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Informationen zum Autor Elizabeth Chandler is a pseudonym for Mary Claire Helldorfer. She is the author of the Kissed by an Angel and Dark Secrets series. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. one LAST NIGHT I visited the house again. It looked as it did ten years ago, when I dreamed about it often. I’ve never seen the house in real life, at least not that I can remember. It is tall, three stories of paned windows, all brick with a shingle roof. The part I remember most clearly is the covered porch. No wider than the front steps, it has facing benches that I like to sit on. I guess I was never shy, not even at six; in the dream I always opened the door, walked inside, and played with the toys. Last night the door was locked. That’s how I awoke, trying with all my strength to open it, desperate to get inside. Something was wrong, but now I can’t say what. Was there something dangerous outside the house from which I was fleeing? Was there a person in the house who needed my help? It was as if the first part of my dream was missing. But one thing I knew for sure: Someone on the other side of the door was trying hard to keep me out. “I’m not going,” I had told my father back in June. “She’s a mean old lady. She disowned Mom and won’t speak to you. She has never had anything to do with Pete, Dave, or me. Why should I have anything to do with her?” “For your mother’s sake,” he’d said. Several months later I was on a flight from Arizona to Maryland, still resisting my grandmother’s royal command to visit. I took out her invitation, the first message I’d received from her in my life, and reread it—two sentences, sounding as stiff as a textbook exercise. Dear Megan, This summer I will see you at Scarborough House. I have enclosed a check to cover airfare. Regards, Helen Scarborough Barnes Well, I hadn’t expected “love and kisses” from a woman who cut off her only daughter when she had decided to marry someone of a different race. My mother, coming from a deep-rooted Eastern Shore family, has more English blood in her than Prince Charles. My father, also from an old Maryland family, is African-American. After trying to have children of their own, they adopted me, then my two brothers. It would be naive to expect warmth from a person who refused to consider adopted kids her grandchildren. Now that I thought about it, the meaning of my dream the night before was pretty obvious, even the feeling that something was wrong. The door to my mother’s family had always been closed to me; when a door kept locked for sixteen years suddenly, without explanation, opens, you can’t help but wonder what you’re walking into. “Megan? You made it!” the woman said, crumpling up the sign with my name on it, then giving me a big hug. “I’m Ginny Lloyd, your mother’s best old friend.” She laughed. “I guess you figured that out.” When Ginny heard I was coming, she’d insisted on meeting me at the airport close to Baltimore. That October day we loaded my luggage into the back of her ancient green station wagon, pushing aside bags of old sweaters, skirts, shoes, and purses—items she had picked up to sell in her vintage clothes shop. “I hope you don’t mind the smell of mothballs,” Ginny said. “No problem,” I replied. “How about the smell of a car burning oil?” “That’s okay, too.” “We can open the windows,” she told me. “Of course, the muffler’s near gone.” I laughed. Blond and freckled, she had the same southernish accent as my mother. I felt comfortable with her right away. When I was buckled in, Ginny handed me a map so I could follow our progress toward Wisteria, which is on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. “It’s about a two-hour drive,” she said. R Zusammenfassung Two girls haunted by the past...and destined to relive it <...
