In 1930, a school principal is suspected of raping a student. Seven years later, on the other side of the country, a girl picking wild cherries meets a violent end. Connecting the two mysteries is the narrator's charismatic aunt, an intuitive teacher named Connie Flood. Anne Flood pieces together her aunt's lifelong attachment to her former student Michael Graves, and her obsession with Parley Burns, the inscrutable principal. As the novel moves deeper into the past, the triangle of principal, teacher, student, opens out into other emotional triangles - aunt, niece, lover, mother, daughter, granddaughter - until a sudden, capsizing love thrusts Anne herself into a newly independent life.