Nestled between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the shores of a dark, sinuous lake, is a town with terrible secrets. A secret that followed a young father home from Vietnam. A secret that haunts a housewife's waking dreams. A secret that killed three children in a forest clearing. A secret lurking in the gray waters of the lake. They all have something to do with eight-year-old Tommy Wilford-quiet, shy, strange little Tommy Wilford. And a mysterious figure, a killer, the center of a cold case twenty years old and counting: an evil known to the authorities only as the Highwayman.

When FBI agent David Nolan arrives at the mental institution where the now-grown Tommy is held in the summer of 1999, he expects only to retread the same steps taken by countless investigators before him. What he finds instead is a story-multiple stories, weaving and intersecting through the year 1978, plotting Tommy's path from happy child to ruined adult. And something else as well, something much darker and more sinister, something cruel and unknowable. Something that might still be out there...