Skip Conway is a redhead with a cowlick and a knack for being where she shouldn't. After a row with her best friend, Skip's left babysitting her little sister, who promptly disappears in a game of hide-and-seek. Skip decides to search the attic of her family's home where she soon comes across an old painting hidden beneath a rotting floorboard. In the blink of an eye she's transported from the present day to the year 1775, and while her family's home is still a house, it's also a tavern run by the Fitch family. Mistaken to be their Cousin Ursuline, Skip is put to work making up beds and preparing meals for tavern guests, but when she finds a notebook full of cryptic messages she becomes immersed in a web of espionage and deceit. She's pretty certain it's the handy work of Mr. Peter Page, who seems to be hiding something, but Jack, a tavern farmhand, also seems to be lingering nearby with idle hands. When Skip overhears two men plot to steal the local militia's muskets, she will do what it takes to reveal British Loyalists in disguise. With real lives and the Revolution at stake, Skip must trick the spies so that the muskets are ready for the Battle of Lexington and Concord. There's also the pesky little detail of her return to the twenty-first century...