Synopsis: The heroine and narrator is Simone Sandoval, thirty-two, witty, brave and a successful Florida businesswoman, but unlucky in love. Her problem, she thinks, is the shape of her nose. Simone travels to Mexico to have it repaired at a famous sanitarium and carries with her, as a model, the portrait of her beautiful great-grandmother, Simone Dupont, rumored to have been a sorceress. But her official reason for the trip is to locate the old family hacienda, Mixtlicalli, partially destroyed during the Mexican Revolution. At the sanitarium Simone meets an ancient daughter of her ancestor and learns that Simone Dupont was not abducted by General Zapata as the family has maintained, but went off with him willingly. The manager of the sanitarium, Federico, with whom she falls in love, turns out to be the woman's other great grandchild. Another discovery is that Mixtlicalli, now reconstructed, serves as a New Age retreat specializing in rejuvenation. It is run by her own great-grandfather, Luis Sandoval, now 109 years old and kept young by his Indian lover, a witch doctor. Simone Dupont survives as the ghost of Mixtlicalli.