On a dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her 15th and 16th birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses over into forbidden territory. It's been that way since Joseph Carl Baine was hanged in 1936. But local superstition says that tonight Annie can see her future in the Baines' well. What she sees instead, there in the moonlight, is a dead woman. And suddenly the events of 1936, events that have twisted and shaped the lives of Annie and all her kin, are brought back into the present.