1936 was a year that saw considerable difficulties after the Great Depression. Abilene Tucker's father takes a job with the railroad company away from home and sends her to the small town of Manifest, Kansas. In her new settings, Abilene feels isolated; she lives with the local pastor and spends her days exploring his old house. Manifest is a poor, run-down town where people still struggle to put food on the table. Abilene and her friends find a box of letters and souvenirs under the floorboards, and read about someone called "Rattler" which intrigues them because they think Rattler might have been a German spy in 1918. They start to investigate, but are scared by a letter that is sent to Abilene telling them to "leave well enough alone."
Abilene realizes that whilst she was busy searching for clues as to Rattler's identity she lost the compass her father gave her. She retraces her steps, walking along the Road to Perdition, but accidentally breaks a diviner's pot as she does so. Now she's in a pickle, because the diviner has her compass, but Abilene owes her the money for the broken pot. To repay the diviner she starts to do odd jobs for her. Abilene thinks that the diviner is making up things for her to do, because some of the jobs don't seem to have a point to them.
The diviner tells Abilene the story of two boys who lived in Manifest in 1918. Jinx was a twelve-year-old con artist, and he was asked by his good friend Ned to forge a birth certificate for him so that he could enlist in the military whilst still under-age. In 1918, the only people in Manifest who had any money, or who were hiring, were the mine owners. They forced their workers to work incredibly long hours, threatening to terminate them if they refused to do so. One day, one of the land-owning men in town passed away and the mine owners wanted to purchase his land to add to their own. The problem as they saw it was that the townspeople got first refusal on the land. and they decided to try to raise the one thousand dollars needed to purchase it by the deadline set to do so. They kept this endeavor a secret from the mine owners because they knew that they would just impose even longer working hours on them to prevent them from working on raising any money. To combat this, they pretended to be sick, and did not go to work. Because of all the sickness, the town was put under quarantine and the mine owners compelled to leave for safety reasons. The townspeople sold the recipe to a healing elixir and made almost the full amount that they needed, but a snitch amongst them told the mine owners what was going on. They were all summoned back to work immediately.
A government official told one of the mine owners that a small pocket of the land that was up for sale had "healing waters" running on it. He convinced the man to purchase the piece of land, assuring him that he would make a lot of money from selling the waters. However, after purchase, the taxes on the land were so high that they made enough money for the town to buy the remainder of the land that was available. Shortly afterwards, the mine owner who had been fooled into purchasing the "healing waters" land sold it for a fraction of what he had paid. The town celebrated but the celebrations were cut short when it was learned that Ned had been killed by German gunfire fighting in the war. Jinx was devastated and felt that he was to blame because he had forged the birth certificate that had enabled him to enlist. He left town for good.
Abilene rushes back to her box of mementoes and realizes that the diviner has told her the story of Jinx and Ned for a reason; the mementoes go with the story. She puts the jigsaw puzzle of clues together and realizes with a jolt that Jinx is actually her father. He has a history of running away from things that he feels are his fault, and he thinks that everything is always his fault. Shortly before taking his present job with the railroad, Abilene had been ill after getting a very bad cut. Her father had blamed himself, of course, and that coincided with his sending her to Manifest and running away again. She sends a telegram to her father pretending to be ill, and asks for him to come to her.
She also gets to the bottom of the identity of the Rattler; Rattler is an urban myth made up by someone who had seen a nun, and her "rattling rosary", in the woods after dark. She also deduces that the "spy" they have been seeking is the local undertaker, who is the person who had told the mine owners about the townspeople's plan to raise the money to purchase the land themselves nearly twenty years earlier. He was scared of being found out and so had sent the note to Abilene trying to scare her away from her investigations.
Jinx returns to Manifest after receiving Abilene's telegram and at first is angry when he finds out that she lied just to get him to come to see her. However, after she tells him that she knows why he ran away from Manifest in 1918 he agrees to come back and stay, knowing that she both understands him and forgives him.
