He tried to hide a grin. “Then I should probably warn you that if you get into trouble that cell phone you’ve been clutching won’t be of any use. There’s no coverage out here.”

She lifted an eyebrow. She’d never had trouble getting coverage with her cell phone carrier. The man didn’t know what he was talking about. She snapped open her phone. Damn, he was right.

When she looked up he was walking back toward his combine, shaking his head with each long stride. She could hear him muttering under his breath. “Got better things to do than stand around in this heat arguing with some fool city girl who doesn’t have the sense God gave her.”

“So much for Western hospitality,” she muttered under her own breath, then turned toward the house and felt herself shiver despite the heat.

Jolene Stevens glanced at the clock on the schoolhouse wall. The hot air coming through the open windows and the sound of the birds and crickets chirping in the grass had all five students looking wistfully toward the cloudless blue sky and the summerlike day outside.

“Hand in your writing assignments and you may go home a few minutes early,” she said, giving up the fight to keep their attention. “Don’t forget you have another part of your story to write tonight. Tomorrow we will talk about writing the middle of your story.”

The air was close inside the schoolhouse, the breeze coming through the open window as hot as dragon’s breath against the back of her neck.

Jolene lifted her hair as she waited for her sixth-grader, Codi Fox, to collect all the assignments. She tried not to let any of her students see how anxious she was, not that they were paying attention. As Codi put the stack of short stories on the corner of her desk, Jolene made a point of not looking at them.

Instead she watched as her students pulled on their backpacks, answered questions and wished everyone a nice evening. None of them seemed in the least bit interested in the short-story assignments they’d just turned in.

If one of the students was bringing her the extra story, wouldn’t he or she have been anxious to see Jolene’s reaction? Apparently not.

After they’d all left, she straightened chairs, turned out lights, picked up around the schoolroom. The small, snub-nosed school bus came and went, taking three of her students with it. She waved to the elderly woman driver, then stood in the shade of the doorway as the parents of her last two students pulled up.

As soon as the dust settled, Jolene went back inside the classroom to her desk. Her hands were actually trembling as she picked up the short-story assignments, afraid the next installment of the murder story would be among the pile—and afraid it wouldn’t.

She quickly counted the individual stories. Six.