jan toom

When advertising executive, Paula Martin, buys a box of old photographs, she discovers a picture of a young woman who looks exactly like her. Also in the box are photos of an old mining camp. The photos are dated 1907, exactly one hundred years earlier. Feeling a strange kinship to Catherine Hollingsworth, the girl in the photo, Paula sets out to find the gold mining town of Oro Belle, Arizona and walk the same streets that Catherine walked.

While Paula is traveling the deserted mountain road to Oro Belle, Catherine is traveling the same road 100 years earlier. They are caught in a thunder storm and in a flash of lightening exchange places in time. Paula is sent back a hundred years to a thriving mining camp while Catherine is hurled forward into 2007 San Diego.
Paula, who everyone thinks is Catherine, is faced with Catherine's father's debts and his cranky elderly sister. She meets Sam Loudin, whose mother was Yavapai Indian, and his young son, Davy. Also there is Jeremiah Curtis, a handsome mining engineer. To make ends meet, Paula goes to work in the local saloon and befriends the owner, Celeste.

Meanwhile, Catherine, who everyone thinks is Paula, is expected to run the office, write commercials and jingles. Unable to cope as well as Paula, she struggles. To complicate things, Brian, Paula's fiance, doesn't understand what is wrong with her and has her see a psychologist.

The women keep trying to find a way back to their own time, while learning to accept that they may never get back and may not want to.