Valerie Reynolds, a graduate student working on her doctoral thesis for a PhD in History at Lewistown University, has chosen as her topic the legend of an Eighteenth-Century settlement—formerly a bustling coal and railroad town in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania—that was annihilated by a catastrophic flood in the early 1900s.

While researching her topic, Valerie travels with a companion to the site of the ghost town of Lausanne Landing, where a cluster of archaeological relics and collapsed buildings—known locally as the Lausanne Ruins—is still standing, albeit in varying states of decrepitude, having survived a hundred years of withering Pennsylvania winters. During their exploration of the Lausanne Ruins, Valerie and her companion befriend a homeless stranger who is camped among the ruins, at the bottom of a collapsed foundation in the surrounding forest.

As it turns out, their new acquaintance has an ignominious past that he shares with the young explorers during their sojourn at the Lausanne Ruins. Despite the stranger's long history of marital discord, addiction to gambling, betrayal of loved ones, and possible ties to an unsolved murder, Valerie finds herself, for reasons unknown even to herself, developing an affinity for this transient whose disreputable past is so at odds with his benign personality, causing Valerie to draw parallels between the dilapidated ruins where they meet for the first time, and the shambles Saul has made of his life.