Side by Side in Silence is a story about the greed of one man who is living, the deception of another who died many years ago, and the effect it all has had on the town of Ferndale, where the story takes place. One young widow, Sarah Falworth, stands alone as the inheritor of Aldergrove, a place the people of Ferndale have cherished for years. Sarah finds herself having to untangle a terrible family secret that has bedeviled one generation after another in the Falworth family. The wife of Aldergrove's first owner, deceased for many years, returns to the land of the living when she feels her former home is threatened, and her ghost makes unannounced appearances in the attic of the place she loved. One man wants the Aldergrove property so badly he resorts to murder to get it. He has always viewed Ferndale as a one-horse town but, as time goes by, he sees it through the mists of his drunken binges and worsening psychosis. Fear takes hold of Ferndale as the bodies pile up and children disappear. There are phantoms in this story and perhaps a few of them are figments of a man's sick mind.

On the other hand, perhaps they are not. Nevertheless, the ghost of Patience Falworth makes her wishes known.