When Cheryl and her roommate quarrel, Cheryl moves into her aunts skid-row hotel in downtown L.A. rather than return home to Ohio. The lodgers are odd, Aunt Martha is a moralizer obsessed with funerals, murder is afoot, and the inexperienced and trusting Cheryl may be the next victim. She wants to be treated like a woman, and shes drawn to George, a handsome photographer who longs for human contact but sleeps with a water-inflated doll and spies on Cheryl as she bathes. Jeff, a neighborhood clerk, may be Cheryls only ally in what she doesnt realize is a perilous residence haunted family secrets. And, what happened to Alice, a model who used to have Cheryls room?