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

She didn't know what she would do without either of them; they had been the rocks of her life since her parents had gone.

"Jody?" Chase called, louder this time. "Honey? You home?"

He sounded tense, which wasn't like her coolest uncle.

In a flash Jody thought of their various wives and ex-wives, their assorted children and stepchildren who were her cousins and sort-of cousins. There were so many disasters that could happen on a cattle outfit. So many ways to get hurt, so many ways to end up in hospitals or funeral homes, so many ways to break hearts and families. She couldn't think of any minor calamities that would prompt her uncles to pay a special visit like this to her. They wouldn't do this unless there was something serious, something they couldn't just make a phone call to tell her, and worse--something that made them decide they had to tell her en masse.

"Jesus," she whispered, a half prayer, hurrying to pick up clothes to cover her naked body. She felt shocked, albeit without being surprised at all, since she believed that bad events followed good as inevitably as death followed life, and as frequently. The secret, she had decided when she was younger, was to try to anticipate it, so as to mitigate the blow. The problem with that philosophy was that it never worked; she was always surprised; no matter how far ahead she tried to look, bad news still hurt, shock still left her shaken. With a start, she realized she hadn't answered, so she yelled in a high voice, "I'm home, Uncle Chase! I'm upstairs, I'll be right there!"

"You want us to come up?" he yelled back.

"No!" she screamed. God, no.

On the bed, Red had bolted up to a sitting position at the first sound of that voice, which was the voice of one of the members of his extended family of employers. He also heard the terrifying offer to climb the stairs, and now he was trying to scurry out of bed and get dressed fast and silently.

"Go down the back stairs!" she whispered to him, unnecessarily.

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.