A Stairway to the Sea

Sheriff's deputy Justin Everson loves his home town, St. Vincent, a tiny mill town on the Florida Gulf Coast. He patrols the same streets he grew up on, driving past a landscape that at once familiar and mysterious, simultaneously modern and primeval. Gripped in the wake of a national recession, the town is quickly becoming a place that Justin doesn't even recognize.

But Everson is not well. Still mourning the death of his ex-wife and fighting insomnia, he lives in a fog, somewhere between reality and a dream. When former high school bully Donnie Ray Miles drowns after a night partying on the Apalachicola River, Everson suspects foul play. A good old boy who joined the Army in a fit of patriotism after 9/11, Miles came home from a truncated tour in Iraq, and no one seems to know why. Not the local gossips who say that Miles was drummed out for selling dope. Not his father, Big Don Miles. Not local troublemaker Jimmy Danley. And not the enigmatic Wayne Childress, a labor activist intent on unionizing the workers at a local fishery.

Even Sheriff Mack Weston puts Everson off the case, telling him that it's open and shut. The county investigator threatens his job when he begins to ask questions. But Justin is seeing visions of the dead man and wondering why no one wants to answer his questions. After a run-in with a former high school crush, he devotes himself to finding out the truth about Donnie Ray Miles' time in the Army and about what happened on the river the night he died. The truth will change forever the way he sees his hometown, a place he thought he knew.