't scare Ingrid and punches Maude in the face. The terrified Ingrid runs out of the house and hides below the deck. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can just barely make out two dim shapes in the corner: the two ghost girls.