A small-town eccentric opens a café in her decaying home.

In 1974, 24 year-old Francis Wetherbee, a bank teller who is the subject of small-town envy and gossip, disappears from her hometown of Smithville, Texas two weeks after her fiance's bank is robbed. Her car is dredged from the bottom of a local river but it yields no clues. After a vigorous but futile search for the missing woman, the authorities give up, and Francis recedes into legend--until the case is revisited nearly 40 years later when key figures in her life come forward with theories and clues surrounding her disappearance. The film then morphs from documentary style to narrative as the odyssey of Francis' life unfolds for the audience and the truth is revealed.

The film is set in a small Texas town, where an ancient Egyptian cat god, in the form of a cheap statue, commands all the local felines to surrender their nine lives; a mass cat suicide ensues, as cat after cat throw themselves off roofs, bridges and telephone poles. However, the dead felines are revived, becoming beautiful women in the process, given one goal: mate with and exterminate the population of human males in order to make room for "The Great Litter".

The son of the richest man in town wants to marry the town's beauty queen, but she meets a more interesting stranger who just got off the train.