The Ursulina

Chapter Twenty-One

I spent two weeks in the hospital after Ricky’s assault and then another three weeks at home recovering. It was mid-March before I was really up and around. I’m right-handed, so even though my broken left wrist was in a cast, it didn’t slow me down too much. My cuts healed, and to my relief, they left no noticeable scars. The bruises began to fade. Miraculously, for the blows my head had taken against the floor, I’d escaped having a concussion. As we neared spring, I was feeling healthy and more like myself again.

My brother called several times while I was recovering, but he had a job in New Mexico and couldn’t leave. My father took a few weeks off from the road and practically lived with me during that stretch. He was mostly worthless around the house, with absolutely no experience cooking or cleaning, which meant that most of the time I took care of him more than he helped me. But I liked having him with me for a while, even though we had a way of getting on each other’s nerves. Eventually, though, he had to get back in his truck and start making money again, and the house felt empty after he left. Given what would happen soon, I was grateful for that time we spent together.

Others in town helped, too. For all their many shortcomings, people around here come together when someone needs them. Ben Malloy insisted on giving me five hundred dollars to help with my expenses while I was out of work. He gave it anonymously, but I heard through the grapevine that it was him. Darrell, his wife, and daughters were always bringing over meals. Norm shoveled my driveway. Will, who’d mostly recovered from his own injuries, made me a couple of pieces of new furniture to replace ones that had been damaged in the fight. He talked and walked a little slower than he had, but he was alive, and his charming smile was back, if tinged with more sadness.

As for Ricky, he left town. Rather than face criminal charges, he vanished, taking his truck and the clothes he was wearing and nothing else. No one was sure where he’d gone, but I heard a rumor that he was in Pennsylvania under a different name. With Norm’s help, I filed for divorce, which went uncontested because Ricky didn’t show up in court.

It was the day after Easter in early April when I got the official confirmation of what I’d suspected for weeks. I was pregnant. Missing a period in the wake of what had happened to me didn’t necessarily seem unusual, but missing two was something I couldn’t ignore. Plus, the truth is, I already knew. I felt you inside me, sweetheart. I was sure you were there. You gave me the strength to get better.

When the doctor called that Monday, I was eating jelly beans and chocolate and playing with the green paper curlicues filling the big Easter basket that Darrell had made for me. As soon as the phone rang, I knew it was the doctor, and I knew what he’d say. Even before I answered, I remember staring at the Easter basket as if it were a bassinet and imagining a baby amid those curlicues, rather than a chocolate bunny. The doctor broke the news to me, and I started to cry. They were tears of pure joy. Knowing that I was going to have a baby was the first happiness I’d had since awakening on the floor.

I suppose I should have been scared at the idea of being a single mother, but I wasn’t. You made up for everything else, sweetheart. The things I’d been through in life had led me to that one moment. Of course, I had no idea if I was having a boy or a girl, but in my heart, I knew you were a girl. Rebecca Colder would have a daughter to share her life. I began to talk to you right away, telling you the things we would do together. I sang to you. I wrote poems for you. I know you don’t remember any of it, but I like to think that I’m back there somewhere, that my voice is tucked away in a little corner of your brain.

You’re probably wondering if I ever called Tom Ginn to tell him what happened to me, or to tell him that I was pregnant. I didn’t. Oh, believe me, I was tempted. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up the phone and then put it down. I knew if I called, he’d be at my side in an instant, but it didn’t seem fair to push my way into his life like that. He had his father to take care of. He had his own responsibilities. And this sounds so vain, but I looked terrible in those weeks after the beating. I didn’t want him to see me like that. In his mind, I was pretty. An angel. A perfect little fantasy, the girl who’d saved him. Instead, he would come to me and see a woman who was swollen and cut and bruised and bedridden. He’d stay out of obligation, not desire. I hated that. When the weeks of my recovery had finally passed and I looked like myself again, I felt that too much time had gone by to reach out to him. His life had gone on. I half wondered if he’d even remember me, although my secret heart said he thought of me every day. But I let him go. I never called.

I assumed I would never see him again.

I was wrong.

At the end of April, I went back to work. No, not as a deputy. Jerry got his wish. After my behavior on the night of Jay’s death, the sheriff could have fired me. Even Darrell wouldn’t have defended me for leaving the scene of a suicide and not reporting it. But Jerry didn’t like the optics of firing a deputy for dereliction of duty while she was in a hospital bed after being raped and nearly beaten to death by her husband. So I got a reprieve. Jerry was actually very sweet, visiting me a couple of times during my recovery and making sure I had everything I needed. As I say, people can surprise you.

However, I’d be the first to admit that I couldn’t do my former job anymore. I was feeling better and getting around pretty well, but that didn’t mean I was anywhere close to the physicality needed to be a deputy. Plus, I was pregnant, so even as my body got stronger, I was already suffering from what the sheriff considered a disqualifying disability. He couldn’t imagine that I wanted to come back to work at all, but I had bills to pay, and so he agreed to take me back in the role I’d had before. Mrs. Mannheim transferred to a job in the county licensing bureau, and I became the office secretary again.

The rest of the deputies treated me better after that, partly because of what I’d been through and partly because I was back in a woman’s job. I missed being out on the road, and working with Darrell, but I didn’t miss the abuse. At that point in my life, I’m not sure I could have handled it.

And the murder investigation? The death of Gordon Brink?

Jerry closed the case. He did it while I was in the hospital and unable to offer any kind of protest. The sheriff interviewed Ben Malloy, who told him about Jay’s confession to the murder before the boy killed himself. Maybe Ben couldn’t hear everything that had been said between me and Jay on the ice — the wind had been howling the whole time — or maybe the sheriff had twisted around Ben’s statement to suit what he really wanted to do, which was put Gordon Brink’s murder to bed. Had anyone asked me, I would have said that Jay made up the story to protect Will, but by the time I was in a condition to say so, nobody cared. Darrell hadn’t objected. Neither had Norm and Will. I suspect Norm had a long talk with Will about it, because as a result of Jay’s false confession, Will went back in the closet. I’m not sure anyone believed it, but most of the town pretended, and Will was able to live his life again without violence. In another year, he’d go away to college. I doubted he would ever make his home in Black Wolf County after that.

So we’d found the killer. He was dead, and that was that. The thick folder that Darrell and I had gathered about the death of Gordon Brink got put away.

I filed it myself.

In the fifth month of my pregnancy, my father died. I told you I’d had a sixth sense about it coming soon, so I wasn’t completely surprised to get the call. He was on the road when it happened, in a cheap motel outside Wichita. The check-out time passed without him leaving his room, and the motel owner found him dead in the twin bed. He’d died in his sleep, which was probably a blessing. According to the coroner, he’d been in the advanced stages of stomach cancer, so he must have been hiding extraordinary pain for a long time. He’d shown me no hint of it while he was staying with me. The end could have been much worse, but apparently God and his heart had decided that he’d had enough.

We had his funeral in Random. Most of the town came. My brother was there, and he and I spent a couple of awkward days together before he headed back to his latest job. After New Mexico, he’d gone to Oregon to work in the lumber mills. He was never going to settle down. The itinerant, Bob Dylan lifestyle suited him, going from place to place, making friends, sleeping with women, leaving them all behind. He had no interest in living in Random again, and he seemed to have no idea what to say to his pregnant sister. I loved my brother, but really, I hardly knew him. We’d spent very little time together. That one camping trip when I was ten years old is still the only real memory I have of us as a family.

My brother and I inherited my father’s house, but neither one of us was sentimental about keeping it. I wanted to stay where I was. So we sold it, and the deal went through quickly, because homes didn’t come up for sale in our area very often. Norm, jack-of-all-trades lawyer that he is, handled the closing and title work for us. Dad had been whittling away the mortgage on the house, so my brother and I came out of the sale with a reasonable amount of equity — enough to put me on solid financial footing for the first time in my life. I paid off my own little house, and I had enough in the bank that I didn’t cringe at the thought of my small paycheck.

