In 1943 Nashville, a pregnant Luddy Patricia Carmichael murders her domineering mother with an axe, and that brutal act shadows every step of her life. Twenty-five years later, she is released from prison and travels to a nearby college town, where she happens to witness a touch football game in a local park. A tumble with one of the players, Richard Robert Gentry, sets off a chain of entanglements, as his wife Ellen Elizabeth Eis, a nurse, invites Luddy to recover at South Hall, a crumbling plantation where she tends to her aging aunt Delilah Agnes Moorehead.
Ellen soon discovers Luddy’s prison paperwork while resting and promises not to reveal it, inviting her to stay as a long-term housekeeper. Delilah consults her attorney Roy Jurroe Will Geer, who warns against pushing a financial scheme with Delilah’s siblings—Alonzo [Dennis Patrick], a retired doctor grappling with heroin, Morgan [Michael Ansara], and Grace [Anne Meacham], his sister. During a tense dinner at South Hall, Delilah confesses that she has only months to live, that she plans to leave the property to the state, and that she has unearthed a hidden fortune of $600,000 left by her father. She declares that whoever finds the money may keep it, while Alonzo and Grace remain skeptical of the tale.
That night, Luddy awakens to an axe in her bed and hears a spectral call outside. She finds Roy dying in the stables, his body marked by axe wounds. Alonzo arrives and urges Luddy to help conceal the evidence as he searches for the money. The pair stash Roy’s corpse in a smokehouse and move on, while the others murmur about a newly installed septic tank on the grounds. Morgan, intent on securing funds to cover embezzlement debts, presses Delilah, but Buffy, his lover, drinks too much and is soon beside the point of trouble. When night falls, Morgan digs around the septic tank in vain, and Buffy follows him into the woods, where she is hacked to death by an axe-wielding assailant. Morgan returns to find Buffy dead and is himself killed in a brutal confrontation; Luddy discovers both bodies and spends the night burying the pair.
The following day, Ellen needles Luddy about leaving Richard, and Delilah heads to a mausoleum to visit her father’s grave. Inside, she senses a figure from the past and staggers back, terrified. Later, a drunken Grace finds the house empty and, in a chilling moment, is decapitated by the masked killer who reveals himself to be Richard, the same man who returned with the hidden money. Ellen, meanwhile, has secretly allied with Richard and drugs Alonzo to induce a lethal overdose. The pair celebrate, but Richard turns on Ellen and kills her as well. In the midst of the chaos, Alonzo screams for help and Luddy wanders the grounds, only to be confronted by Richard, who confesses to murdering the entire family and frames Luddy for the crimes. Richard attempts to drown Luddy in the pool, but Delilah—still alive—emerges from the mausoleum and shoots Richard in the head with a shotgun; moments later, Delilah herself dies.
In the days that follow, Alonzo and Luddy savor the money and dream aloud of using it to open a home for unwanted children, a project that would finally give life to the ambitions they both carried—an ending that hints at redemption amidst the tremors of a deadly, hidden fortune.
