Having fled to a family friend's hillside trailer after his mother's boyfriend tried to throw his baby sister against a wall, nine-year-old Jamie finds himself living an existence full of uncertainty and fear.

After her sister Laura is murdered in South Africa, Berry and her estranged father travel there to participate in the dedication of a memorial in her name.

Ivy and Ray accompany their parents on a trip to the Florida Everglades in order to find their only living relative, a distant cousin who, according to their great-grandfather's memoirs, absconded with a valuable, if unspecified, item.