A wish come true! That's what Portia thinks when her parents buy Villa Caprice, a tumbledown Victorian house along the swampy edge of Gone-Away Lake. A new house is always full of surprises, but Portia is completely unprepared for the extraordinary things that happen when her family moves into a new old house. Empty for a half a century, ugly as a horned toad, Villa Caprice is a mildewy, cobwebby, boarded-up, junk-cluttered museum to a way of life long forgotten. But it is also a wonderland, filled to the rafters with fifty years' worth of treasures and secrets -- small mysteries that Portia and Julian must solve to uncover the greatest secret of all.... Elizabeth Enright (1909-1968) a native New Yorker, spent her childhood drawing pictures and created both art and story for her first book, Kintu: A Congo Adventure. She went on to write many enduring popular and critically-acclaimed children's classics, including Newbery Medal winner, Thimble Summer, and Newbery Honor winner, Gone-Away Lake. Colleen Delany has narrated numerous best selling audiobooks. An accomplished stage and television actress, she has appeared in Homicide: Life On The Streets.