When a history professor needs one great field study to be promoted, she attempts to solve a 90-year-old murder mystery and beat deranged killers to a treasure of buried gold coins.

SYNOPSIS:

ELLE JACKSON (35) is a brilliant black Assistant Professor of History who needs one more successful field study to get promoted. She sets her sights on solving a 90-year-old murder mystery involving a fortune in gold coins buried in the Yuba River near the historic Rustic Lodge in the High Sierra. She meets with the heavy-drinking lodge owner, BRETT PARKS (40s), who searches for the gold daily but has little information about the murder. While speaking about the difficulties in finding the gold in an ever-changing riverbed, Brett is called by kidnappers claiming to have his daughter, NORA (20), who is away at college. The kidnappers demand $100,000 which Brett doesn’t have. Brett begs for Elle’s help to find the gold and she finally agrees, for half of any gold discovered. Brett notifies his estranged second wife, LISA (early-30s), of the kidnapping and warns her that Nora will be killed if they go to the authorities.

Finding the gold at night won’t be easy. Based on a one-paragraph news story about the 1932 murder following a poker game, Elle recreates the scene and calculates the weight of gold coins and the distance the winner could have run in the five minutes it took the loser to drive home to get his gun. Elle uses a statistical approach to finding the gold. She has Brett make several runs from the tavern to the river carrying two pillowcases with a 40-pound dumbbell in each. Brett’s heart condition and drinking take their toll.

Things turn worse when Brett’s jealous wife, Lisa, arrives and conks Elle on the head to take over the search. We learn Lisa is motivated by gambling debts, not her stepdaughter’s predicament. Realizing they need Elle to use the mapping models, Brett and Lisa coerce Elle into helping. Betrayals abound after Elle reveals the antique $10-gold coins are valued over at $4 million. Lisa is trying to kill Brett for his life insurance and both suspect Elle of the kidnapping. Unknown to everyone is that Nora is spying on them all with cameras from upstairs in the lodge.

Elle discovers Nora, fragile and frightened, who wildly claims Lisa staged her kidnapping and that her dad and stepmom murdered her biological mom, Mary, five years ago. In the end, Elle and Nora ally to trap the criminal parents into confessing. Motives get intertwined, Brett and Lisa confess to Mary’s murder, Lisa attacks Brett and gets shot, and Brett has a heart attack before Nora storms into the Tavern with a pistol. In a twist at the end, psychotic Nora admits to staging her kidnapping and Elle survives a gunshot to capture Nora, solve two murders, and finds the gold the next morning.

OF GOLD AND MURDER