Lena Jennings is a lackadaisical layabout who has met many strange men in the drinking holes of the small northern town where she lives and works. But a young man who tells her a story about an unsolved murder from the town's past and who then goes missing is the strangest of them all.

This disappearance leads her through a catalogue of fables and theories, all of which suggest that, uncannily, the murder is re-occurring with surrogate victims.

The history of disappearances begs a single question of Lena: can the murder ever be solved?