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reminded her, “Papa Zeke taught you all about things like this. Remember how he used to whittle us whistles out of slippery elm, and those little water wheels we put in the creek?” Back in our Scouting days, Ellis’s granddaddy had taught us how to identify all kinds of wildlife and once made pink lemonade from sumac berries—not the poison kind, of course.
    The girls in my class were on a field trip after class that day to gather the materials we would later use for dyes, and I glanced warily at the sky as I walked. The day had begun brisk and sunny, but now the blue was almost obliterated by a gray watercolor sky, and it seemed to be getting darker by the minute.
    The wine-red roots and berries of the pokeweed that sprouted tall in scraggly undergrowth dyed up anywhere from red to purple, and the outside hulls of black walnuts from a tree at the far end of the back campus produced shades of black and brown. We collected the pokeweed first, pulling the plants from the ground with a few forceful tugs. I wanted to keep the roots and berries separate to see if it would make a difference in color, and each student had brought along bags for that purpose.
    Ellis stopped to dig up a couple of tiny red cedars that dotted the field around us. The roots were supposed to dye up purple, and several of the girls were collecting the flowers of goldenrod for a particular shade of yellow.
    â€œI see the professor is keeping her distance,” Ellis whispered as Joy Ellen Harper and some of the others plunged ahead of us through broom sedge and brambles to the remote part of the campus that had once been a popular recreation spot.
    â€œAt least she had the good sense to wear boots,” I said, extracting my sneaker-clad foot from a clump of muddy goo. Joy Ellen seemed resigned to my being assigned to her, but I got the distinct impression that she wasn’t happy about joining us today. Well, she had insisted on coming along!
    â€œWasn’t the old stable somewhere about here?” Ellis asked, and I nodded, although I barely remembered the building. The trails were long overgrown, and only a faint circle remained of the riding ring where industrious joggers sometimes ran. The Old Lake, once a favorite swimming place, had been drained since the death of that student several years before.
    â€œSomething tells me we’d better make it quick.” Celeste, who trudged along beside us, glanced up as the first drops fell. We had spread out over several acres to gather as much and as quickly as we could. A couple of girls collected handfuls of acorns from a gnarled red oak at the edge of the field, while a little farther away three of their classmates knelt to scoop up fallen black walnuts and throw them into bags. The three of us hurried to join them, staining our fingernails yellowish-brown from the hard green hulls. The acrid smell was almost suffocating. A red spatter of pokeberry juice stained the front of my shirt, and my hands looked as if I’d dipped them in blood.
    â€œThis is enough. We’d better start back,” I said as water plopped on my face and trickled under my collar. A loud clap of thunder seemed to shake the ground and I called to the others to hurry back to the main campus and shelter. Through a scattering of pine saplings I glimpsed Joy Ellen’s red-and-black-checkered jacket and heard her call out. She shouted again, and this time I detected what I thought was a little more than concern in her voice.
    â€œYou go with the others,” I told Ellis, who wasn’t the least inclined to argue. “I’ll see what Joy Ellen’s yelling about.”
    Great, I thought, as a dripping pine branch slung water in my face and thistles tore into my ankles, all we need now is to lose another girl!
    Joy Ellen stood herding a group of students in front of her at the rim of what used to be the Old Lake and I could hardly see her for the rain. Sloshing through terra-cotta