Aging rocker Judas Coyne, a collector of the macabre, pays a thousand dollars for a suit said to be inhabited by the owner's ghost, and learns only after the angry spirit arrives that he has been set up by the family of his last young lover who committed suicide upon her return home.

During the summer before ninth grade, intrepid Gilda Joyce invites herself to the San Francisco mansion of distant cousin Lester Splinter and his thirteen-year-old daughter, where she uses her purported psychic abilities and detective skills to solve the mystery of the mansion's boarded-up tower.

Childhood friends Liz, a housewife, and Sarabeth, a single designer, who were brought close by Sarabeth's mother's suicide when they were sixteen-years-old, are forced to confront problems in their friendship when Liz's fifteen-year-old daughter attempts to take her own life.