Chapter 1 Karina Tucker took a deep breath. “Jacob, do not hit Emily again. Emily, let go of his hair. Don’t make me stop this car!” Her daughter’s face swung into the rearview mirror, outraged as only a six-year-old could be. “Mom, he started it!” “I don’t care who started it. If you don’t be quiet right now, things will happen!” “What things?” Melissa whined. Megan, her twin, stuck her tongue out. Karina furrowed her eyebrows, trying to look mean in the rearview mirror. “Horrible things.” The four children quieted in the back of the van, trying to figure out what “horrible things” meant. The quiet wouldn’t last. Karina drove on. The next time Jill called to ask her if she would chaperone a gaggle of first graders for a school field trip, she would claim to have the bubonic plague instead. The trip itself wasn’t that awful. The sun shone bright, and the drive down to the old-timey village, forty-five minutes from Chikasha, was downright pleasant. Nothing but clear sky and flat Oklahoma fields with an occasional thin line of forest between them to break the wind. But now, after a day of hayrides and watching butter being churned and iron nails being hammered, the kids were tired and cranky. They’d been on the road for twenty minutes and the lot of them had