The Whispering Chimney

Middle grade fiction. 48,000 words. Eleven-year-old Bethany is uprooted from her mid-sized Ohio town to rural West Virginia. She misses her friends, grieves that her family has been broken apart.
At the small school she is forced to attend, the sixth-grade girls are friendly at first. Then, led by a domineering girl named Marsha, the girls turn on her, teasing and taunting.
Lonely and unhappy, Bethany explores the ridge behind their rented farm. She discovers a stone chimney, a remnant of a pioneer cabin. She hears sounds, voices, then the names--Emily and Joseph. She runs away in fear, but on another visit, she hears fragments of conversation captured in the ancient stones. Unbelievably, time pulls her back two hundred years plunging her into a life filled with beauty and danger.