While on a summer, history research trip in 1976, Canadian William Dick finds himself dumped by his girlfriend in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. He soon meets up with Jacques Pierre Falstaff an Australian with a French-Canadian background. Falstaff is known by his friends as BS Jack and gets Bill Dick a room at the Alvermay, a seedy hotel run by Fripp, a black man raised on Fripp Island.
BS Jack tells Bill and Fripp a story about how Benjamin Franklin arranged for Bills ancestors from Edinburgh, Scotland to send a fortune over to Charleston in the 1770s to help the Patriots win the revolutionary war against the British. Jack then pulls a stunt that gets Bill into trouble with the law. Fripp hides Bill at the Blue Dolphin Inn on Fripp Island.
Spending days in Beaufort, Bill meets an eclectic group of characters, who together with Fripp and BS Jack search out the treasure they believe to be hidden in and around Charleston. The clues that they follow are from stories that Bill's grandfather told him. A double-cross leads to a double murder in Sumter County that remains unsolved to this day.
