In the town of Mintlaw, four people collide discovering they have a shared destiny. It is 1985 and along the Oregon / Idaho border drug traffickers are becoming more emboldened every day. Police departments from the area are forced to reinstate retired sheriffs to combat the trafficking of drugs throughout the region.
One of the townspeople of Mintlaw, a new arrival, Vera Lee, has purchased the Anderson Farm and hopes by moving to Idaho her privacy will be respected and the locals will leave her alone. Yet, her past refuses to concede defeat. Like the trickle from a rusty pipe, the past arrives on her doorstep determined to remind her of her former mistakes. Her Roma family also refuse to fade quietly into the background and allow her to live as a gadji.
Andrew Treloar, a former member of the armed services and Deputy Sheriff of Mintlaw, just wants to make a new life for himself as an artist. His art helps him deal with his nightmares from the Vietnam War and the most recent trauma - the death of his young son. Then he meets Vera and remembers the first time he met her when he found her husband dead at the wheel of the Firebird. At the time, the Mintlaw Police Department suspected Vera of contributing to her husband's death. They were never able to prove how she managed to kill him.
Daniel Harden shunned all his life by the townspeople due to his intellectual disabilities is now a young man. He has found a way to escape his loneliness - hunting for thundereggs and finding the beauty inside. He meets Vera Lee for the first time and experiences something he's never felt before - desire. He has no one he can trust who might explain his erratic and sometimes scary feelings for this woman. And to compound his confusion there is someone or something haunting his favorite place where he hunts for thundereggs. He believes a ghost has made a home in the caves and is trying to drive him away.
Maggie Treloar is new to Mintlaw. Both her parents are teachers. But now her father has chosen to return to Idaho to help his grandfather run the farm. Maggie is assigned the job of caretaker to her grandfather and hates the job. One compensation for the boredom of watching her grandfather who spends most of his time sitting in his wheel chair and staring out the window is the new neighbor Vera Lee across Jump Creek Road. Unlike the rest of the adults in her life, Vera treats Maggie like an adult.
The town of Mintlaw faces a grave challenge when an autistic child is discovered abandoned near the gateway to the Owyhee Canyonlands. Instead of informing the authorities immediately, Vera waits until morning before calling the police. She tells them she discovered the child swinging on the old swing set in her backyard leaving out the time of her discovery. The authorities determine the child to be three and four years of age and speculate she might have walked out of the Owyhee Canyonlands by herself. When no one claims her, the sheriff is convinced her parents are lost, injured, or possibly dead. It will take hundreds if not thousands of volunteers to comb the 7,000-miles to find them.
