In Bucephalus, Ohio, people die in strange ways. The town puts up a plaque for every one of them. Bucephalus, or "Buck" to everyone who lives there, is a town of apple orchards, Friday-night football, and a lake called Respite Bay. It is also where eleven soldiers drowned in eighteen inches of water in 1861 and where lights hang over the bay every fifteen years. Every strange death gets a bronze marker and no questions.
On the last day of school, five kids who barely know each other end up in the same diner booth:
• Colt, a fatherless football prodigy with a temper
• Tyrese, whose family runs the diner and who writes everything down
• Sandra, who has quietly kept her mother's struggling hotel afloat since seventh grade
• Alex, a farm kid with perfect aim and a father they can't talk to
• Julie, a silent fourteen-year-old outcast who can see the town's dead
Then something surfaces in the river below the old railroad trestle: a beaver the size of a man, with nothing behind its eyes. Animals that died out twelve thousand years ago start walking the woods. A boy vanishes, then a duck hunter, then a girl on a lonely road. A body falls out of a clear sky wearing dog tags from Omaha Beach. And the adults of Buck do what they have always done: they look away.
Over one year, from summer through harvest to the frozen lake and back again, the five of them build the map no one else will. The pattern reaches back more than two centuries. It leads to a word a missionary wrote down in 1794 for "the place that is hungry," and to a door in the woods outside a town called the Hollow.
Something there has been watching Buck for a very long time. It doesn't hate them. It doesn't care about them at all. And that might be worse.