All that activity took up most of the summer that year. Life settled into a routine, or at least as much routine as I could expect while I waited for you to join me in the fall. I did my job. I lived day to day. For a while, I stayed something of a recluse, but gradually, I let the town see me out and about again. Occasionally, I’d stop by the 126 and chat with Sandra and some of the other girls. Enough time had passed that they saw me not as a victim but as Rebecca Colder again, the girl they’d known their whole lives.

In many ways, that was the happiest summer I’d ever spent. I read a lot, particularly old classics. I did some writing myself, mostly poetry, most of it very bad. I took guitar lessons and found I had a little bit of a knack for it, so I began to write some songs and play them to the trees in the national forest. When I looked in the mirror, I would catch myself smiling. That was a new experience for me.

Most of all, I was excited about you that summer.

I could feel you moving, kicking, shifting, as if you were impatient to be out in the world with me. As the time passed and my due date got closer, I began to allow myself to dream that I had a future. That we had a future.

It still makes me sad to realize those hopes were a mirage.

Just as I got to the last month of my pregnancy, everything fell apart. That fragile confidence I had in my life blew away like a spiderweb in the wind. In a single moment, I knew that happiness wasn’t in the cards for me.

You see, the Ursulina came back.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Darrell showed up at my door before dawn on a Sunday morning in early October. That had once been a common experience for me, but it hadn’t happened in a long time. I could tell from the strange look of horror on his face that something was wrong. He apologized for getting me out of bed, but he asked me if I could come with him to a crime scene.

Quickly.

At that point in my life, I didn’t do anything quickly. Walking anywhere was an effort. Even getting in and out of bed took ten minutes. I had one of those pregnancy bodies where the rest of me stayed skinny, but you presented like a Thanksgiving turkey big enough to serve a family of twenty, and the weight of you meant I had to pee every hour on the hour. I was still a few weeks from my due date, but I had the feeling you would be coming sooner, rather than later. So I wasn’t anxious to stray far from home.

“Look at me, Darrell,” I said. “Are you kidding?”

“Yes, I understand, but I got a call about a murder, and this is one where I’d like to have you with me.”

“Why me? I’m just a secretary. I’m not a deputy anymore. Jerry would flip if he found out you brought me to a crime scene.”

“I’ll explain when we get there. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need you.”

“Why not Ajax? He’s your partner now.”

Darrell sighed. “Look, Rebecca, you can say no if you want. If you’re not up for this in your condition, then I get it, of course. I feel bad even asking, but I really want your help.”

I wasn’t going to say no, not after Darrell and his family had been a lifeline for me for most of the year. He knew that. It took me a while to get dressed, and then Darrell helped me out to his cruiser. It wasn’t even seven in the morning, earlier than any of the churchgoers would be out, so the streets were empty. As we drove, the day brightened, revealing the palette of reds and yellows in the trees. Soon enough, the leaves would be falling, burying us the way the winter snow does.

Darrell didn’t say much along the way. I asked him twice more what had happened, but I realized he wasn’t going to tell me until we got there. I wasn’t sure if he was keeping it a secret for some reason, or if he was simply having trouble processing whatever it was. He had a queasy look I’d seen on his face before.

It was a look that said there would be blood.

Based on the route we took, I thought at first that Darrell was taking me to his own house, which was down the dirt road near Norm’s place, and next door to my father’s old house.

“Are the girls okay?” I asked with concern.

“The girls are fine.”

“Is it Norm? Or Will?”

“No. It’s not them.”

That gave me a small sense of relief. When we got to the crossroad, Darrell turned the opposite way, driving in the shadows of the forest for several miles. He finally pulled into a driveway at the house belonging to Ajax and Ruby. Several cars had arrived ahead of us. Neighbors. Friends. But ours was the only squad car. I could see Ruby herself at the base of the porch steps, with her nine-month-old son in her arms. Her red hair blew wildly, and her face was a pale mess of tears.

“Oh my God,” I murmured, turning to Darrell. “Ajax?”

He replied in a clipped voice. “Yes.”

“Dead?”

“According to Ruby, yes.”

“What on earth happened?”

“I don’t know. That’s what we need to find out.”

As I struggled to get out of the car, Ruby came toward us, screaming. Her shrill panic set her baby crying, too. One of our mutual high school friends emerged from inside the house and rushed to take Ruby’s son from her. At that point, Ruby collapsed, wailing as she knelt in the dew-damp grass.

“He’s dead! He’s dead! Who did this? What am I going to do?”

Darrell helped Ruby back to her feet. I felt terrible for what she was going through, but I also felt awkward, standing there with no real role to play. I still didn’t understand why Darrell needed me. The pregnant office secretary. If Ajax was the victim, there were other deputies who could have come here with him to start the investigation.

“Ruby, let’s go inside,” Darrell told her softly. “Tell us where to go.”

She had her face buried in his chest, and she was making incoherent whimpering noises. He let her cry for a while longer, and then he took her shoulders gently and held her until she was able to focus.

“Ruby? I know this is hard, but take us inside, okay? You don’t have to show us the body. You can stay with your friends and wait for us. Are the other kids here?”

She shook her head. “A friend took them to her house.”

“Good. We’ll need to talk to you, but we have to see — we have to see what happened first. Okay?”

“It’s horrible. It’s horrible. It’s unbelievable.”

“I know.”

Then, like a snake’s head whipping around, Ruby’s gaze shifted to me, and her entire face contorted from grief into simmering hatred. “What the hell is she doing here?”

“I wanted her help.”

“She’s not even a cop anymore. Get her out of here.”

“Ruby, please. This isn’t the time. Take us inside.”

She stalked away from us with quick, angry footsteps. We followed, with me slowing down the pace. I hadn’t seen much of Ruby this year, and when I had, she’d been cold and distant, but this reaction was beyond anything she’d shown me before. I didn’t think she’d forgotten the incident between me and Ajax months earlier in the bathroom of the 126, but this seemed over the top for something like that.

We entered the house, and without a word, Ruby simply pointed at an oak door that led down to the basement. After that, she went into the living room and took her baby in her arms again. There were three other women inside who gathered around her. I knew all of them, but they shot me looks that mirrored Ruby’s disgust.

Darrell opened the basement door, but then he hesitated. He seemed to see me for the first time, baby bump and all, even though we’d been together in the sheriff’s office every day for months. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you to come with me. I know you’re pregnant, and so much has happened to you, but I still think of you like I did before. I wanted your help, but I wasn’t thinking about how you might react. Are you up for this?”

“I don’t even know what’s down there.”

“Well, from what Ruby told me, it’s gruesome. If you think this will put you or the baby at any risk—”

“Darrell, either tell me the truth, or let’s just go downstairs, okay?”

“Yes. Okay.”

I took hold of the railings with both hands. Darrell made sure I didn’t fall as we headed down the steps to the cool basement. It was large, sprawling under the footprint of the entire house, but unfinished, with a concrete floor and foundation walls and wooden crossbeams overhead. The floor had no carpet, just a few throw rugs in the middle of the room and a minefield of children’s toys. The lights were plain bulbs with chain pulls, tucked among layers of insulation.

“Where is he?” I murmured.

“Far back, Ruby told me. Past the washer and dryer.”

Darrell led the way. I felt a sense of confusion and dread as I followed behind him, because I truly had no idea what we would find. It was hard for me to imagine Ajax killing himself. His ego wouldn’t allow it. I had visions of a sex game with one of his girlfriends gone wrong. If you believed what the women at the 126 were saying, autoerotic asphyxia was all the rage. Or maybe a jealous husband had finally had enough of Ajax sleeping his way through the married women of Black Wolf County.

