Time creates history; it does not erase it. There are towns in this country whose life's blood depends on the history it fashions for tourists and, often, its own citizens. Movies and documentaries are made on the bones of an unsettled past. A grandmother has kept a secret. Her grand-daughter must decipher it. And her Asian friend must protect it. Their lives will take them far into the past, far into the present and straight into the eternal. There was a Call on the Water, made so long ago, amid terror and unutterable anguish. A priest, wholly evil and unspeakably powerful, spoke the song of...