It wasn't unusual to find a dead body in the orchards surrounding Bakersfield, California. So when Vermilion Blew reads in the local paper about yet one more corpse dug up by a backhoe, she dismisses the discovery. That is, until the revelation that the man had a ticket in his pocket for a movie that she had attended with her fianc , thirty-seven years before. And that movie was the last time she had seen Frankie Monroe, the evening before her nuptials. Very has gone on with her life, or so she believes, until a slippery slope of events pushes her into a painful and mostly repressed past. A return to the emotional roller-coaster of the days and weeks that followed the spoiled wedding causes Very to face a horde of questions that she had longed to bury. Why was Frankie so secretive about his origins? Does the clue of the movie ticket solve anything or open a swarm of meddlesome queries? When new evidence emerges about the body in the orchard, Very plunges into the murky world of identifying and tracing missing persons, and she discovers a new profession, skip-tracing private investigator.