It was something no one in Parkin, Arkansas could have ever predicted - on the same day that the local museum is hosting a reenactment of Hernando de Soto meeting the Casqui Indians, three young girls in the graveyard across the road encounter someone they later claim is the Virgin Mary. Now, in the face of berserk media attention and people flooding into town to visit the apparition site, a local Baptist minister, Tommy Pilot, sets himself the task of disproving this nonsense. Soon, he uncovers a hidden strand of secrets woven around the person of his father, a World War II P.O.W. camp once based in Parkin, and a murder that has been long forgotten by almost everybody - all of which somehow relate to this supposed apparition and the message given to these three girls: "Remember your dead."