It's 1981 and new high school graduate Shelby Sloane gets a car a canary yellow Mustang convertible. She sets out on an odyssey to find her mother that will see her, and her one time best friend Gina cross four thousand miles, the Badlands and the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Salt Flats of Utah, and some of the loneliest highways in the country. Gina has her own reasons for this trip...When the pair see a young woman hitchhiking on the side of a country road in Maryland they don't want to pick her up. They turn their gaze away, and speed down the road. But days later, far north, in the flats of Indiana on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, they find her again. They stop at a stop sign and there she is, waiting for them. Shelby thinks it's fate. Gina also thinks it's fate, but not the good kind. "Keep going," she warns. "It's a test. Don't stop the car."
Shelby stops the car.
It is fate after all, and the Bartered Bride gets in.
Her name is Candy Cane. They plan to let her off at the next highway crossing. And the next. And the next. Little by little she sucks them into her treacherous world and her own frightful journey, which is as far removed from theirs as the moons of Saturn are from Earth.