Whatever was in my mind, I wasn’t ready for what we found at the back of the basement.

Ahead of me, Darrell froze in the way he did when he had to swallow down his bloody flashbacks of the war. I heard him hiss under his breath. He turned back to stop me from going inside, but I did anyway. My eyes absorbed the scene in an instant. It was a small, windowless interior room, with nothing but a twin bed inside. No sheets, no blankets, just a mattress and a single pillow.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. I simply couldn’t believe it.

Ajax lay on the bed, naked and very dead. Not suicide. Not a sex game. This was the past come to life again. Just like Kip Wells and Racer Moritz. Just like Gordon Brink. His wrists and ankles had both been tied, and his fixed eyes were wide, filled with a kind of terror I’d never seen on Ajax’s face before. His body had been flayed, sliced open head to toe. His organs were on display, some squeezing out like worms where his abdomen had been severed. The entire mattress below him was soaked red, completely red, as if it had been sewn out of burgundy fabric. Blood made a lake on the floor, too, and splatter filled all the concrete walls, where it had dripped into long streaks like pinstripes.

“No,” I murmured, grabbing my head and blinking over and over in pure shock. “It can’t be. This can’t be happening.”

But it was.

Months had passed, but the monster had returned. There on the wall, we saw the message scrawled in blood taken from Ajax’s corpse. Four deaths with the same signature, the way it had been left every time:

Chapter Twenty-Three

Upstairs, I needed a drink of water. I found Ruby alone in the kitchen. Her deep-red hair was greasy and loose around her shoulders. She gripped the counter with both hands and stared out the window at her expansive backyard. Her tears had dried on her face, and a fierce, almost wild expression had replaced the sadness. Her jaw was clenched so hard I thought she might bite through her tongue. Her survival instincts were kicking in, the mother of three kids left alone. One thing I knew about Ruby. She was hard as nails.

“I’m really sorry about Ajax,” I told her.

Her head jerked around on her swanlike neck when she heard me. Her eyes looked ready to light me on fire. “What are you doing here?”

“Darrell needs to ask you some questions.”

“That’s not what I mean. What are you doing here? I can’t believe you’d show your face in my house.”

I shook my head in complete bafflement. “Ruby, I don’t understand. I mean, I know you’re a wreck over Ajax, but what exactly did I do to piss you off? Is this still about the thing at the 126? Because I’m sorry, but that wasn’t my fault.”

She didn’t say anything, but her eyes made an eloquent shift from my face to my belly and then back up again. My forehead wrinkled with a moment of confusion before it dawned on me what she thought.

“Are you serious?” I burst out, unable to control my reaction. “Do you think this is Ajax’s baby?”

“Isn’t it?” she snapped.

“No! I hope to hell he never said it was.”

“He didn’t have to. One of your neighbors saw him going into your place last January. Do you think I can’t read a calendar? You’re a worthless little slut. Everyone around here knows the truth.”

She was out of control, but I let it go. Her husband had just been murdered, and she was lashing out at anyone she could. I happened to be in the firing line. But I struggled not to scream back at her.

“Look, Ruby, I know how horrible this is, and I know how scared you are for the kids. You don’t have to believe me about this, but I never slept with Ajax. Never, not once, not ever. It didn’t happen. This isn’t his baby. I swear.”

I saw the look in her eyes. She wasn’t convinced.

“Fine,” I said, giving up. “Believe whatever you want. Right now, the main thing is, someone killed your husband. Darrell’s trying to figure out who it was, and he needs to talk to you.” I cupped my belly, where you were kicking for all you were worth, sweetheart. “Unless you somehow think I managed to do that in my condition, too.”

Ruby inhaled sharply, her nostrils flaring like a thoroughbred on the racecourse. She stormed past me. I followed, crossing through the living room, where several of our high school friends had heard the whole argument. They all shot me looks that said they didn’t believe me, either. I guess I’m naive. All year, people around town had apparently been speculating about me and Ajax, and I didn’t even know it. None of the stories had gotten back to me, I suppose because people were too nice or too embarrassed to tell me what others were saying. Ajax himself hadn’t seemed any different with me when I went back to work as the department secretary. Maybe he was less flirtatious, but I wrote that off to him having no interest in sleeping with me while I was pregnant.

I made my way to the room off the garage that Ajax had used as his beer-drinking rec room, complete with a Centipede game machine and full-size pool table. Playboy posters of naked women filled the walls. Ruby sat on a brown leather sofa. Darrell was already at Ajax’s rolltop desk, removing papers from a drawer and stuffing them into a box. I sat down on the other end of the sofa, and Ruby’s hostility blew at me like a cold wind.

“What are you doing with all that?” Ruby asked Darrell.

“We have to take everything from his desk and review it.”

“Why?”

“I need to go through Ajax’s papers, in case there’s anything that would tell us who killed him. Threats, that kind of thing.”

“Well, I need it all back,” Ruby said. “I have bills to pay. With Ajax gone, it’s up to me.”

“Of course. We’ll go through it this afternoon, and I’ll have someone drop off whatever we don’t need back at your house. If we keep anything, I’ll get you a list of what it is.”

“I don’t want her going through it,” Ruby said with a glance at me. “Whatever’s in there is private.”

Darrell sighed. Something in his face told me that he knew what Ruby’s problem with me was, even though he’d kept me in the dark about it. “Whatever we find stays inside the department, Ruby.”

She shot me one more venomous stare. Then she swept strands of her red hair out of her face. “So what do you want to know?”

“I’m sorry that we have to do this now,” Darrell said, “but take me through exactly what happened, step by step.”

Ruby rolled her wedding ring around her finger. I could see long, perfect nails, none of them broken. “Thursday morning, the kids and I went to see my sister in Marquette for a long weekend.”

“Ajax didn’t go with you?”

“He hates my sister. The feeling is mutual.”

“Did you talk to him while you were gone?” Darrell asked.

“Yes, I called him later that day to say we’d arrived. He was heading out to the 126. We talked again on Friday evening around seven. That was the last time I spoke to him. I tried calling him a couple of times on Saturday, but there was no answer. That was when I packed up the kids and drove home. We got back after dark on Saturday night.”

“Did Ajax know you were coming home?”

“No. I was supposed to stay until Sunday.”

“Why did you come home early?”

Ruby tugged her T-shirt down. “Because I assumed he was taking advantage of me being gone to stick his cock between some tramp’s legs. I thought I’d catch them together.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“What did you do when you got home?”

“I put the kids to bed. I waited up for a while, but then I went to bed myself.”

“What time was that?” Darrell asked.

“I don’t know. Midnight.”

“Did you go down in the basement at all?”

“No. I checked here in the Playboy mansion, and that was it.”

“Were you surprised that his car was still in the garage if he wasn’t home?”

Ruby shook her head. “We’ve got an extra detached garage, and Ajax keeps his restored Mustang out there. It’s his baby. I assumed he was driving that. It’s his chick-mobile.”

“But you didn’t actually look to see if it was there?”

“No.”

“And then what?”

“I told you. I went to bed.”

“Did you hear anything overnight? Cars outside? Noises in the house?”

“No. And I didn’t sleep well, so if anything was going on, I would have heard it. It was quiet.”

“Why didn’t you sleep well?”

“Because I was pissed off thinking that my husband was in bed with another woman! Shit, Darrell, do I have to spell it out for you? You worked with him. You knew what he was like.”

Darrell didn’t answer, but it was true. He did know Ajax. So did I. Every one of us in that room knew the kind of man Ajax was, and neither Darrell nor I had any trouble believing Ruby’s story. Of course, it was also true that she had no real alibi. If he’d come home late, smelling of his latest conquest, they might have argued in the basement while the kids were asleep. She could have hit him. Killed him. Done all the rest and then calmly showered away the blood. Ajax liked to joke that Ruby was a redhead, and redheads were crazy. Looking in her scary eyes, I believed it.

