Excerpt from The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

They were also not activities the local high school had looked for on her resume when they hired her to be their new English teacher in two and a half months. She had whooped with joy upon landing that job, but immediately tamped down her exuberance, because who knew how long she could stay employed in such an iffy economy? And what if she wasn't a good teacher, or the kids hated her, or their parents objected to Catcher in the Rye? There were so many things that could go wrong after something went right.

Tense as fresh-strung barbed wire, she watched from the second floor.

Three truck doors slammed, bang, bang, bang, with the solid thud of well-built vehicles. Now her uncles were walking toward each other. What were they doing here, and why didn't she know anything about it? Uncle Chase was supposed to be in Colorado, running the family's ranch on the high plains east of the Rockies; Uncle Bobby was supposed to be in Nebraska, where he ran a third ranch the family owned, in the Sand Hills. Uncle Meryl was supposed to be at his law office in Henderson City, the county seat, twenty-five miles away.

"Hey," Red said, in the tone of a man feeling ignored.

"Shh!"

From her hidden vantage point, she watched with growing alarm.

Now her uncles were meeting in a tall, wide-shouldered trio on the sidewalk in front of her porch, and now her uncle Chase was grinding out a cigarette on the cement, and now he picked it up and put it in his shirt pocket--not because he was so thoughtful, but because every rancher and farmer was wary of fire. And now her uncles were coming toward her front door together--big men dressed in cowboy boots, pressed pants, cotton shirts, and wearing their best straw cowboy hats for summer. The hats, alone, were a disturbing sign. The uncles usually wore their best hats only to weddings, funerals, and cattlemen conventions, preferring brimmed caps for everyday. Meryl even wore a bolo tie and one of the hideous plaid suit coats that her aunt Belle had never been able to excise from his wardrobe. He had matched it with a reddish-brown pair of polyester trousers that made Jody, even two stories up, wrinkle her nose. She knew what Meryl would say if she mocked his wardrobe: he'd say it fooled out-of-town lawyers into mistaking him for a bumpkin--to their sorrow and his clients' gain.

Their trucks also looked suspiciously clean, as for making formal calls.

They wouldn't have done all this for just any casual visit.

When her uncles went formal-visiting, they showered first and changed into clean clothes. Jody's grandmother, who was the mother of two of these men and a near-mother to the third one, wouldn't stand for any less. If a male in Jody's family stepped into somebody's house, he would, by God, smell of soap. Her uncle Bobby might be forty-one years old, her uncle Chase might be forty-four, and Uncle Meryl might be forty-six and have married into the family instead of being born into it, but they lived by the laws that all Linders lived by, the commandments that Jody's grandparents, Hugh Senior and Annabelle Linder, set down. You didn't show up in church dirty and smelling of horse. You didn't take your cow-shitty work boots into other people's nice living rooms. Most important of all, you didn't show up at somebody's house without calling ahead first, even if that somebody was only your niece.

They hadn't called first. She hadn't known they were coming.

And then they really scared her, because they rang her doorbell.

Only after that unprecedented announcement of their arrival did she hear her front door open, and a moment later her uncle Chase called out in his smoky baritone, "Josephus?"

It wasn't her name, which was Laurie Jo, after her mother.

Joe-see-fuss was her three uncles' nickname for her.

She clutched a fist to her naked breasts: had something happened at the ranch?

Was it her grandfather Hugh Senior, was it her grandmother Annabelle?

Excerpted from The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard Copyright © 2010 by Nancy Pickard. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.