Fourteen-year-old Ellie Magari's mother left shortly after Ellie was born, and her father has raised her, but Ellie always figured that one day she would meet her mother and ask her some pertinent questions--but now her mother has died, and Ellie does not know exactly how to feel about that, but she is determined, with the help of her friends in the St. Francis of Assisi's Howling Wolves marching band (where she plays the glockenspiel), to make some kind of connection with her mother's memory.