However, I didn’t think she’d done it. Her nails were too perfect. You couldn’t do what had been done to that body without breaking a nail.

But if not her, then who?

“What time did you get up?” Darrell asked.

“Early. Maybe five thirty. The kids wouldn’t be up for hours, so I made coffee and decided I would get a jump on the laundry. I gathered it up and went down to the basement.” She closed her eyes and exhaled sharply. “That’s when I found him.”

“Did you touch anything in the room?”

“No. I just screamed. I stood there screaming. Then I ran back upstairs and called you.”

I sat on the other end of the sofa, listening to the back-and-forth. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Since I wasn’t a deputy anymore, I didn’t really know if Darrell wanted me asking any questions, but then again, he’d asked for my help because we’d worked on the Gordon Brink case together. So I decided to butt in. There was an uncomfortable question that needed to be asked, and I could probably ask it better than Darrell. Ruby couldn’t be any more pissed at me than she already was.

“Do you know who Ajax was sleeping with?” I asked.

Seeing Ruby’s reaction, I realized that she had no trouble getting even more pissed at me. In fact, she practically foamed at the mouth. “Shut up, you little—”

“Ruby.”

Darrell interrupted, but not before Ruby called me what she wanted to call me.

“This is not helpful,” he went on. “I know you’re upset, but Rebecca and I are here to figure out what happened. So let’s leave the personal stuff out of this. Please, if you know, answer Rebecca’s question. Who do you think Ajax was having an affair with?”

“Now or last January?” she spat in reply.

I opened my mouth to protest, but I closed it when Darrell shot me a look. There was no point in denying it all over again.

“Ruby,” he said again. “Come on.”

She turned her anger down to a simmer. “Fine. If you want a list of the women he was with, get me a copy of the phone book. Ajax wasn’t exactly monogamous, Darrell. I knew that when I married him. I’d made my peace with it.”

I hated to interject again. All I would do was make it worse, but Ruby was lying to us, and I wasn’t sure if Darrell realized it. It was the kind of lie that was likely to fly over a man’s head.

“You came home early to catch him,” I murmured. “You waited up to confront him. That doesn’t sound to me like you were at peace with it. Had something changed lately?”

This time she didn’t lash back at me, but she also didn’t answer my question. Her whole body looked stiff and tense, as if she were holding up a wall that was threatening to fall down on top of her.

“Was it someone special this time?” I went on. “Was it somebody who felt like a threat to your marriage?”

Her knee tapped nervously up and down. “I don’t know who it was.”

“But there was someone in particular?”

“Yes.”

“How did you find out?”

She shrugged. “I’m his wife. I knew. He wasn’t acting the same. He was gone more, sometimes overnight. He’d make up lame excuses. Plus, a couple of weeks ago, I went shopping in the next county over. I stopped in at the jeweler where Ajax got my wedding ring. He asked if I liked the necklace Ajax had given me. Except he hadn’t given me anything like that. I covered, but I think he knew. Ajax didn’t get it for me. He got it for her. And if he was buying her jewelry, then I assume it was serious.”

“But you don’t know who it was?” Darrell asked.

“No.”

“Could she have been married?”

“I have no idea.”

Her voice was clipped, urging us to move on. I was pretty sure that Ruby did know the identity of the other woman — or at least she had a strong suspicion — but she wasn’t willing to tell us. Maybe she couldn’t bear to say the name out loud, as if doing so made everything real.

“Was Ajax having any problems recently?” Darrell asked. “He didn’t say anything to me, but it’s harder to keep things from your wife.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He was edgy. Anxious. I figured it was the affair, but maybe it was something else.”

“What about money?”

“It seemed like we were doing fine. Maybe a little tighter this year, but nothing serious.”

“You didn’t see anything unusual in your bank accounts?”

“No.”

“Can you think of anyone who had a grudge against Ajax?”

Ruby ran her slim fingers back through her hair. “Well, there was this thing with Norm.”

“You mean last winter? About Will?”

She shook her head. “No. This was more recent. The lawsuit is finally heating up again. The mine ran out of continuances, so it looks like the case should be going to trial before the end of the year. I got called back for more questions a couple of weeks ago.”

“What does that have to do with Ajax?”

“He drove me to the deposition. Norm was outside the house when we got there. He and Ajax got into it before I went inside.”

“Over what?”

“Ajax made some kind of joke about Will. I mean, you know what he was like. A queer joke. It was pretty ugly, even for Ajax.”

“What did Norm do?” Darrell asked.

“He pulled a gun on Ajax,” Ruby replied, “and he threatened to kill him.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

I’d seen Norm many times throughout the year, but I guess I was so caught up in my own issues that I didn’t really look at him. When we stopped at his house, I realized that he looked tired. And years older. He’d lost weight. There had always been a cheerful energy about Norm, a belief that nothing could ever defeat him or slow him down, but it was obvious that the crisis with Will last January had taken its toll.

He covered it well, though. He fussed over me, making sure I was comfortable. He talked about camping, photography, and college football with Darrell. But when we sat out on his back porch and Darrell told him about Ajax, I could see his facade drain away. He hadn’t shaved, and he scratched his chin with an exhausted look that said: What next?

“I suppose you want my gun to test for ballistics,” he said, guessing why we were there. “I’m sure Ruby told you about the threat I made.”

“Ajax wasn’t shot,” Darrell replied.

“No? Well, I suppose that’s a relief. What happened?” Norm glanced back and forth between the two of us, and then he leaped to the correct conclusion. “The Ursulina again? Seriously?”

“That’s confidential for now,” Darrell told him, “although I’m sure the story will be around town in no time.”

“Yes, of course.” Norm got up and leaned against the porch windows. The morning sunlight made his face pale. “I can’t say I feel bad about Ajax being dead. I mean, it’s terrible for Ruby and the kids, of course. But I never forgave him for spreading the story about Will.”

“Tell us about the threat,” Darrell said.

Norm looked at the two of us with regret. “I wanted to take it back as soon as I said it. All I can tell you is, I reacted as a father, not as a lawyer. I would never have actually followed through on it.”

“You pulled a gun on him?”

“Yes. Ever since what happened to Will, I’m always carrying. I’ve started to share your philosophy of life, Darrell. You never know. If someone comes after me or my family, I intend to be prepared.”

“What was the argument about?”

“I’m sure Ruby told you. Ajax made a crude joke at Will’s expense. I won’t repeat what it was, but it was foul. It set me off. I’ve been working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, as we get closer to trial, and I was strung out. Not that I’d ever laugh off the kind of thing he said, but I overreacted. Mind you, it wasn’t just the joke. It was the fact that it was Ajax.”

“Where were you on Friday and Saturday?” Darrell asked.

“I just told you. Working. Morning to night. I haven’t had a weekend off in a couple of months.”

“Can anyone verify that?”

Norm shook his head. “I had a couple of meals brought in. I made some phone calls. Otherwise, I was alone in my office in Random the whole time. I’ve hardly seen Kathy or Will. They know the drill. This is the critical time in the litigation.”

“So you don’t have an alibi,” Darrell concluded.

“Depending on when exactly Ajax was killed, no, I don’t. And yes, I’m obviously familiar with the Ursulina crime scenes. In fact, I’ll do your job for you and confirm what you already know. If I wanted to murder Ajax and make it look like the earlier murders, I could easily have done so.”

“Norm,” Darrell interrupted, because it was obvious that Norm was losing a grip on his emotions. In most circumstances, Darrell wouldn’t have tried to stop a suspect from talking, but Norm was also his best friend. The previous December, Darrell had declined to interview Norm for that very reason, but he didn’t let it stop him this time. It made me wonder if he had doubts about Norm and wanted to judge for himself what he saw in his friend’s face.

