Nathan Glow doesn't want to be a hero, but he just can't help himself. As he takes a circuitous route home from San Francisco to Boston that finds him digging in Native American ruins, battling blazes in the woods of Arkansas and joining a black sharecropping family in South Carolina, he just can't escape the hero business. Nathan meets archaeologist Rachel Ring and together they travel not just across America but into each others past to find secrets that they have allowed to be secrets. Set, in part, in Nathan's childhood with his band of friends, the Freaks, someone has been ringing the bell in the church tower in the middle of the night. Who is the bell ringer and what does he want? The Glow family has been disintegrating for years and the unsolved murder of Nathan's father is one of the mysteries that should not be a mystery. In "No Pennies Please," the language of the heart speaks louder than the language of the tongue.