Bored and obsessed with finding lost treasure on her family's campground (the campground was once a CCC work camp during the Depression), teenager Angie Jackson, loses track of her babysitting charge, a 4-year old girl named Melanie, who has wandered away and become lost in the wilderness surrounding the campground. This coming-of-age story follows the search for the little girl as the families and the community come together and are both hampered and helped by the resulting media frenzy. They soon discover this search is an echo of a similar lost child incident in these same mountains that took place in the 1940s.