Holly needed to take all the jobs she could get right now. Much as Holly liked this time of year, it was also the time when the tourist season started to ease off and so work would get thinner on the ground. It was Karen’s voice, always a welcome sound apart from anything else, it usually meant there was some work in the offing. She’d taken the call only a few minutes earlier. It was her favorite time of year, something about the crispness and the colors, and the sense of letting out a deep breath you’ve been holding in all summer. Holly headed out into the chill autumn air. Her father was in his armchair, reading the Times, his glasses propped right on the tip of his nose, old before his years.

Probably all afternoon, okay? Do you need anything? Hey, Dad, she called from the front doorway. Kept himself to himself, apart from when he appeared occasionally with his dog.Īnd that was all she knew of him, then. From a distance, she put him in his mid to late thirties.

He walked with a slight limp – sometimes with a stick – and that made her think of him as older than he probably was. The man had chestnut hair like his dog, and he was tall and slim and liked to wear black jeans and a tweed coat that came down to his thighs. Holly Colcroft saw him sometimes, out walking in the manicured grounds of his estate with a great big lolloping red setter. They said he was all kinds of things but in truth nobody in the village knew much about the enigmatic stranger who had moved into the Hall. They said he was an Arab oil sheik, or a Russian arms dealer.

Damage by P.J. Adams