Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Even more so when Kinsey Millhone’s only lead is a grown man dredging up a repressed childhood memory—of something that may never have happened…

Looking solemn, Michael Sutton arrives in Kinsey’s office with a story: When he was six, he wandered into the woods and saw two men digging a hole. They claimed they were pirates, looking for treasure. Now, the long-forgotten incident has come back to him—and he is convinced that he witnessed the burial of a kidnapped child.

Kinsey has little to go on. Sutton doesn’t even know where he was that day—and, she soon discovers, he has a history of what might generously be called an active imagination. Despite her doubts, Kinsey sets out to locate the so-called burial site. And what’s found there pulls her into a current of deceit stretching back more than twenty years…