Plot summary

New Orleans based land developer Michael Courtland still mourns the death of his wife Elizabeth Courtland and their adolescent daughter Amy Courtland sixteen years earlier in 1959 from a botched kidnapping. What's worse for Mike is that he feels guilty for the deaths and that the burned and drowned bodies of the two were never recovered, the only memorial he has for them being a scale model and empty mausoleum of the Florentine church where he and Elizabeth met, the mausoleum sitting on an expensive piece of property he now refuses to develop, much to the chagrin of his business partner, Bob LaSalle. On a business trip to Florence, Mike goes back to that church to find a woman who looks exactly like Elizabeth, she being Sandra Portinari, who is working on an art restoration project inside the church. Mike is immediately smitten with his wife's lookalike. Sandra, despite eventually learning why Mike is so smitten with her, still falls for him. The two decide to go back to New Orleans to get married. In New Orleans, Mike faces a sense of déjà vu of an incident sixteen years earlier. And Sandra, unknown to Mike, brings her own emotional baggage into their relationship.—Huggo