The day started with Clara Kate brushing her shoulder length golden hair. She brushed her hair every day, sitting at the very same dressing table, but today was different; maybe it was the heat or the stench. Whatever the cause, Clara Kate’s mind wandered. Slowly easing back to reality, she found herself staring down at her brush. At one time this brush would have been expensive, something only the Holloway’s could afford. Now, tarnished, it was a precious frivolity that fate had abused. Clara Kate’s intense, blue eyes wandered up the handle of the gilded brush to her slender hands. She had her mother’s hands, the long, thin, alabaster fingers. Clara Kate remembered the softness of her mother’s fingers, a suppleness that only comes with little use and a disdain for cooking and cleaning. Clara Kate looked down at her hands one last time and sighed. She wished her hands could be soft like her mothers. At that moment, she ached to have her mother’s life, that of a good southern aristocrat. Clara Kate wanted her mother’s life, but she did not want her life to end as abruptly as her mother's did. Honestly, Clara Kate could not exactly remember how her mother and father had died. All she could remember was them walking out those big oak panneled doors on that fateful September day and never coming back. Clara Kate, at age five, had not realized that they were gone forever. Every night while curled up on her new antique four poster bed, Clara Kate begged her maiden aunt to let her go home. Thinking her parents were just on one of their many trips to Europe, the newly orphaned girl could not comprehend that her parents were never going to return. Clara Kate felt abandoned and alone. In the instant her parents perished, she fell from her place as the pampered heir to the Holloway fortune and great-granddaughter of the city’s founder, Edward R. Holloway, to an orphan, a charity case, and an object of pity. A wretched smell dragged Clara Kate from her musings. She could not remember the last time it had rained and she wore the oppressive heat like a warm, wet blanket inside the dilapidated old house on Quincy Way. She could remember a time when having an address on the dignified Quincy Way was a thing to be proud of. Now, the stately mansions of Quincy Way were as run down the rest of the town.