By the time the knife finally stilled, its wielder panting hard from the exertion in the close heat of that second-story bedroom, she lay with her head turned toward the door, eyes dull with death, the face of her killer reflected accusingly in her dark pupils.

Jolene Stevens dropped the neatly printed pages and let out the breath she’d been holding. She glanced past the glow of her desk lamp to the door of the Old Town Whitehorse one-room schoolhouse.

The door was open to let in what cool night air might be had this late spring day. Like the beginning of the story she’d just read, the heat had been intense for weeks now. There wasn’t a breath of cool air and little chance of rain, according to the weatherman.

Jolene fanned herself with her grade book as she looked down at the pages again. On Friday she’d given her students an assignment to begin a short fictional story that would be told in six segments. She’d told them they didn’t have to put their names on their stories, thinking this would make them less self-conscious.

Each story was typed, double-spaced, on the student’s home computer so all of the stories looked the same.

While she’d instructed her students to start their stories at an exciting part and introduce an interesting character or intriguing place or event, she hadn’t expected anything this disturbing.

Mentally, she envisioned each of her five students: Amy Brooks, the precocious third-grade girl; the two goof-off fifth-grade boys, Thad Brooks and Luke Raines; the sixth-grade cowgirl, Codi Fox, and the eighth-grade moody boy on the cusp of becoming a man, Mace Carpenter.

She couldn’t imagine any of them writing this. Picking up the assignments, she counted. Six? Five students and yet she had collected six short-story beginnings? Was it possible one of them had turned in two stories?

For the first time since Jolene had come to Old Town Whitehorse to teach in the one-room schoolhouse, she felt uneasy. She’d been hired right out of Montana State University to fill an opening when the former teacher ran off and got married just before the school year ended, so all of this was new to her.

She rose and walked to the door to look out. Night sounds carried on the breeze. Crickets chirped in the tall dried grass of the empty lot between the school and the Whitehorse Community Center. No other sound could be heard in the hot Monday night since little remained of the town except for a few old buildings.

Her bike still leaned against the front of the school where she’d left it. Past it she could make out the playground equipment hunkered in the dark inside the old iron fence.