Regardless, Norm kept rambling, quickly and loudly.

“And yes, I was in a frame of mind to murder that piece of shit,” he went on. “Will almost died, and Ajax was as much to blame as the boys who beat him up. Darrell, you have children, so you know what it feels like. And Rebecca, you’re going to have a baby, so very soon you’ll understand, too. When your child is at risk, you will do anything to save them. You will walk through fire. You will steal, cheat, lie, and yes, kill, without so much as a second thought or a single regret. There is not a sin in this world you won’t commit. You’re going to love your child the way I love mine, and that means you’ll sacrifice anything to protect them. You’ll give up your life, your future, everything that matters to you. Which is what I would happily do for Will.”

Instinctively, sweetheart, I closed my hands around my stomach. Norm was absolutely right, and it wasn’t even a question of waiting until you were in this world. I was already protecting you. You were the one thing in the world for which I would give up everything. I was a little blackbird willing to go up against a hawk to protect my baby in the nest.

I was a mother.

Norm sighed and sat back down in the chair. “But I didn’t kill him, Darrell. Yes, I had every reason in the world to want him dead, and I had the time and opportunity, but I didn’t do it. Search whatever you want. Home, office, car. Look for bloody clothes, or knives, or whatever else you’re hoping to find. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

I knew Darrell wasn’t inclined to believe that his friend was a murderer. I didn’t believe it, either.

Then again, you never know.

“Can you think of anyone else who might have killed Ajax?” I asked.

“Other than Ruby? I mean, you know how badly he treated her.”

“Are you talking about abuse?”

“No, just the constant cheating.”

“Ruby thought there might be someone special this time,” I said. “A woman he was serious about.”

“If there was, they must have been discreet. I didn’t hear rumors, and it’s the kind of thing the plaintiffs and their families would have been gossiping about.”

“How is the litigation going?” I asked.

“It’s progressing,” Norm replied, with a lawyer’s caution. “The new partner handling the case for the mine is a cool customer. Have you met her? JoAnne Svitak. She’s every bit as ruthless as Brink. Maybe more so.”

“Ruby is a key witness for the mine. Could that be a motive?”

“Well, she’s important to the case, but I can’t see anyone taking it out on her husband.”

“Was Ajax involved in the lawsuit himself?”

Norm hesitated. “Not really. Not directly. But I did ask about him in my interviews with some of the mine workers.”

“Why?”

Norm took a moment to decide what information he was willing to share with us. “Ruby’s experience at the mine was different from most of the other women’s. I wanted to know why she wasn’t getting harassed. I wondered whether her being married to a deputy gave her some kind of protection.”

“Did it?” I asked.

“I think so, but I wasn’t able to prove it. Nobody admitted anything about Ajax intimidating or threatening them. However, there was one incident that made me curious. It was all hearsay, and I was never able to confirm it. In fact, everyone I talked to denied that it happened, but that only made me more suspicious.”

Darrell leaned forward in his chair. “What was it?”

“According to one of the women on our side, Ruby did have something bad happen to her at the mine. This was well before the lawsuit was filed. Probably five or six years ago. My witness insists she saw a mine worker expose himself to Ruby and try to get her to give him a hand job. He was new to the job. An out-of-towner. What makes it interesting is that the mine fired him the next day. He left town and never came back.”

“But your witness doesn’t know who he was?”

“No. She doesn’t remember his name. I asked Ruby about the incident in her deposition, and she told me that nothing like that had ever happened. I couldn’t find a single worker who would back up the story, either. The really strange thing is, it’s like this guy never existed. I went through the mine’s employment records, trying to find anyone who was hired and fired within a short period of time. No luck. They must have scrubbed their records.”

“What does that have to do with Ajax?” I asked.

“That I could establish in court? Not a thing. I couldn’t tie him to this at all.” Norm shook his head. “But in the dozens of harassment incidents we’ve documented against the women at the mine, this is the only time that the mine ever took action against one of the men. Someone made a move on Ruby, and they immediately shut it down and got rid of him. Now if this had happened later, after the lawsuit got filed, I could see them wanting to protect her, because she was on their side. But back then? It doesn’t make sense. Why help Ruby and ignore what was happening to the others? The only answer I could come up with is that Ajax got involved. Either alone or by getting his uncle to intervene as the sheriff. That was speculation on my part, but that’s what my gut tells me. And I trust my gut.”

“Did you talk to Ajax and Jerry?” Darrell asked.

“I did, and they both denied it,” Norm replied. “But I don’t think my witness made it up, and I don’t think she got it wrong. So if everyone’s lying about it, that means they have something big they’re trying to hide.”

Darrell kept talking to Norm, but I had to take a bathroom break.

When I was done, I went outside for a smoke. I’d been trying to quit while I was pregnant, but that morning, I really needed a cigarette. I was uncomfortable, I was sleep-deprived, and I was unsettled by the return of the Ursulina. For the first time in months, I found myself listening to the forest again for the hufffffff of the beast.

It was a cold October morning. My boots crunched through frost on the grass. I had no hope of zipping my coat over my stomach, so when the wind whistled at me, I shivered. The gray sky had a winter look about it, as if the sun would never shine again. To tell you the truth, sweetheart, I was thinking about running away. I was tempted to get in my car right then and there and go somewhere else and never come back. Maybe that’s what I should have done. But wherever I went, I knew the monster would find me eventually.

I’ve known that since I was ten years old.

“Hi, Rebecca.”

The voice behind me made me jump. I turned around and saw Will, seemingly not cold at all in a short-sleeved T-shirt and khakis. “Oh. Hi.”

“Are you okay?”

I shrugged as I took a drag on my cigarette. “Sure.”

“When’s the baby due?”

“End of the month,” I said. “But she feels like she’s coming early.”

“She? Is it a girl?”

“I don’t actually know that, but yeah, I think it’s a girl.”

“You got another cigarette?” Will asked me.

“Will your dad kill me if I give you one?”

“Probably.”

I gave him one anyway, and the two of us stood there smoking. We were alone in the big yard, surrounded by soaring evergreens. Will seemed the same as he’d been, charming and strong, but he wasn’t the same at all, not really. He’d discovered that the world can be cruel, and once you discover that, you can’t look at life the same way again. You carry that anxiety with you forever.

“I heard you guys talking,” he said. “I heard about what happened to Ajax.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t like him. It sucks that he’s dead, but I didn’t like him.”

“Join the club,” I replied.

“Do you think the same person killed both of them? Ajax and Gordon Brink?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, you and me, we both know Jay didn’t kill him. My dad made me shut up about it, but the sheriff blaming Jay was bullshit.”

I’d never heard Will swear before. “Yes, I know. Jay didn’t kill his dad.”

The boy was quiet for a while. He blew smoke in the air, and the cloud vanished toward the trees. “Hey, Rebecca? I need to ask. Are we okay? You and me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been different with me all year. Is it the gay thing?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then what is it?”

I shrugged. “I blame myself for what happened.”

“That’s crazy. Jay killing himself wasn’t your fault. Neither was what happened to me.”

“I appreciate you saying that, Will, but I feel responsible.”

“Why? I came to you. I told you what was going on. That’s what started everything. If anybody should feel guilty, it’s me. I tried to rescue Jay, and instead I got him killed.”

“You did not do that.”

Will brushed away a tear. “Yeah. I guess. All I can do is live with it, right? But I’m glad you and me are okay. I’ve been worried about that.”

“We’re fine.”

“Thanks for the smoke.”

“Sure.”

