Kevin Heartstone is a past-obsessed tenth grader grieving the loss of his father, an architect and restoration specialist, and struggling with his mother's new relationship with the owner of a demolition company. While visiting his father's grave, Kevin encounters Jane Cardinal, a fifteen year old girl who has been dead for over a century and a half. Jane, along with her contemporaries, have recently been re-animated by the by-product of an anti-depressant produced by Still City's leading employer-Preventative Solutions-which has been illegally dumping the waste into the decaying area neighborhoods and cemeteries. Jane will be Kevin's link to a time for which he longs, while Kevin himself will become central in his fractured hometown's survival, and the dilemma of reconciling its past with its present by conciliating the dead with the living.