The same camera I’d dropped that day when I was running for my life.
My camera.
I’d dreaded for years that someone would find it. I’d searched for it after I escaped from the trailer, and I’d come back during Ben’s Ursulina hunt to search for it again. But I never found it. I’d assumed, hoped, prayed that the camera — and the roll of film inside it — had long since decomposed with the rain and snow.
But I was wrong.
Ricky had found it. He’d found the camera and developed the film inside. And then he’d set about finding the girl who’d taken the pictures.
I opened up the envelope and removed the photographs. I picked up the one on top. It was of me. I’d taken it in the woods that July day. My eyes so dark and serious, my black hair a mess, as it usually was. Sunflower Lake was behind me, shining in the morning light.
I was still an innocent girl in that picture, with no idea of the horror that lay ahead of me.
“I bought the camera that summer,” I murmured. “I was still getting used to the features. I remembered using the self-timer a couple of times, so I knew there were pictures of me on the roll. Me, and then a few frames later, them. Brink, Kip, Racer. I was in a panic when I couldn’t find the camera. I knew if anyone else found it...”
My voice trailed off.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you knew what I’d done?” I asked him. “All you’ve ever wanted to do was control me. Own me. Why not lord it over me that you could expose my secret?”
Ricky’s voice oozed with triumph. “I liked you not knowing. I was a cat with a mouse. I had all the power. Anytime I wanted, all I had to do was swipe my paw to take you down. There were so many times when I wanted to say it. Tell you what I knew. See your face when you found out. Sometimes I’d see a look in your eyes, that little fire when you were ready to fight back, and I’d think: Just try it, Bec. See what happens if you push me too far. But I was in no hurry. When you hold all the aces, you can relax and enjoy the game. So I waited. I waited for the perfect moment. And now it’s here. It’s payback time. You think you can get rid of me? Not a chance. You belong to me, and you always will.”
God, I hated the boasting in his voice. The shallow, arrogant ego. I hated that I’d been a fool for him all those years. I wasn’t going to live with it anymore, not with the fear, not with the abuse. The time had come. I could feel the electricity sizzling in my blood.
“I need a drink,” I said, my voice cool and casual. Like he’d won. Like he’d defeated me. “Do you need one?”
“Sure.”
“Beer?”
“There’s some in the fridge.”
I opened the door of the small refrigerator, which temporarily blocked me from Ricky’s view. That was the opportunity I needed. I found two bottles of Budweiser, and I saw that there was an opener next to the sink. When I had the bottles open, I closed the fridge and brought them over to the bed.
I handed one to Ricky, and as I sat down next to him again, he took my wrist and twisted it hard enough to make me wince.
“I want you to say it,” he told me.
“What?” I asked, but I knew. I knew exactly what he wanted me to say.
“I want to hear the words from that pretty mouth of yours,” he went on. “I’ve been waiting years for that. Tell me who you are.”
He let go of my wrist. I stared at him, working hard to keep the hatred off my face. I couldn’t let him see it yet.
Did he really think I’d take him back into my life? Did he really believe I would allow him anywhere near you, Shelby? After what he’d done to me, after the evil I’d seen in his eyes when he was holding you? I knew what would happen to us. Oh, I knew. Sooner or later, on a day when the cat got tired of playing with the mice, he’d kill us both.
I watched him take a long swallow from his bottle of Budweiser, and he never tasted the powder of the four Xanax pills I’d dropped inside.
“Say it,” Ricky told me again.
So I did. The truth is, I wanted to say it. I felt a surge of power running through me, a power I knew only too well, a power that had come over me twice before in my life. When I transformed. When the beast and I became one. When I evolved into what I really was.
I told you that the monster was real, Shelby.
I told you that from the very beginning.
I leaned into Ricky’s face, and then I whispered the words. The same words I’d painted on the wall in that trailer seven years earlier. The same words I’d painted above Gordon Brink’s bed.
The words I couldn’t run away from. The words that had defined my life.
“I... am... the Ursulina.”
I was twenty years old that July.
I was on my own, my father and brother both working jobs far away. I had no job myself, and I didn’t know when I’d get one, because the economy was terrible. Yes, I’d just completed a two-year degree program, but that wouldn’t do me much good when no one was hiring. I had no job, no money, no one in my life, and I felt the kind of loneliness that becomes like a friend after a while.
I did only two things that whole summer. I stayed home reading books. And I hunted for the Ursulina.
The legend of Bigfoot was all the rage back then. You’d see him everywhere — in books, on television, in magazines and newspapers. The beast in the woods that walked upright like a man. Was he real or a myth? Were there actual photos of him, or were they hoaxes? Of course, I knew he existed, or something like him did. I knew there was one of those beasts haunting the forest near Sunflower Lake. We had a special connection, him and me. I was sure that if anyone could find him, if anyone could draw him out, I could.
That’s why I bought the camera. It was a luxury I could barely afford, but if I found the Ursulina again, if I could get a picture of him, then my whole life would change. So day after day, with nothing else to do, I searched the national forest. Sometimes I arrived before dawn and left as the sun went down. Other times I brought a backpack and camped. I’d hike for miles, watching for movement in the trees or tracks on the ground, inhaling the air for a whiff of his breath, listening for that unmistakable hufffffff.
I thought he’d come back when he knew it was me. He’d show himself.
It’s Rebecca. Don’t you remember? Where are you?
But as the days passed, I saw no sign of him. All I did was take pictures. Sometimes of the woods, the lake, the flowers, the animals, the birds. Sometimes of myself, when I would put the camera on a rock and take a self-portrait in the shadows.
That was my summer seven years earlier, sweetheart. The lazy summer of a young woman trying to figure out her future. Until that one terrible afternoon, when I saw sunlight glinting on silver.
Norm’s trailer.
I knew where I was. I’d been here before with Norm and Will. I heard voices, and I assumed it was them, so I headed that way to say hello. As I got closer, I also brought the camera to my eyes to take a picture. The light off the trailer reflected like a kind of rainbow, as if I were staring at a spaceship, and I thought that was cool. There were people in the foreground, like aliens. It was only when I stared through the viewfinder and snapped the shutter that I realized the men standing there were strangers. Not Norm and Will.
Three of them. Three men.
Their conversation froze into silence when they saw me. Six eyes locked on me at once; they locked on me and on my camera. I knew at once that I’d just made the worst mistake of my life. Every woman knows hard men of evil purpose at a glance, and I saw it in those men. Two were dressed in ratty clothes; one wore a suit and looked oddly out of place in the wilderness. That man focused on me, as coldly cruel as a reptile. I had no idea who he was, but I was never going to forget his face, and he was never going to forget mine.