Will turned away, but then he stopped. He looked at the cigarette in his hand as if it had reminded him of something. “Listen, I should probably tell you this. I mean, it may be nothing at all. When the sheriff blamed Jay for Gordon’s death, I figured it didn’t matter anymore. But now — with Ajax dead, too—”

I tensed. “What is it?”

“Well, it was a dumb thing. Jay and I were having a smoke one day here in the yard. I had a book of matches from the 126, and I used it to light his cigarette. When he saw the matches, he took the book from me. Then he shook his head and said that was really strange.”

“I don’t understand. What was strange?”

“Jay used to collect matchbooks when he was a kid. His dad would pick them up for him on his business trips. He had ones from all across the country. For a while, he had mason jars filled with them.”

“Okay.” I was still puzzled.

“The thing is, Jay was sure that he’d had a matchbook from the 126 in his collection. He recognized the design. The only way he could have gotten it was if Gordon had brought it back from a trip. So Jay thought Gordon had been lying about never being in town before last fall. Like it wasn’t the first time he’d been to Black Wolf County.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

When we were back at the sheriff’s office, Darrell and I searched Ajax’s desk.

The contents were what you’d expect. Underneath the files of active cases in his drawer, he had copies of Penthouse and Hustler, many with dog-eared pages so he could find the photos he liked the most. He kept a flask-sized bottle of vodka, plus a carton of cigarettes, a tin of breath mints, and a strip of condoms. We found a pocket calendar, but most of the entries were blank, so we weren’t able to determine if he’d planned to meet someone while Ruby was gone for the weekend. There was also nothing in the calendar to tell us if he’d been seeing a woman other than his wife.

As we went through the desk, Jerry stopped by. The sheriff looked devastated by the murder of his nephew, and maybe that was why he raised no objections when Darrell said he wanted to deputize me to help on the case. Darrell pointed out that we were short-handed without Ajax and that I’d worked with him on the previous Ursulina murder. I expected an argument, but Jerry simply nodded his approval with barely a glance at me. We all knew it would be a short-term assignment anyway, given how far along I was.

After Jerry left, Darrell finally raised a topic that we’d avoided between us for months. Given that the Ursulina was back, we couldn’t dodge it any longer. “I know you wanted me to push back with Jerry about closing the Brink case,” he told me. “You didn’t agree with him blaming Jay.”

“I never said that.”

“No, but you don’t think Jay killed him,” Darrell said.

“You didn’t think so, either. But Jay confessed, so I get it.”

“It was better for Will,” Darrell admitted with a sigh. “Jay was dead, but Will still has to live in this town.”

“I know. You’re right.”

“Except here we are with another body.”

“Yes. Here we are.”

“You’re right, you know,” Darrell went on. “I never thought Jay murdered his father. I was pretty sure that the same person did all three. Brink, Kip, Racer. If Will’s right about Brink being in town years ago, that makes it even more plausible that we’re only looking at one killer. There must be a connection that we’ve missed.”

He shut the drawer of the desk and shook his head. “There’s nothing here. Let’s go through the personal papers I brought back from his house.”

We went into the office conference room, where Darrell had stashed the box that contained the contents of the rolltop desk from Ajax’s rec room. He pulled out stacks of papers and spread them neatly across the table. There was a lot to review. Tax returns. Bank statements. Receipts. Credit card bills. I took one side of the table, and Darrell took the other, and we began to sift through the piles in silence.

It felt odd, going through Ajax’s records, as if I were digging into the private details of his life without his permission. I’d seen him on Friday morning here in the office, and he still felt alive to me. He should have walked into the conference room, sat down with his cocky smile, and asked us what the hell we were doing. Instead, he was gone. I’d stared at his body, defiled in a truly horrific way. It seemed impossible. I couldn’t say I was going to miss him, but I didn’t understand why he was dead.

Or who could have killed him.

“Is there anything in the credit card bills?” Darrell asked.

“Ruby’s right about the jewelry store. Ajax spent almost a thousand dollars there last month. If it wasn’t for her, then who?”

Darrell whistled. “A thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money.”

I flipped through more of his statements. “He liked his toys, too. He made a lot of purchases from sports and auto-part shops.”

“Did he have any outstanding balance on the credit card?”

“No, he paid it off each month. In most months that ran to a few hundred bucks.”

Darrell grabbed for the stack of bank records. “Where was Ajax getting that kind of cash?”

He took the most recent account statements and passed the others to me. We paged through them, and I flipped through all the canceled checks that came with each statement.

“His checking and saving balances aren’t high,” Darrell said. “His salary wasn’t paying for most of the toys, that’s for sure.”

“Could Jerry have been helping him out?” I asked.

“Jerry doesn’t make that kind of money, either.”

“Hang on,” I said.

“What?”

“There are no checks made out to the credit card company.”

“What do you mean?” Darrell asked.

“He’s writing checks to places around town, but I don’t see anything made out to Visa. So how’s he paying off those balances?”

Darrell examined the papers spread across the conference table again. Then he frowned and reached for a new stack of bank statements. “He has another account.”

“What?”

“Look at these records. He has a separate checking account at a bank in the next county. Not joint, like the accounts here in town with Ruby. This one is just in his name.” Darrell went through the pages quickly. “The Visa checks came from that bank. Up until late last year, he was depositing five hundred dollars into that account every month.”

“Every month? From where? A second job?”

Darrell shook his head. “He couldn’t possibly have had another job without me knowing about it. There’s no info on where the money came from. He was simply cashing checks every month.”

“From who?”

“That’s the question.” Darrell ran through the bank statements again. “The last deposit was made in December of last year. After that, nothing. He’s been working down the balance since then, but he’s still got a few thousand dollars built up in the account. He must have been getting those payments for a while.”

“December? That’s when they stopped?”

“Right.”

“That’s the month Brink was killed,” I said.

Later, Darrell and I drove back to the house that Gordon Brink had rented.

I didn’t like the feeling of déjà vu or the ugly memories in this place. But in the time since I’d been here, the law firm had made a clean sweep. The retired mine president had decided to stay in Florida permanently, and the house had been repainted and refurnished from top to bottom. There was almost nothing left to remind me that Brink and his wife and son had ever lived here.

The partner who’d taken over the lawsuit, JoAnne Svitak, was exactly as Norm had advertised her. She had an edge that could make you bleed. Her face looked molded into a wax shell of overly white makeup, and the only thing that moved was her eyes, which were blue and severe. Her hair was brown and flowed around her head like an ocean wave caught in an ice storm. She was probably in her midforties. We’d looked her up in a legal directory at the courthouse, and we’d learned that she was the only female partner at Gordon Brink’s Milwaukee law firm. I had no doubt that she’d followed a tough road to get there.

When we sat down, she made it clear that she didn’t have much time for us. Her clipped answers rushed the interview along.

“Do you know a sheriff’s deputy here in town named Arthur Jackson?” Darrell asked her.

“No, I don’t.”

“He went by the nickname Ajax.”

“I still don’t know him.”

“He was murdered over the weekend.”

The news of a homicide elicited no reaction at all. She simply tapped a pencil on the desk and waited silently for Darrell to continue.

“The nature of the murder was very similar to the murder of Gordon Brink, your predecessor,” he went on.

“How similar?”

“Almost identical. The same wounds. The same message left on the wall.”

“Didn’t your department conclude that Brink was murdered by his son?” she asked us.

“That was the sheriff’s conclusion, yes, but—”

“So what does this crime have to do with me or my firm?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Darrell said.

I leaned forward in my chair, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. “Ajax’s wife, Ruby, is a key witness for the mine in the litigation. It’s hard to believe you don’t know who Ajax is.”

Her eyes had the patient cruelty of a snake. “Anything and anyone related to the mine or this litigation is privileged.”

“Your opposing counsel, Norm Foltz, believes the mine covered up an incident of harassment involving Ruby,” Darrell went on. “It’s unlikely they could have done that without Ajax knowing about it.”

