After being buried for thirty-one years under fallen trees in a forest as the result of a severe hurricane, a 1936 Hudson is discovered by two hikers, Karen Conroy and Neil Warner. While looking over the badly rusted remains of the car, they come across an item that turns out to be a major contributor to a teen aged girl's disappearance that happened thirty-one years earlier and any hopes until now of learning what happened to her had been all but exhausted.

The story then traces back to the time when the Hudson was new and the various owner's lives during the time that they owned the car and leads up to the present day when a detective learning of the new evidence becomes involved and after reopening the case, is obsessed with solving the girl's mysterious vanishing. He has a grown daughter of his own and cannot imagine the stress and sadness the girl's family had endoured over those years.