Patrick Curran works the nightshift at Havenwood, a State facility for the intellectually challenged on the outskirts of Seattle in the newly incorporated City of Bitter Bay. He feels sheltered under the cover of darkness until the morning one of his residents discovers a skeleton in the crawlspace of an abandoned cottage slated for demolition. State Senator Mason Manning is campaigning to close Havenwood as a costly and obsolete institution. He also wants to be governor. Unfortunately for him, the skeletons in his closet include the one found under Ash Hall where he worked the summer between high school graduation and college entrance. Jillian Danvers, lawyer and legal guardian for her brother Danny, who lives at Havenwood, receives a letter from his housemate, Grady Hayward, claiming he can identify the skeleton, sending Patrick and Jillian on a perilous hunt with her crisis-craving law partner, Lisa Adler. On the treacherous trail to the Quileute Reservation town of La Push, they are pursued by deceitful handymen and unskilled kidnappers before teaming with Tribal Police Officer, Andrew Jackson, who harbors a great distaste for casinos, smoke shops and bodies washing up to defile his holy beach. This unlikely company of strangers discovers a truth that refuses to remain buried.

Thirty poems from of a well-traveled poet who has discovered during his wanderings that even the driest desert or the prickliest cactus is capable of producing the most fragrant blooms.