“Again, anything related to the mine or this litigation is privileged,” she said.

“Even if it involves murder?”

“Murder is your concern, not mine.”

“I would think you’d be nervous, given that someone killed the previous lawyer working on the case.”

“I’m not, but thank you for your concern.”

Darrell and I exchanged a glance. We were both thinking we should have brought along an ice pick to chip through her frozen exterior.

“Do you know if Gordon Brink had any kind of relationship with Ajax?” Darrell asked.

“I’m unaware of who this man is or was. Obviously, I have no idea whether Gordon knew him.”

“Ajax was receiving monthly payments of five hundred dollars from an unidentified source. Those payments stopped the same month that Mr. Brink was killed. Was your firm making payments to Ajax? Or was Mr. Brink?”

“I have no idea.”

“Can you find out?”

“I have no access to Mr. Brink’s personal finances, and anything related to payments made by the firm would be privileged.”

“How long did Mr. Brink represent the mine?” Darrell asked.

“Anything about our client relationship is privileged.”

“Even how long you’ve represented them?”

“That’s right.”

“We have reason to believe Mr. Brink visited Black Wolf County prior to his arrival last fall,” Darrell went on. “Is that true?”

“I can’t say.”

“Because you don’t know, or because you won’t tell us?”

“I can’t say.”

“Was he here in connection with your representation of the mine?”

“Anything about our client relationship is privileged. I believe I’ve made that very clear.”

Across the table, Darrell shook his head in frustration. “Well, you’ve been a big help, Ms. Svitak.”

“It’s not my job to help you, Deputy.”

“Even if it means solving the murder of your colleague?” Darrell asked.

“Gordon is dead. That’s not going to change. Right now, my only concern is serving the interests of my client. Are we done?”

“Yes, we are. For now.”

“Then please show yourselves out.”

Darrell stood up from the table. So did I, with more difficulty. We both shook hands with the lawyer. Her grip was cool and limp. By the time we left the room, she’d already gone back to the paperwork in front of her, as if the time she’d spent with us was a nuisance that she’d already forgotten.

On our way out of the house, I had to pee again. Darrell headed outside, and I tried to locate a bathroom. As I checked the doors, I collided with Penny Ramsey, who was coming out of a room that had been set up as a law library. I hadn’t seen Penny since Ajax and I interviewed her the previous December, so I hadn’t even realized that she was still in Black Wolf County.

Seeing me, her eyes widened. Quickly, she glanced both ways down the hallway to make sure we were alone, and then she took hold of me by the elbows. “Oh my God! Is it true about Ajax? He’s dead?”

“Yes, he is.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Penny covered her mouth with a trembling hand and backed away from me. “I can’t believe it.”

“Do you know something about his death?”

“No. Nothing!”

“It looks to me like you know something.”

I saw her eyes welling with tears, and her fingers nervously caressed the necklace she was wearing. Without saying more, she ran down the hallway, and I saw her disappear into one of the other rooms. The door slammed shut behind her.

I’d only had a moment to look at her, but she’d upgraded her wardrobe, her hair, and her makeup since we met. The Amy Irving innocence I’d first seen at the motel had been replaced by a more polished style. If I’d had to guess, she’d found a boyfriend who was buying her gifts.

Like the expensive gold-and-emerald necklace she’d been fondling.

I was pretty sure I knew who’d bought it for her.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Darrell dropped me back home after dark. I was exhausted, and although I hadn’t told him, I was having sharp pains in my belly as well as a constant dull ache in my lower back. I didn’t know if I was experiencing premature labor pains or if it was something else. Maybe it was just the stress of the day. I went inside and turned on the lights, and then I kicked off my shoes and settled into the living room sofa to see if the pains went away. In a few minutes, they did. I began to feel better.

I thought about putting on a record, or playing my guitar, but at that moment, I didn’t want to do anything that involved getting off the sofa. I was able to reach the phone, and I wondered for the thousandth time about calling Tom Ginn to tell him about my pregnancy. But no. If I heard his voice, I’d want to see him again. I’d probably fall in love with him again. As tempting as that was, there were too many complications to let it happen.

The house was warm. Or maybe it just felt that way to me, because my metabolism was out of whack. The heat and the tiredness of the day made my eyes blink shut. My head fell back against the sofa cushions, and I slept. I had disturbing dreams of being ten years old again, of running through the woods with an invisible monster in the darkness behind me. I kept calling for help, from my father, from my brother, from Darrell, from Tom. No one came to rescue me. I woke up with a start just as I felt the beast’s claws on my skin.

The house was definitely not warm anymore. My unreliable furnace had gone out while I slept. I sat on the sofa, trembling with chill. I checked my watch and saw that I’d missed the whole evening. It was just after midnight.

Around me, something felt wrong. I didn’t know what it was. Call it an instinct. A sensation of dread, as if my nightmare had followed me into real life. Except when I studied the room, I saw nothing to explain it. Everything looked the same.

But something was different.

What?

I struggled my way off the sofa and stood up. Outside, the street was dark. My neighbors were asleep. A fall rain had begun, and the wind blew wet leaves from the big oak tree onto the windows. I checked to make sure that the windows were locked, which they were. I still did that every day, part-habit, part-precaution. I always kept the front door locked, too.

Or had I forgotten tonight?

I returned to the foyer and checked. The door was locked, as it should have been. I opened it and stepped onto the covered porch in my stockinged feet. The rain made a gentle, steady music on the overhang and in the street beyond. The rain on fall nights could last for hours. I listened. I eyed the shadows. I smelled the air for something other than peaty dampness, like a cigarette, or car exhaust, or gasoline. But the entire neighborhood felt normal, a night like any other.

Inside, I locked the door again, but my nervousness refused to go away. If anything, it grew worse. I went to each of the downstairs rooms and checked the other windows, but they were locked, too. So was the door to the backyard. The basement had a dead bolt that was undisturbed, and when I put my ear to the door, I heard nothing. It seemed impossible that anyone could have gotten inside without me being aware of it. And yet that was what I felt.

A presence.

I switched off the downstairs lights and went upstairs. There were only two bedrooms. The smaller room was where I put everything that didn’t fit in the rest of the house, so it was a mess. Eventually, I had plans to make it into your room, but for the time being, you were going to stay in the master bedroom with me. I already had a crib in the corner, and people had been giving me clothes and supplies for weeks.

Outside, the branches of the oak tree in my front yard brushed up against the small bedroom window. If someone wanted to do so, they could readily climb the tree and enter the house that way. But that window, too, was locked. I had learned my lesson that I only had to be careless once.

And then there was the master bedroom.

I stood in the doorway, hesitating to go inside. When I turned on the overhead light, it flickered, then popped and went out. I swore. I’d need to get Darrell to replace the bulb for me. With no light, I couldn’t see into the shadows. I could cross the carpet to the bathroom and turn on the light there, but the distance across the bedroom felt like miles. A prickling chill of fear went up my back. Darkness was behind me, darkness in front of me.

“Hello?”

I said it out loud, softly, tentatively. There was no answer. Of course not. But what I did hear made me clench my fists until my nails bit into my skin. The wind screeched, wailing like a skeleton trapped in a grave.

It was wind through the crack of an open window.

My legs wouldn’t move. I was frozen where I was. I could have stayed in that doorway forever.

You’re imagining things. You left the window open.

That was what I told myself. I liked cold air at night, and I liked waking up to the chill of the house in the fall. No one could get in there without a lot of trouble. The second-floor window looked out on the backyard, and there were no trees nearby. The only thing on the house wall was a drainpipe, and it would have taken an itsy-bitsy spider to climb up that water spout.

