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 Porcia is completely unprepared for the extraordinary things that happen when her family moves into a new old house.

Empty for 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...