Larocque, a man living in a trailer in the desert at the edge of Banning, CA, gets a call that his father has died of cancer from his father's girlfriend, who is moving away to Florida. Larocque returns to his hometown in Cheshire County, New Hampshire for the first time since he was young to deal with his father's things.

He remembers being a young man living with his father and "running with" a former friend named Gifford Pelletier, the two of them almost looking for trouble. He remembers his father's abuse, feinting toward him as if to hit him.

The day after he arrives at his father's house, empty save for a few dogs, the sheriff visits with a woman named Carrie Milgram. Evidently she was helping his father train the dogs as search and rescue dogs for the county police to use--they would pay his father a little money to do so. Larocque worries what his father might have told her about Larocque's past. Carrie comes over regularly to train the dogs and the two become close and begin dating.

One night, Larocque goes to pick up cigarettes and runs into Pelletier at the shop. He's surprised because he imagines Pelletier would've run away from town years ago. He's accompanied by a small boy. Pelletier follows him to his car in the parking lot. Larocque asks if the boy is his son, and Pelletier says not to worry about the boy. Pelletier is angry Larocque has come home and acts ambiguously threatening. A week later, they run into each other again--this time, when Larocque is with Carrie and the dogs. Pelletier asks Larocque if he's with the police now and who the dogs are looking for. Later, in the car, Carrie asks about Pelletier and Larocque tells her Pelletier is a bad man.

A 10-year-old girl disappears and Larocque and Carrie take the dogs to track her, with no luck. Two days later, they go to track a suspect who fled when questioned. The hat Petellier was wearing at their last encounter is found in his car. While tracking, they stop in the woods and Larocque tells Carrie about how, at 17, he and Larocque "would drive around, talk all this crazy talk, all these things we were going to do.” He says his father thought he was no good, and his response was to become just that. But then, one day, they got a girl drunk in the woods. Larocque went back to the truck and passed out and when he woke up Petellier was driving him home and said he'd dropped the girl of; however, the next day, she was reported missing. Larocque surmised that Petellier killed her and Larocque moved away to California immediately. He never expected Petellier would stay.

At that moment, Petellier appears and shoots Carrie. Larocque accuses Petellier of killing everyone who has gone missing. Petellier is angry at Larocque for having left him "with these things in [his] head" and not stopping him the first night as a teenager when he saw he would do something horrible. Carrie jerks up, still alive, and shoots Petellier dead.

Three summers later, some college kids including a local girl are shooting a movie and ask Carrie to use the dogs. The director says the movie is called Satan's Kingdom, after a wilderness area--one Larocque and Petellier stole a "Satan's Kingdom" sign from as teens. They ask Larocque to stand with the dogs at the edge of the woods and pantomime fear when some horror--that they'd edit in in post-production--emerges from the woods. However, Larocque is genuinely haunted when the girl actress emerges from the woods, tapping a stick like a bone, and screams with real fear, sobbing. After, Carrie helps him home.