After the devastation in France just as World War I, Sam Simoneaux went back to New Orleans eager for a normal life. But when a little girl disappears from a department store on his shift, he loses his job and soon joins her parents working on a steamboat plying the Mississippi. Sam comes to suspect that on the downriver journey someone had seen this magical child and arranged to steal her away, and this quest leads him not only into this raucous new life on the river, but also on a journey deep into the Arkansas wilderness. Here he begins to piece together what had happened to the girl--a discovery that endangers everyone involved and sheds new light on the massacre of his own family decades before.