A chance discovery takes anthropologist-turned-novelist Maude Travers through a centuries-old missing person's investigation. Each piece of evidence triggers vivid dreams of the Sloane sisters as they help Buffalo's poorest residents during the cholera epidemic of 1849. Maude is compelled to keep digging as she suspects that her dreams of Martha Sloane and the decisions she struggles with as the first female medical student might, in fact, be true. A trip to the Modern Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York, brings the realization that, once again, the dead still have much to tell. A psychic medium and the spirit of a nineteenth century school teacher enable Maude to reconcile the past with the present and to glimpse what the future might hold.