The second had only a cloth binding, sun-bleached blue. The pages were yellowed and fragile. Inside was a collection of overheated legends about the town.

A tale about a creature called the squonk dwelling in the pine forest. It reminded me of stories we used to hear in Nebraska about the Alkali Lake Monster. It strikes when least expected! And curiously a lone member of the party survives to tell the tale.

Seriously? If some olde tyme gentlemen wanted to come up with some scary stories to tell ye olde kids in the dark? They should have come up with a better monster name than “squonk.”

Several stories centered around “the Quince House,” which must have once sat somewhere on the outskirts of town. A teacher who bludgeoned his fiancée with a hammer in a jealous rage. A freak fire decades later that killed the house’s inhabitants and a worker. The fire was blamed on heat and dry conditions, but the anonymous author of this volume seemed suspicious. Some very hippy-dippy stuff about bad energy trapped. Malevolent spirits.

Creepy.

Normally, I’d laugh.

I ignore the sensation of something crawling along my spine and consider the cover of a paperback volume titled His Wayward Love. The cover features a man with a white blouse on, wind-whipped as to show his giant muscles, including a six-pack. In front of him, a woman in a lilac princess dress swooning in his arms. The wind was obviously really whipping up in this picture. I guess that was a picture from before his love goes wayward. Maybe it was supposed to be His Windward Love.

I’m very involved in my analysis of that book cover—who posed for it? Did anyone pose for it? Or is it just an illustration? Why is her dress not wind-whipped when his shirt is practically blown off?—when I realize that the sky outside seems to have turned itself from blue to purple. And not a subtle purple . . . the purple of an angry bruise. The kind of sky that, back home, means a tornado.

I turn around, looking back at the town diminishing in the distance. Yes, it’s still there. True. But the clouds above it have turned to a deep, aching purple and the air around me is starting to change. The barometer is dropping. This is one of the things you have to know about if you grew up in Tornado Alley. The feeling before a storm.

A storm, where I come from, could mean a light drizzle, or that the entire side of your house gets ripped off, leaving a painting hanging neatly on one wall while the opposite one has been turned into matchsticks of splintered wood with a tractor-trailer cab stuck in the middle of it. So, of the very few things I know, this is one of them: A storm is coming.

I pick up the pace, not wanting to run, although come to think of it . . . why not run? It’s not like anybody is watching me. And yet I stick to a merely quickened pace.