Free Forever Fall by Elizabeth Sinclair

hood. I was wrong about the battery. Seems the alternator quit and has to be special ordered. I should have wheels again in a few days.”
    Mandy nodded as if she knew what an alternator was and pulled away from the curb. As they headed toward Lake Hope, the silence in the car grew deafening. “So, are you ready for our grand adventure?”
    Luc shifted his position in the seat. “Not really.”
    “Oh?”
    “Well, I’ve never been a father, and I didn’t have the greatest role model to call on for points of reference.” He realized he’d just opened the door to a subject he’d rather not get into. To prevent questions, he turned the conversation on her. “What about you?”
    For a long time she remained fixated on the road. She and Luc had been cast in the role of parents to a teenage mother, Catherine’s granddaughter, and a mechanical baby, and Mandy suddenly realized she was no better equipped for it than Luc. “Like you, I’ve never played this part before, and I don’t have any reference points either.” She glanced at him, then back to the road. “Guess we’ll have to play it by ear.”
    The conversation came to an abrupt halt. Neither of them, it seemed, was willing to elaborate.
    When Mandy had driven around the lake after having lunch with Catherine and Luc, she hadn’t been able to see Catherine’s summer house for the thick stand of trees blocking her view. So, as she pulled into the driveway that wound around to the front of the house, her breath caught in her throat. Without even glimpsing the inside, she felt certain that the entire pitiful shack she’d grown up in would easily fit into just one of the rooms.
    Having come from the small coal town with the contradictory name of Pleasantville, a lot smaller and much poorer than Carson, she’d never seen anything this imposing or this elegant. She supposed her hometown had once been a pleasant village, until the mine closed, leaving those who hadn’t fled to live in rundown houses that screamed of the poverty inside.
    Catherine Daniels’ towering two-story, stone house nestled in the grove of white oaks and maple trees like a behemoth hiding from the world. Looking more like a castle with a turret on one side and an octagonal set of upper story bay windows on the other, it spoke of old world charm and elegance. A wrap-around porch dotted with white wicker rockers and supported by white columns with stone bases, gave anyone who wished to sit there a panoramic view of Lake Hope. Mandy wondered absently how many hours Catherine must have sat there thinking about the daughter she’d lost.
    The lawn, arrayed with brilliant fall flower gardens, was dotted with the first colorful fallen leaves of the season and stretched to the lake’s edge where a pier protruded out into the water like a long boney finger.
    Mandy sighed with pleasure. Spending time here, no matter how brief, was definitely not going to be a hardship.
    “Impressive.” Luc’s voice pulled Mandy from her perusal of what would be their home for the next fourteen days.
    “To say the least,” she muttered, still gazing wide-eyed at the house.
    Just then, the front door opened, and Catherine Daniels stepped out on the porch and beckoned for them to join her. Beside her stood a jeans and T-shirt clad young girl with an excited, expectant smile curving her lips and ash blond hair pulled back in a ponytail that reached well past her shoulders.
    Mandy stepped through the large, oak doors into a foyer that stopped her cold in her tracks. The only thing more breathtaking than the outside of the house was the inside. From where she stood, she could see two huge rooms, both filled with what looked like antique furniture and chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings and dripping with diamond-cut crystals
    “Let’s go into the family room, and I’ll make the introductions there.” Catherine led the group down a long hall toward the back of the sprawling house.
    Mandy couldn’t believe