When the Bones Sing

In the remote Ozark Mountain town of Lucifer's Creek, Arkansas, seventeen-year-old Dovie Warner possesses an inherited ability to sense and locate the bones of the dead. She describes the sensation as a "bone song," a soundless vibration that hums through her skeleton and leads her to buried remains. This talent passes through the Clover women: from her grandmother Nana (Fern Clover), to her absent mother, Lucy, to Dovie, who alone in the family line developed the ability in early childhood. Lucifer's Creek has fewer than five hundred residents and sits at the midpoint of the Aux-Arc Trail, a two-hundred-mile thru-hiking path. The town takes its name from a sulfurous creek that runs through the valley.

Three years before the novel opens, hikers began disappearing from the trail at an alarming rate, their bodies buried in shallow graves across the surrounding hills. Dovie has found twenty-three of them, working anonymously with the local sheriff. On a sweltering July night, the bone song leads Dovie, the sheriff, and his deputy, Jonah Cardell, up the trail to unearth the remains of Riley Alden, a twenty-one-year-old hiker from Tulsa who vanished two months earlier. During the recovery, the sheriff reveals that Lowan "Lo" Wilder, Dovie's lifelong best friend who left town two months ago, has returned without telling her.

Dovie reunites with Lo on a plank bridge over the creek. Gaunt and hollow-eyed, Lo explains that he left because he was tormented by shadow people, dark shapes at the edges of his vision that whisper and follow him. Lo was raised by his grandmother, Granny Pearl, after his mother, Claire Wilder, died in what was ruled an accidental drowning. A practitioner of Ozark folk magic, Lo believes the shadows are the ghosts of the murdered hikers demanding he stop the killing. Dovie is a committed skeptic who lost faith in magic when childhood spells failed to bring her mother back, but she agrees to help investigate. At the gallery where her father creates stained glass art, they encounter Ira Langdon, Del Warner's best friend and the wealthy owner of Moonlight Crag Lodge, who funds local amenities and offers Lo work. In Dovie's attic bedroom, Lo shows her the Witch's Ladder on her wall, a protective charm of nine skeleton keys strung on yellow yarn and bound with a nine-knot spell. Dovie cuts one key from the charm and gives it to Lo for protection.

On the Aux-Arc Trail, Dovie and Lo meet Candy and Hannah Nelby, two sisters on their first overnight hike, and direct them to a nearby shelter. Hannah gives Dovie a small gold angel pin. Days later, the sheriff reports that Hannah stepped out of her tent in the night and never returned.

Suspicion falls on Brother Turley, the town's fire-and-brimstone preacher. Sheltering from a thunderstorm inside the unlocked church, Lo and Dovie discover drops of fresh blood on the open Bible at the pulpit and three passages underlined in red ink. A handwritten note in the margin reads: "Jesus Christ, only you can wash the blood from my hands and make me clean again." Turley catches them and says he is "already condemned" before stumbling into the woods. Lo later finds a bloody skinning knife in a shed behind the church. Granny Pearl performs a smoke divination that appears to confirm Turley's guilt, but she warns the ritual only works if "you ask the right question."

The confrontation with Turley reaches its climax at the flooded banks of Lucifer's Creek. The preacher seizes Lo and holds him over the raging water, revealing that he is Lo's biological father, the product of a secret affair with Claire. Claire begged Turley to marry her, but he refused. He believes the hiker deaths are God's punishment for abandoning his son. Turley attempts to force Lo under the water. Dovie strikes the preacher with a rock, and Lo plunges into the torrent. The saturated creekbank crumbles beneath Turley, dragging him into the current, where he drowns. A figure bursts from the trees wielding Granny Pearl's rifle: Xander "Xan" Alden, Riley's seventeen-year-old brother, who has been in town investigating his brother's death. Xan's pale blond resemblance to Riley explains the figure Dovie had been glimpsing near her house.

Xan joins the investigation. Dovie briefly suspects her own father when she finds a gold angel pin in Del's desk, identical to Hannah's, and when Xan describes a bearded man matching Del's appearance near the trail before Riley vanished. But Del confesses a different secret: He saw Lucy's ghost by the crepe myrtles she planted as a farewell and has been walking the hills every night searching for her bones, convinced she is dead.

When Hannah's bone song begins, Dovie leads Lo and Xan up the trail. Lo, overwhelmed by his shadow people, flees. Dovie and Xan locate Hannah's shallow grave, and beneath the body Dovie discovers the skeleton key she gave Lo, still tied with a scrap of yellow yarn. Seconds later, Xan vanishes from behind her on the trail, snatched without a sound.

Lo finds Dovie and confesses. For three years, he has been waking to find freshly killed hiker bodies left near his cabin, heralded by the cry of the Ozark Howler, a legendary beast said to haunt the hills as a harbinger of death. Terrified the town would blame him and Granny Pearl, he buried each body, trusting Dovie's bone song to eventually lead her to the remains. He left the skeleton key with Hannah so Dovie would discover what he could not bring himself to say. He insists he never killed anyone. A phone call from Candy provides the final piece: The man she saw in the woods the evening Hannah vanished was a redhead who had been in Del's gallery and gave the sisters a compass. Dovie realizes the killer is Ira Langdon.

Dovie and Lo drive to the lodge, where they overhear Ira and a guest toasting "to the hunt" and "to the kill." Ira has been running a paid human-hunting operation, abducting hikers and releasing them for wealthy clients to hunt. In a cave beneath the bluff, they find Xan bound but alive and free him. On Moonlight Crag, Ira confronts them at gunpoint and reveals the deepest truths: He loved Claire, but when she came to him pregnant and rejected by Turley, he refused her and drowned her in Lucifer's Creek. He killed Lucy Warner when she confronted him about Claire's death and left hiker bodies near Lo's cabin to implicate Lo. Ira shoves Lo over the cliff edge. Del Warner appears from the fog and shoots Ira dead. Lo is found clinging to a ledge below and is hauled to safety.

In the aftermath, Lucy's bones are found at the base of Moonlight Crag and buried among the peach trees behind the Warner home. The whole town attends the memorial, seeking forgiveness for fearing the wrong people. Nana and Granny Pearl, estranged for years, finally reconcile. From her mother's buried diary, unlocked by the ninth key from the Witch's Ladder, Dovie learns the final secret: Ira, not Turley, was Lo's biological father. Claire lied about paternity to protect her son from a man she sensed was dangerous. At dusk, Dovie and Lo visit Claire's grave and see two spectral figures, one dark-haired and one white-haired, walking hand in hand through the tall grass before fading into shadow: Lucy and Claire, reunited. The generational rift between the Clover and Wilder families is healed. Lo asks if Dovie believes in magic now, and for the first time, she says yes.