I couldn’t believe it. February 13th. The opening night of our graduation ceremonies. My students had decided to hold a fundraiser and silent auction as part of the graduation ceremonies for Tyler Baker, a ten-year-old boy who was suffering from some strange disease that no one could pronounce.

His prognosis wasn’t good. In fact, it was really bad. Modern medicine had no cure. His older sister had also died of the disease and his younger brother was a good candidate to get the disease also since it was some sort of genetic thing.

Tyler’s mother had been killed in a car accident a few months after his sister had passed away from the disease. So Tyler’s father, Dennis Baker, had been struggling to raise his two boys. Dennis was the assistant football coach at Southern Point High School where my nephew would be going next fall.

There was an experimental cure for Tyler’s problem but the insurance company wouldn’t cover it because it was experimental so the doctor’s couldn’t guarantee a cure. The insurance company’s refusal to pay for the surgery angered the residents of our small town. For a while, I thought the poor agent would be run out of town on a rail, but most of the residents simply changed insurance companies.

Kohler’s classmates’ actions were more practical. They decided to hold a fundraiser. Since the students from my cooking school had helped with a fundraiser at Halloween, Kohler’s classmates enlisted the student’s help.

What had started out as a bake sale rapidly blossomed into a $100.00 a plate buffet dinner and silent auction. So far the students had raised nearly $30,000. Many of the items for the auction were fancy trips, season tickets to different plays, and even a ski trip to Tennessee. They had conned, I didn’t know how, a professional auctioneer to handle the bidding. They were hoping to make a $100,000. It was beginning to look like they would make their goal.

I hurried down the stairs to the kitchen. The students had each selected dishes to cook for the buffet that were popular in their home area. For example, Michael Good was from London. He was cooking Beef Wellington and Yorkshire pudding, Eton mess, steak and kidney pudding and Trifle.

The school had paid for the ingredients because we were listed as the corporate sponsor in all the advertising. We had booked the event center for the dinner and auction as well as the graduation the next day.

The students were beginning to load up their creations or concoctions as they called them into vans that had been lent to us by the company who was building my Haunted Plantation resort. There was so much food, that it was taking eight vans to transport it all.

As I stood watching everything being loaded, I felt an overwhelming sense of dread. My arms prickled. Something was going to happen. Something bad.