Tracy Carter seems to be living the African-American Dream, her forty acres a lavish home in the Oakland, California foothills, her mule a $70k Land Rover. She has an eclectic but practical education, the means to indulge her passion for art; and at age 33 owns a successful boat-building business. So why does her story begin in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere? Is she on a mission to save children? Is she searching for her ancestral roots? …Or, could she be on an unconscious quest for something much deeper, something long-buried in vine-tangled graveyards and shrouded in moonlit shadows of Voodoo? The meaning of life? Or the secrets buried within her own soul? ...Or does she even have a soul, and if she does could she lose it?

Her journey leads her to the isolated children's refuge of Father Amaury, which seems at first a Garden Of Eden. Yet something isn't quite right. The children seem too angelic... except one, a 12-year-old boy who the good Father seems to fear, and who digs at night in the refuge's little graveyard, where, among other small skeletons, lies that of a gifted young wood-carver who died at the age of 13.

But, are his bones actually there?

Though Tracy finds the answer to that, it only uncovers more unburied bones -- metaphorically speaking -- along with a Voodoo priest's warning that she has embarked on a fateful voyage from which there is no turning back.

At first it begins literally aboard an ancient freighter powered by steam and fueled by coal, and crewed mainly by children, but then it becomes a frightening quest over a dark and skeletal sea toward a faint and distant light.