For sister and brother Lily and Robert Brewster and the rest of the Hudson Valley, the dark days of the Depression mean deprivation all around. Their poor town has lost its post office and now the mail gets dumped at the train station. When Robert helps a young widow haul her newly arrived German grandfather's trunks home, he thinks he may have found a new set of friends. But when a swastika is found painted on the widow's window, and the train porter is found dead, Robert and Lily know that something much deeper, and much darker, has moved into their sleepy little town.