When a Depression-era southern town suffers a series of inexplicable tragedies, life is interrupted for its denizens-including a womanizing mayor, the abused wife of a sullen locomotive engineer, an honest but compromised police chief, a minister that seems to levitate, a dying junk dealer, a Black preacher caught between two worlds, a brutal company guard, a diminutive railroad executive and master manipulator, and a group of church ladies prone to gossip. Seventy years later, in Southern Calif