Crawling on elbows and knees, a man slowly inches forward, making his way through a cramped space and suffocating darkness. He doesn't know that someone is watching, and in a flash of light, his journey is over.

Now, fifty years later, small-town newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is on-site at a former World War II POW camp observing an archeological dig. The archeologists are looking for buried Anglo-Saxon treasure, but the excavators have found something even more interesting---the skeletal remains of a man trapped in an underground tunnel. The dead man's intent seems obvious, but there are two things no one can explain: The bullet hole in his forehead and the direction of the body. This prisoner was crawling in, not out.

It's a puzzle that intrigues Dryden far more than it does the archeologists or the police. Meanwhile, he continues his nightly visits to the hospital where his wife, Laura, is emerging from five years in a coma. Laura can sometimes communicate through a computer now, though the process is painfully slow and erratic. When it turns out that Laura's father was involved with the POWs during the war, Dryden begins to wonder if the key may lie in long-buried family secrets. And then a second, more recent, body is discovered….