“Don’t you want that one?” asked her third-grader, Amy Brooks.

Jolene turned and looked at the girl. Amy was pointing at the corner of a table in the back of the classroom where stapled-together papers were lying on it, facedown.

“Does anyone know who left this here?” she asked her class, glancing at each of the five. Blank faces stared back at her. “Has it been here every time you collected the stories?” she asked her students.

Amy nodded. “Isn’t it from your other student?”

“My other student?” Jolene repeated.

“Don’t you have one who can’t come to class and sends things in?” she asked. “You know, like an online student?”

“A ghost student,” her fifth-grader brother, Thad, said with a laugh.

“Yeah, ooooooo,” Luke chimed in. “Ghosts.”

“All right, that’s enough. It’s Thursday so that means we have one more day of writing the middle of the story and then you will have the weekend to complete the end.”

There was a groan from the two fifth-graders.

“You’re about to wind up your story. What else do you need to tell your reader before the ending? That’s what you should think about when you write tonight.”

She picked up the pages from the small desk at the back and turned them over. More of the murder story. She felt her pulse quicken with both relief—and dread. Monday it would end.

But how?

The searing wind was a demon moving over the lifeless land. With no sign of rain in the forecast, the tension had grown until it was like a wire strung too tightly. Everyone waited, knowing it was just a matter of time before something snapped.

Among the farmers and ranchers there was a growing sense of panic. The men talked among themselves in quiet desperation. The women tried to keep the children from irritating their fathers.

A silent fear had settled in. If it didn’t rain soon, there would be no crops, no money. They had been through hard times before, but this time might be the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

While she fanned herself and watched the road or slogged through chores that couldn’t be put off, the rest of the community hung on each blistering breath and prayed and cursed and worried.

Not that she was immune to the growing strain in the country and people around her. She was part of it, this pressure that pushed some to the edge, for she had grown bored and restless. Her lover had to sense it and feel another kind of quiet desperation.

The hottest day that spring, she lifted her head as if sniffing the air. An old pickup clattered up the road, the metal pipes he carried in the back humming like a siren call. Did he glimpse her standing at her bedroom window, lifting her long, richly burnished hair from her slim neck?