Maude Travers gulped for air. Why had this man struck her? Why was she on this kitchen floor in this ramshackle tenement? Blinking hard she was instantly sitting back in the anthropology lab questioning her own sanity. Was that a vision? An hallucination? Could she really just have witnessed, or rather, felt the brutal beating of a woman who lived over 170 years ago, and if so, why? What was this woman trying to tell her? Compelled to understand this message, Maude juggles the running of her own business and her work in the lab. Her attempt to decipher the tale of an excavated skeleton from the former grounds of the Erie County Poorhouse consumes her. This quest is aided by the diary of the Keeper of the Buffalo Orphan Asylum, Ciara Sloane Nolan. A former poorhouse inmate herself, Ciara's duty is to defend and protect the homeless children of the city. Between the journal and the whispering of bones, the past and the present intertwine. Maude learns of widespread corruption at the almshouse, and a most horrifying secret is revealed.