THE GIRL WHO COLLECTED RAINWATER — WHEN EVERY WELL WENT DRY

Chapter 1 — The Girl With the Old Clay Jars

Nobody in Bell Hollow understood why seventeen-year-old Clara Whitmore collected rainwater.

Every time dark clouds rolled over the mountains, the other villagers rushed outside to cover their hay, bring in their laundry, and protect their firewood.

Clara did something else.

She lined up old clay jars beneath the edges of her roof.

One beside the kitchen door.

Two beneath the barn gutter.

Three behind the small wooden shed.

And every time the rain came, she watched the water fall into them as carefully as if it were gold.

“Look at her,” old Mr. Harlan laughed one afternoon.

“She’s catching rain like she plans to sell it.”

Several villagers laughed.

Clara lowered her eyes but said nothing.

Her father, Elias, had died three winters earlier, leaving her and her mother a small farmhouse at the far end of the valley. They owned little land and almost no money.

The old jars were things Clara had collected from abandoned homes, broken sheds, and farms whose owners had moved away.

Some were cracked.

Some were stained black with age.

One was missing half its handle.

But Clara repaired every one.

She sealed the cracks with wax and cloth. She washed them carefully and kept them covered whenever they were full.

People thought it was strange.

Some even thought it was foolish.

“There’s a perfectly good well in Bell Hollow,” Mrs. Cooper told her one morning.

“You don’t need to save rain.”

Clara glanced toward the distant mountains.

“I know.”

“Then why do you keep doing it?”

Clara hesitated.

“Because rain doesn’t always come when we need it.”

Mrs. Cooper laughed.

“Child, you’ve been reading too many old books.”

Clara smiled faintly.

Maybe she had.

But there was one thing nobody knew.

Before her father died, he had told her something that she had never forgotten.

It happened during the winter when Clara was fourteen.

They had been sitting beside the stove while rain hammered against the roof.

Her father had looked toward the window.

“Your grandfather used to say something,” he told her.

“What?”

“Never trust a valley just because it has a river.”

Clara had frowned.

“What does that mean?”

“It means water can disappear.”

She had laughed then.

Her father hadn’t.

“Someday,” he said quietly, “you may need every drop you can save.”

Three years later, Clara still remembered those words.

And she had another reason for collecting water.

The previous summer, she had noticed something nobody else seemed to care about.

The creek behind their house was getting narrower.

The grass along the banks had turned brown earlier than usual.

And the old oak trees on the southern ridge had begun losing their leaves before autumn.

Clara had started counting the days between rains.

At first, there had been nine.

Then fourteen.

Then twenty-three.

By the beginning of June, the valley had gone thirty-six days without a proper rain.

And the sky above Bell Hollow had begun to look strangely empty.

Still, the villagers laughed at her.

Until the first well stopped giving water.