Fresh Air

Description for FRESH AIR by Charlotte Vale Allen: For twenty-seven years Lucinda Hunter, daughter of the acclaimed film star Lily Hunter, has been a virtual recluse. Alone in the Connecticut farmhouse that was once her mothers's, Lucinda's life has become a small thing. Everything she wants or needs can be purchased online, and her only trips to the outside world are to the library or to the post office. It sometimes takes her days before she has sufficient courage to venture past her front door, and even these excursions are sufficiently traumatic to induce blinding migraine headaches. Then, one hot morning in July, as she sits at her computer near the living-room window, a motion in the garden catches her eye. When she turns to look out, she is certain she must be hallucinating -- for out there, admiring the overgrown flower beds, is a little girl in shorts and a T-shirt, her bare feet in outsize sneakers. She can't be real, Lucinda tells herself. But when she looks again,