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Informationen zum Autor Dorothy Gilman Klappentext "A superb book." THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE When quiet, shy Amelia Jones reads a desperate message that has fallen out of a barrel organ in the antique shop she just bought, she can't forget the words, "They're going to kill me soon..." Armed only with the woman's first name and the note written years before, Amelia begins a journey into the past, a search that takes her from the protective cocoon she's wrapped herself in to a precarious world where nothing is the way it seems, where fear is second nature, and dark secrets just might uncover murder--her own....1 Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it’s just me. I’m speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors, like the meaning of life or what if there’s no meaning at all, or what if somebody pushes the red-alert button, or the economy collapses and we turn into ravaging beasts fighting over food, not to mention the noises in an old house when boards creak and things go bump in the night. Sometimes I think we’re all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we’re okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know. That’s why, when I found the note hidden in the old hurdy-gurdy, I didn’t take it as a joke. I could smell the terror in the words even before I’d finished reading the first sentence: They’re going to kill me soon—in a few hours, I think—and somehow they’ll arrange it so no one will ever guess I was murdered. But perhaps I’d better explain about the hurdy-gurdy and why at my age, which is twenty-two, I am not out in the world setting it on fire, figuratively speaking, or graduating from Wellesley or Bryn Mawr, or doing any of those normal upper-middle-class things, but instead own and tend the Ebbtide Shop, Treasures & Junk, Amelia Jones, Prop., 688 Fleet Street (not your best section of town). Actually it’s because I’m so free, a word I use loosely and not without irony. Due to circumstances I won’t go into at the moment I have been quite alone in the world since I was eighteen, and with a rather strange childhood under my belt as well. When I was seventeen my father packed me off to a psychiatrist named Dr. Merivale. I think my father knew he was going to die soon and one day he looked across the room and saw me, really saw me—perhaps for the first time—and he thought, “Good God!” So off I went to Dr. Merivale, who was supposed to inject confidence and character into me in prescribed doses, three times a week, at forty-five dollars an hour, and a few months after I’d begun seeing Dr. Merivale my father went to the hospital with his last heart attack and died. He left a rather surprising amount of money, to be doled out to me month by month until I was twenty-one by the First National Bank downtown. I think he hoped that Dr. Merivale would assume some kind of responsibility for me. I continued visiting Dr. Merivale for two years, at first out of sheer inertia, having nothing else in my life, but gradually I began to grow interested in what he was trying to do. Actually it was like going to college, except that while other girls were studying Jung and Freud out of textbooks in class I was collecting dreams for Dr. Merivale, learning the difference between super-ego and id, discovering that I came from a trauma-ridden family and that I was terrified of life. I crammed just like a student, reading books on psychology all day and half the night. It had an effect: one day I looked in a full-length mirror and realized why nobody had ever noticed me: I shouldn’t have noticed me, either, in an over-sized gray sweater with stretched sleeves and a gray skirt with a crooked hem. I went out and bought a pair of bellbottom slacks, which were in ...
