Now I was scared.
I stood alone in the clearing, absolutely frozen in place, unable to move a muscle. I wished I would hear those thunderous footfalls head away, but the beast had stopped again. Another loud growl rumbled out of the darkness, and the sound had a menace to it, like a threat.
I was trying to decide what to do when I heard a familiar shout not far away. It was my father.
“Rebecca?”
He was looking for me, thank God. He would save me. I put my head down and charged back into the woods, making as much noise as I could, my flashlight beam bouncing crazily as I ran. I crashed through brambles that grabbed at my tangled black hair and scraped their woody fingers across my bare arms and legs.
I hoped that the noise would scare the beast away, but it didn’t.
There it was. Its giant shadow loomed in front of me and blocked my path. I didn’t dare bring up my flashlight to see it clearly. All I could make out was its shape, hunched and huge, twice my size. We were so close that I could smell its stench and feel the heat of its breath. With a swipe of a paw, it could slash off my face. I tried to scream, but there was no sound in my throat. My whole body shook.
I lifted the revolver, struggling to keep it steady. My quivering finger slid over the trigger. I dropped the flashlight to the ground and balanced my wrist with my other hand. At that range, even a scared little girl couldn’t miss.
But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t.
I could not kill this thing, which had done nothing to me. Somehow I think it sensed that, as if we had a truce between us. He would not hurt me, and I would not hurt him.
“Rebecca!”
My father shouted again, much closer to us.
At the sound of his voice, the monster stomped past me. The sharp claws on one of its paws scraped my arm as he passed, drawing blood. I held my breath, wondering if he would carry me off with him — but no. The beast vanished into the trees, leaving me behind. When I saw the beam of a flashlight, I called out, and seconds later, my father appeared in the woods. His face dissolved into relief when he saw me.
“Rebecca! What are you doing out here?”
I shrugged, as if it were no big deal. “I had to pee.”
“Well, you scared me half to death. Come back to camp.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Are you hurt? You’re bleeding.”
“I scratched myself, that’s all.”
I followed him back to our tent, where he bandaged the cuts on my arm. After that, I pretended to sleep, but my eyes stayed wide open until morning. The rest of the night, the rest of the trip, was uneventful. I had no more strange encounters. Overnight, I would listen for the hufffffff that told me it was nearby, but all I heard was the hooting owl somewhere in the trees.
I found myself wondering where the beast was, and what it really was, and why it hadn’t killed me.
Somehow I knew — I already knew even as a girl — that we would meet again.
I never told my father what I saw. Not him, not my brother, not anyone. That moment in the woods has always been my secret. You’re the first person I’ve ever told, sweetheart, but it’s important that you know the truth.
You see, this is what you must remember as I tell you the rest of the story.
The Ursulina is real.
Part One
Your Father
Chapter One
When you’re the only woman deputy in the county sheriff’s department, and it’s Christmas Eve, who do you think is the lucky one who pulls the overnight shift? Yes, it was me.
The snow fell in huge flakes, promising us a white Christmas at the end of a brown December. Around ten o’clock that Monday evening, I was alone in my cruiser on the back roads of Black Wolf County, singing along to a cassette of Mitch Miller carols that my father had sent me from a truck stop somewhere in Wyoming. My brother was away in the oil fields of Texas. I was lonely and fighting a cold and trying to take my mind off the fact that my life was falling apart.
This was 1984. I’m sure you can do the math. You were still almost a year away from being born.
You might think the holiday would make for a quiet night on patrol, but you’d be wrong. Christmas does weird things to people. My first call was to deal with Darius Stedman, who was moonwalking to Michael Jackson on the boom box, in the parking lot of the 126 Bar. Mr. Stedman was wearing a Santa hat and only a Santa hat. The temperature was seven degrees outside, and body parts freeze pretty quickly in that kind of weather. So I turned on the siren and went screaming toward the 126 to make sure that Mr. Stedman’s various appendages didn’t start snapping off.
It’s not like he was a regular in the county drunk tank. We had plenty of those. No, he was forty-three years old, a solid citizen, and my former high school science teacher. I liked him. However, he’d lost his wife to a heart condition over the summer, and the holidays have a way of bringing those things roaring back, particularly when alcohol is involved. When I got to the 126, a crowd of bar-goers was cheering as Mr. Stedman danced to “Billie Jean.” Ricky, my husband of four years, was among them, but we ignored each other like strangers. I broke up the party, wrapped Mr. Stedman in a blanket, and took him back to his house to thaw him out and sober him up. He spent the next half hour sobbing to me about his wife over coffee.
It made me think how nice it must be to love someone so deeply that it hurts that much to lose them. I’d never experienced an emotion like that, and I wouldn’t until the following year.
Until you, sweetheart.
I left when Mr. Stedman finally fell asleep on his sofa. I had to drive by the 126 on my way back to the station, so I decided to stop to talk to Ricky. I was sure he was still at the bar. He was always there, drinking up my county salary and flirting with the eighteen-year-old waitresses. The 126 was our local dirty dive. It took its name from its location on Highway 126 about ten miles outside the county seat, a town called Random. During the summers, they had strip nights and wet T-shirt contests. Dart games turned into knife fights. Cocaine was snorted in the bathroom. And yet almost everyone in the county, from parents to preachers, came in for pizza and drinks at the 126 several times a week, because there was nowhere else to go.
Sundays were typically movie night at the bar, and that always drew a crowd. Yesterday, they’d shown Trading Places, which Ricky didn’t want to miss because of Jamie Lee Curtis and her boobs. I’d used my cold as an excuse to skip it, but Ricky and I had also had a big fight before he went off to see the movie. I’d lost my cool and said things I never meant to say out loud.
Like using the D word — divorce — for the first time.
It had been almost two years since Ricky got fired from the mine for assaulting his supervisor. With no unemployment, we were barely scraping by, and we’d only made the December mortgage payment because my dad gave me two hundred dollars. January was coming and the mortgage was due again, and Ricky was no closer to finding work. However, the fight was less about him and less about money than it was about me. I was struggling with Big Things. Who I was. The mistakes I’d made. What I needed to do to reclaim my life. More and more, I was thinking about a future without Ricky, but the time to say so wasn’t in the midst of an argument while we were both drunk and angry. So that Monday night, with it being Christmas Eve and all, I decided to stop at the bar and see if we could make peace, at least for the holidays.