Brian Craig is a history professor at a suburban Chicago university. With a second divorce in process, a growing disillusionment with his work, and a mounting anxiety over his growing inability to concentrate, he flees Chicago for a sabbatical in England. Ten years before while traveling in Britain Brian had an unsettling encounter with something called place memories, strong emotional reactions to historical sites, especially ones with a violent or turbulent past. Now, in Cambridge, he has a series of realistic, vivid and lingering dreams about people who lived there more than four hundred years before. Gradually the dreams reveal a series of tantalizing clues about the deaths and unusual burials of three seventeenth-century women in a nearby village. One night as he is walking across Midsummer Common, an open park, he has a waking dream that leaves him with a ghostly companion. Bent on finding the truth about these mysterious deaths, he learns to see his dreams for what they are visions related to the Ghost, a kind of spiritual companion. He is accompanied in his efforts by an elderly English woman he calls Candy Apple, an American academic couple, an English-born Indian Franciscan priest, two women who have claims on his emotional life and his adored only daughter, a college senior. As he restores an ancient church, all the puzzle pieces start to slide together, but will he be able to see how they connect? Or will it all slip away from him before he is able to interpret the signs?