Plot summary
In 1936, twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is sent by her father Gideon to the small town of Manifest, Kansas. Abilene arrives to find the town run-down and greatly affected by the Great Depression. A pastor takes her in, and in that house, she discovers a box of mementos and letters from a boy named Ned addressed to a boy named Jinx stashed away under a floorboard. One letter mentions the "Rattler." Abilene and her two friends, Lettie and Ruthanne, believe the Rattler was a German spy in 1918. After some investigating, they receive a note telling them to "leave well enough alone."
Realizing that she lost her father's compass while searching for the spy, Abilene walks down the "Path to Perdition", a house where Miss Sadie, a diviner, lived, to search for it. On the way, Abilene accidentally breaks a diviner's pot. To pay off her debt and earn her compass back from the diviner, Abilene does odd jobs for her: she tills dry soil during a drought, plants seeds in it, and hunts for strange plants, all of which seemed to have no useful purpose.
Sensing that Abilene feels abandoned by her father, the diviner tells her a story of the past about two boys in Manifest in 1918 called Jinx and Ned. Jinx is a twelve-year-old con artist who leaves his partner after thinking he accidentally killed a man, and Ned, the writer of the letters, is a fifteen-year-old adopted boy who used Jinx's skills to sign up for the army underage. He leaves Jinx his compass when he goes off to war and writes him letters from the battlefield. At the time, Manifest is controlled by the owners of the mine because there are no jobs or money without them during the war; the owners pay the workers very little and forced them to work more shifts.
After a land-owning widow dies, the mine owners desire that piece of land for their own profit. However, the town has first pick, and they need to raise $1,000 for it before the deadline. They don't want the mine owners to know about it, or else they'd give them more work and also stop them from raising the money, so everyone feigns illness and put the town under quarantine to get rid of the mine owners. They sell a healing elixir and raised most of the money, but someone reveals their plans to the mine owners, causing them to return and put everyone back to work.
A government official, the nephew of a resident of Manifest, tricks one of the mine owners into buying part of the land up for sale because of the "healing spring" he could use to make a fortune. However, it is regular water, and the tax he paid for the land goes to the town, giving them enough money to buy the rest of the land. Soon afterwards, the fooled man sells his part of the land for a fraction of the cost he paid for it. Meanwhile, Jinx confronts his old partner in crime, and discovered that the partner is the one who killed the man, not Jinx. The old partner dies when trying to pursue Jinx. The town celebrates their triumph over the mine owners, only to be crushed by news of the death of the well-known Ned in St-Dzier, France, on October 8, 1918. Jinx thinks it was his fault Ned was killed by the Germans. He leaves Manifest for good. Soon after, Spanish influenza kills many people in Manifest and the town becomes the run-down, battered outpost Abilene knows.
Abilene hears the story and matches the letters and mementos she had to the story the diviner told her. She put the pieces together and discovered that Jinx was her father; when she got a cut and became very ill, her father began acting differently around her because he thought it was his fault, which it wasn't. That was the reason he left her in Manifest. Furthermore, Ned was the son of the diviner, who had been keeping watch on her son from afar. After sending a telegram to her father, feigning ill herself, she discovered that the Rattler was a story someone made up after seeing a nun and her rattling rosary in the woods at night. The "spy" they happened to find was the undertaker, the person who had revealed the town's trick to the mine owners almost twenty years ago. He was afraid that the kids had found out about that, so he sent them the note to scare them. Abilene's father returned to Manifest and found that his daughter wasn't ill, and after she told him about knowing about his past, he understood her when she asked him to stay. They go into Manifest together to rebuild their lives.
