The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved sites on the West Coast. Its owners thought their secrets were buried foreve;but when cold-case investigator Raquel Laing arrives, secrets are all she sees. A magnificent house, vast formal gardens, a golden family that shaped California, and a colorful past filled with now-famous artists: The Gardener Estate was a twentieth-century Eden. And now, just as the Estate is preparing to move into a new era, restoration work on some of its art digs up a grim relic of the past: a human skull, hidden away for decades. Inspector Raquel Laing has her work cut out for her. Fifty years ago, the Estate's young heir, Rob Gardener, turned his palatial home into a counterculture commune of peace, love, and equality. But that was also a time when serial killers preyed on innocents;monsters like The Highwayman, whose case has just surged back into the public eye. Could the skull belong to one of his victims? To Raquel;a woman who knows all about colorful pasts;the bones clearly seem linked to The Highwayman. But as she dives into the Estate's archives to look for signs of his presence, what she unearths begins to take on a dark reality all its own. Everything she finds keeps bringing her back to Rob Gardener himself. While he might be a gray-haired recluse now, back then he was a troubled young Vietnam vet whose girlfriend had vanished after a midsummer festival at the Estate. But a lot of people seem to have disappeared from the Gardener Estate the summer when the commune mysteriously fell apart: a young woman, her child, and Rob's brother, Fort. The pressure is on, and Raquel needs to solve this case before The Highwayman slips away, or another Gardener vanishes.