As a graduating high school senior, Aren Warlick's future is bright and promising. If he can only overcome two obstacles. First, is a ground breaking history composition needed to boost his lagging GPA. His mother suggests researching a local legend. He doesn't get far however, before a more pressing mystery steals his attention. An unnamed woman who first appeared at his soccer game a year earlier seems to stand between his parents and their happiness. How can he discover a way to help them when neither will discuss the beautiful woman in their wedding photos? Only one option seems open. But is the unthinkable possible? Can his answers be found in the darkness of Rich Man's Wood? In an effort to bolster his mother's emotional well-being, Aren agrees to research her suggestion for a history composition. The troll in rich man's wood, a legend passed down by his mother's distant Native American ancestors, is just the kind of story to boost his grades in time for graduation. The difficulty his parents are having in their relationship began about a year earlier. As Aren, and his sweetheart Connie, examine the facts, Aren realizes he saw his father with an incredibly beautiful woman at one of his soccer games- he's sure he's seen her before. But where? It dawns on Aren that she was in a family photo album when she attended, of all things, his parent's wedding. Neither parent will discuss this person, and after some inquires about the woman to his father, the photo album comes up missing. Convinced the woman holds the key to the mystery of his parent's marital problems how can Aren find knowing nothing about her? His quest to find the woman and confront her seems stymied. After an initial camping trip with his father to the forest known as Rich Man's Wood, Aren makes a second journey to do his final research for the troll project. As night falls on his campsite Aren is unable to dismiss the events from the first trip. He remembers the eerie sense of being watched, of hearing footfalls in the darkness beyond their fire, of finding small barefoot human prints in his father's tracks the next day and, just before slipping into sleep, of seeing two slivery eyes, shimmering in the darkness, eyes like those pictured on a rock etching on a mountain ridge above the campsite. After bolstering his courage with self-talk Aren falls asleep and when he wakes, finds that the fire is roaring despite the fact that several hours have passed. Looking about he sees the eyes a second time, shimmering in the darkness across the pond. An effort to approach the eyes is foiled as he slips on a rock in the stream and looking up sees the vision is gone. An animal perhaps, spooked by his clumsiness. That is his thought until he returns to his fire to find a creature sitting there who could never be mistaken as a troll. After some initial, revealing conversation, Aren is invited to follow a trail in the morning which leads him into the living quarters of the troll. The path disappears after he reaches an enormous tree, a hidden entry that leads into a chamber where time stands still, and a huge rock that the troll refers to as "the maker stone, through which the creator made everything." Here Aren learns his fears of his father's infidelity are groundless. But then what is the cause of his morose state of mind and the tension between his parents? The troll, known now as Coprichana, informs him that it is an issue of great guilt which only the forgiveness of the maker stone can heal. A little one has been lost to save another, but the unavoidable decision is crushing his father and the mystery woman Aren is seeking. Coprichana provides only the woman's first name and urges Aren to fulfill his role as an ambassador of the maker stone carrying the word of forgiveness to her and through the telling of his composition freeing his father as well when at last Aren discovers the secret of their pain.