September 1987, Grover’s Bluff, Missouri. The sky hung low and gray, the kind old farmers called a thinking sky. The air smelled of cut hay and cold iron. Folding tables...
Part 1 The iced coffee had been sitting so long the plastic cup had developed a layer of condensation that made my grip slick. I kept holding it anyway. It...
The county had not seen a summer like that in forty years. Ponds that had never gone dry had become fields of cracked mud. Pastures that should have been green...
Part 1 I came home smelling like mountain air, pine needles, and the bitter black coffee my old friend Silas insists on brewing in a battered copper pot. Four days...
The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning in May, sealed with wax and delivered by a rider who looked as though he had come straight from hell. I was repairing...
The entire Missouri county thought Noah Bennett had lost everything. His father was gone. His college dream was over. And the family farm was only one bad season away from...
The sound came first. A rattling, shrieking uproar like a thousand tin pots being struck at once. It rolled across Providence Creek before sunrise, scraped along the sides of houses,...
The people of Ash Ridge gathered in the market square because they had been promised livestock, farm tools, and something stranger. Her name was Kate Wynn. She was twenty-two years...
The sound reached me before I saw the vehicle. Metal grinding against stone. A violent shudder. Then the long, unmistakable hiss of four tires losing air at once. By the...
Part 1 My name is Elena Sterling, and I learned the truth about my place in my family because of a T-shirt. Not a hidden diary. Not a deathbed confession....