Like a Southland Mist

In rural Alabama, the summer of 1966, nine-year old Ella Clayton, sassy, quick-witted and sharp as a tack, has stumbled across a secret while searching for an old haunted shack up in the hills behind a waterfall. She will carry that secret until the end of summer. After a tragic accident happens to twenty-year old Jack Baysenstein, she has no choice but to tell what she knows.


Ella, her brother Garris, her two friends, Joe and Deanie, will spend the rest of the summer pondering over who had beaten Jack and left him for dead. The mystery is solved when Jack is finally able to reveal to Ella who it was that tried to kill him.

When Ella tells her father what she has learned about Jack, she also reveals to her father another secret. She breaks an oath that she had made to Deanie, and tells her father what she and Deanie had witnessed that day up behind the waterfall. Her father is deeply disturbed by the news from Ella and takes matters into his own hands.

For Ella, Garris, Joe and Deanie the summer of '66 will be a time of discovery, understanding and acceptance, a summer that they will never forget.