Thed summer of my seventeenth birthday, Mamu announced that she was going to”get off the carousel,” her metaphor for dying, before the end of September. That same summer there was a grisly double murder in Millersburg. It was a lurid affair, involving sex and mutilation and money and powerand revenge which obviously overshadowed my birthday and Mamu's plans to on. That stiflingly hot summer of 1039 was indelibly stamped into my memory because the murders eventually involved my family.

Ben lives in the big, pristine white house, as cold and isolated as the subject of an Edward Hopper Painting, on the outskirts of Millersburg , New Jersey , with his tyrannical Grandmother. Mamu who rules the family and the family business with an iron fist. His mother, Eulalie, vague and disinterested, has long since relinquished any participation in the upbringing of Ben and his sister, Estella. She pines for their father who was driven away by Mamu when the children were little and she allegedly has no idea where he is. Estella, beautiful and on the brink of womanhood, is in love with a young sheriff's deputy but can only see him in the presence of Mamu.

The only people who stand up to Mamu's tyranny are priddie and Osceola Flowers, an African couple who keep everything in the house running smoothly. Osceola is actually business with Mamu, a business started during the depression out of necessity and a business that makes prisoners of the family.

But Ben and Estella have Uncle Josh, Mamu's younger half brother who lives in a shack on Settler's Creek. Reclusive, romantic and fanciful, he provides the only magic they have ever known introducing them to a world full of music and literature, peopled with the likes of Mozart and Dickens…Tchaikovsky and Twain. But, in reality, Ben and Estella know much more about these famous people than they do about Uncle Josh.

When the murders on Miller's Lake involve the family and in turn, the police, no one is allowed the luxury of secrecy. Eulalie and Uncle Josh are eventually exposed and the family is never the same again. And Ben is faced with making the most important decision he will ever he have make.

 

HARRY CAULEY , a native of Princeton , New Jersey , is a play-wright, actor, and novelist. He is the recipient of the Writers Guild of America award for There Times, Dear-a film about Alzheimer's Disease starring Shirley Jones. Besides directing theater, two of his plays, The paisley Convetible and Let Me Hear You Smile(co-author), have appeared on Broadway. He started writing for tele-vision with the ground breaking Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Among his Many other television credits were the Carol Burnett Specials and Julie, starring Julie Andrews. His first novel, Bridie and Finn, was chosen for the W.H. Smith Fresh Talent Promotion in England . Since then, he has written The Botticelli Angel. Both novels have been published in sev-eral languages. He originated the title role in the world pre-miere of Israel Horovitz' Alfred The Great and has appeared in more than fifty plays. Among them, what he thinks may have been the last production ever of Uncle Tom's Cabin.