Deeply unhappy about her family's separation because of poverty, Megan gradually finds contentment and purpose in her new home on the Kansas prairie with a kind and loving adopted family.
When Shirley convinces her husband Claude to help fulfill their adopted daughter's dream of a visit from Santa, she doesn't reckon on the real Santa Claus showing up at their place in Texas.
A collection of stories about eerie encounters in various ghost towns across the United States; each story is accompanied by an afterword about the actual town on which the story is based.
In 1863, eleven-year-old Peg Kelly is drawn into the dangerous activities of a mysterious young woman who takes refuge with the Kelly family in Missouri after fleeing the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, by William Quantrill and his Confederate raiders.
In 1860, having traveled with his young sister from New York to a foster home on a farm near St. Joseph, Missouri, ten-year-old Danny plots to get his newly-widowed foster father to send for and marry his mother.
Deeply unhappy about the separation of her family because of poverty, twelve-year-old Megan gradually finds contentment and purpose in her new home on the Kansas prairie with a kind and loving adopted family.
Eleven-year-old Michael Patrick Kelly from New York City is sent to a foster home, a Missouri farm with a sadistic owner, a bullying son, and a number of secrets, one of which may be murder.
Nineteen-year-old Frances Mary Kelly, herself an orphan train rider six years before, returns to New York and agrees to escort a group of orphans west to find new homes.
In 1860, when their widowed mother can no longer support them, six siblings are sent on the orphan train by the Children's Aid Society of New York City to live with farm families in Missouri.
After eleven-year-old orphan-train rider David Howard settles with a strict Missouri farm family, his best friend, an ex-slave, is threatened by the growing presence of the Ku-Klux Klan.
