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Imagine this portrait. A woman's face and torso, her hands and blue cape. Around her, there is the richness of the town where she lives, with its inhabitants painted among trees and hills and houses.

Or imagine that there are those trees and hills and houses, but someone has cut the woman out of the picture. What did she look like? What was she wearing? What were her plans? Was she waiting for someone? Was she innocent or secretive? What sense is there now to be made of the background, with its various houses and disconnected lives?

• A Girl in Saskatoon: A Meditation on Memory and Murder, by Sharon Butala, HarperCollins, 262 pages, $32.95

Sharon Butala's newest work is a valiant attempt to repaint the portrait of a vanished girl - someone she barely knew - in a landscape where even the details have faded. The town is Saskatoon and the picture represents a particular time, the 1950s, when Butala and Alexandra Wiwcharuk were in the same high school, having moved into town from remote, northern places. It is a time of dances in the high school gym, of rock 'n' roll and beauty queens, but it is also a time of two lost childhoods, and Butala's exacting prose makes us hungry for those vanished worlds.

"Now, looking back, I think it a fine metaphor: the wilderness of forest, rock, and swampy land standing for the unremembered, untamed past, which nonetheless formed us, formed our souls, formed also our idea of home, yet all of this unrecognized, unacknowledged, and not to be reclaimed as part of our real lives until we were old."

For Alexandra Wiwcharuk, that reclamation would never happen because she was buried alive, in 1962, in a Saskatoon riverbank. But 30-some years after the murder, Sharon Butala begins the process of reclamation for both of them, deciding that the profound and lasting effect of Wiwcharuk's death on the people of Saskatoon is only partly because she was young and beautiful.

There are two other causes for the anguish and chagrin that still haunts the community. There is the fact of who they were then, that particular cluster of expectations and assumptions. And there is the fact that the murder - so savage, so brutal, so out-of-the ordinary - has never been solved.

Butala is a clear-eyed storyteller. She intends to find reason in this death. She intends to make sense of that time and a place. She hadn't known Alexandra Wiwcharuk well and her response as a writer is to keep her distance; she is by nature, she says, an observer, not a participant. She wants to gather what she calls the "specifics" of the murder because perhaps she can succeed where police, detectives and family members have failed. She begins a series of interviews. She visits the murder site and reads hundreds of reports and documents. She intends to report only facts. But something drags her more personally into the story - her own feelings, her memories - as houses and landscape and personalities come back into focus.

The days of rock 'n' roll and beauty queens held mysterious longings for young girls. Theirs was a generation brought up to look pretty, even sexy, but always to stay pure. Against those expectations, the burden of longings made life risky. Alexandra Wiwcharuk was a beauty queen. She wanted to be a stewardess. She went to nursing school and became an intern. She had a night shift at the hospital. What was she doing on the riverbank so late at night? Was she alone? She was a portrait that was about to vanish.

The process of closely identifying with anyone - especially the victim of a crime - can become proprietary and a little paranoid. As Butala continues to research the murder, she wonders if the Saskatoon police are helping or hindering her investigations. Is her phone being tapped? Is someone following her? She calls in the fifth estate. The family gets involved. But it is a thoroughly frustrating investigation until her own memories begin to merge with the imagined life of her subject. Realizing that she is unable to solve the murder, she finds herself studying her own hands and face and past as if she is Alexandra's mirror.

"Perhaps she is dreaming of the spring of her forest childhood, how she ran through the wet, greening pastures ..." The dreamer is Alexandra Wiwcharuk, a Ukrainian girl who is walking along a riverbank on her way to her late-night nursing shift. She is 23. But she is also Sharon Butala, who has grown up, even grown old, and is determined to breathe life into a dead girl's portrait. "Now I saw that the girl I'd barely known ... the one who, for years at a time I never even thought of, had become dear to me, had taken over my heart."

Butala's ambition had always been to study, to learn and understand. Sensing herself as an outsider, she went to university, got married and became a writer, always feeling marginal to the life going on around her. Now, retracing her own past as well as her schoolmate's, she begins to see Alexandra Wiwcharuk's death as a connecting thread, a story that belongs to all who hear it, and that even now weaves together disparate souls in various houses. No longer simply an observer, Butala realizes that she, too, is connected, an integral part of her time and place. "Alex herself had awakened me, her beautiful promise, her terrible death, her rage at having life snatched from her, her determination that her story would be told. Alex herself had thrust me into life at last."

It is a profound awakening. It is even, perhaps, what she has been looking for all along as she tries to resurrect Alexandra Wiwcharuk in a meditation so hauntingly intense that it will touch and connect all those who read it.

Linda Spalding's most recent book Who Named the Knife: A Book of Murder and Memory is the story of her relationship with a woman convicted of murder.