I went to the window. Yes, it was open, just by an inch or two. I threw it wide open and stuck my head out into the breeze, which carried nothing but quiet rain. The yard itself was dark, backing up to the woods. I couldn’t see anything. I closed the window again, but this time I made sure it was shut, and I locked it.

I’d opened it myself last night. I’d simply forgotten to shut it when Darrell woke me up in the early morning. That was the answer.

Wasn’t it?

I went to the bathroom. Brushed my teeth. With the light on, I checked the bedroom closet, to be sure no monsters were hiding there. I didn’t look under the bed, because once I was down on my hands and knees, I didn’t think I could stand up again. However, just to be sure, I found an old tennis ball in my nightstand drawer and rolled it under the bed frame. It came out the other side and bounced against the wall.

No one was there.

I knew what was wrong with me. It was Ajax. The body. The murder. The Ursulina. That was what had me alarmed. That was the bad moon rising.

Even so, I took no chances. When I closed the bedroom door, I took a chair from my makeup table and dragged it across the carpet and wedged it under the doorknob. No one could get in without making a hell of a noise. I also found my handgun on the closet shelf. I always kept the gun loaded and ready. Just in case. For months in the winter and spring, I’d slept with it under my pillow, but sometime during the hot summer, I’d felt confident enough to let it stay in the closet.

Not tonight.

I put it under my pillow again. With that protection in place, some of my anxiety began to ease. I felt a little foolish for letting my imagination run wild.

I began to get undressed. I took off my maternity blouse and bra and threw them into the laundry basket, and I let my oversize jeans fall to the floor, where I stepped out of them. In the closet, I found one of my nightshirts, sized like a bedsheet, and draped it over my body. The flannel was cool and loose.

All that was left were my socks, which always presented the biggest challenge, both on and off. I sat down on the bed and reached for my trusty yardstick, which I slid between my ankle and my left sock. I peeled it off and flicked it in the general direction of the laundry basket. I did the same with my right sock, but it stuck to the end of the yardstick and refused to be flicked. So I retrieved it with my hand.

That was when I noticed something odd.

The bottom of the sock was wet. I hadn’t realized it before, hadn’t noticed the dampness on my foot.

Why was my sock wet?

Yes, I’d gone outside, but the covered porch was dry.

I stared at the bedroom window again.

The rain had been blowing in while I was asleep in the living room. I’d stepped on the wet carpet while I was looking out at the backyard. I pushed myself off the bed and went to the window, and I let out a tiny sigh of relief when I confirmed that the carpet below the sash was damp.

I could even trace the path of my wet footsteps leading to the bathroom and then to the bedroom door, where I’d secured it with the chair.

My footsteps. No one else’s.

I should have left it at that, but I was curious like a cat. I went to the bedroom door and pushed the chair aside, and I opened the door to stare into the cold black maw of the rest of the house. The wooden frame groaned. That was the effect of the wind rattling the walls.

Wasn’t it?

No one was here. I was alone.

I made sure my bare foot was dry. Then I stretched out my toes and slid them along the carpet in front of the bedroom door. To my horror, they came away wet. The carpet outside the room was wet. Damp the way it would be if someone had tracked wet shoes from inside the bedroom.

I closed the door and put the chair back in place under the doorknob.

I got into bed and left the bathroom light on. That night, I kept the gun not under the pillow but in my hand.

I didn’t sleep at all.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Two nights later, I had dinner with Darrell and his family at the 126. It was all-you-can-eat fried chicken night, and hot, greasy chicken legs were one of the more normal things I’d been craving lately.

Ever since my father died, Darrell had sort of adopted me. He’d always treated me like a daughter, but he seemed to make it official at that point. His oldest was just a few years younger than me — she was twenty-four — and he had two younger girls, one who was eighteen, one who was sixteen. I felt honored that they included me as part of their family, since I didn’t really have a family myself. But I also felt guilty, because Darrell had other things to worry about. His wife, Marilyn, was in her early fifties, but it only took one look to realize she wasn’t doing well. She’d been battling lung cancer for two years, and the disease was winning. She was rail thin and pale, and her curly black hair had been replaced by a wig. I could see in Darrell’s face, in his forced smile, that he knew what the future held. He was a strong man, but losing a spouse could bring the strongest of men to their knees.

I didn’t want to add to their burden with any worries of my own, so I pretended as if nothing was wrong with me. We ate chicken, and we laughed. The 126 was a madhouse, as it usually was, raucous and rough. Here, even the best of friends were one bad joke away from a fistfight. The A-Team played on the television over the bar, but no one could hear it, because the jukebox blasted “A View to a Kill” so loudly that you had to shout at the person next to you. There was new artwork on the wall, a huge painting of The Last Supper with Jesus and the Apostles smoking cigarettes and drinking pitchers of beer. Some of the local churchgoers had complained, but at the 126, nobody cared.

I knew everyone there. Norm and Will played rotation at one of the pool tables. Ruby sat at a corner table with her high school friends, her face hard and drawn. Ben Malloy was back in town, going from table to table to talk up his new Ursulina special. The show was scheduled for a prime time debut on the Saturday after Halloween, and Ben had a big party planned at the 126 for the whole town to watch. Everyone was invited. He’d announced a cash prize for the best Ursulina costume, which meant the event was going to be a monster mash.

Sandra Thoreau sat at the bar, nursing a beer and a Merit. She raised her mug at me in a toast. She wore a fraying sky-blue turtleneck, faded jeans, and American flag cowboy boots. She faced outward on the stool, making eye contact with the men around her, assessing who she was going to bring home tonight.

I excused myself from Darrell’s table and brought my basket of chicken to the bar.

“Hey,” I said to Sandra as I squirmed onto the stool next to her.

“Hey, yourself,” she replied with a sympathetic chuckle at my condition. “Looks like you’re getting close.”

“I’m a couple of weeks away, but it feels like it could be any day now.”

“You ready?”

“As ready as I’m going to be.”

“Got names picked out?”

“Actually, I was thinking about Shelby,” I told her.

“Shelby. That’s cool. It’s different, I like it. Works for a boy, works for a girl.”

“It’s a girl.”

Sandra smiled. “Well, you say that now, but prepare to be surprised. I was sure Henry was a girl, until the doc held him up in the hospital and showed me his little dick.”

“It’s a girl,” I said again.

Sandra shrugged and puffed on her Merit. On one level, I knew she was right, because everyone had been telling me the same thing for months. Feelings don’t matter, and God doesn’t care what you think you’re having. But you were you, Shelby. You were always going to be a girl. I never had the slightest doubt.

“So, Ajax,” Sandra commented. “That’s awful, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“That makes four now. The Ursulina’s been busy. Not that I have a problem with his taste in victims.”

“You shouldn’t make jokes like that,” I advised her. Then I added in a hushed voice, “I do need to ask you something. Have you heard any rumors at the mine about Gordon Brink paying Ajax?”

“Paying him?”

“Five hundred dollars a month.”

She whistled. “Wow, nice gig.”

“We’re not absolutely sure it was Brink, but the payments stopped after Brink was killed.”

Sandra took a long swallow of her beer. “Norm told you about Ruby getting harassed at the mine, didn’t he?”

“Yes. He also said she denied that it ever happened.”

“Exactly. There you go. The little liar. Brink and the mine bought her off. There’s your five hundred a month.”

“You think?”

“Sure. They tried it with me, but I told them to stick it.”

I didn’t offer any opinion on Sandra’s theory, but it had a plausible ring to it. I had no trouble imagining Ajax trying to squeeze the law firm for cash. On the other hand, if they’d been paying Ruby to stay quiet about the harassment, I didn’t know why Ajax would have been keeping the money in a separate account that Ruby didn’t seem to know anything about.

“Speaking of Ajax,” Sandra murmured.

“What?”

She gestured at the entrance to the bar, where I noticed Penny Ramsey standing underneath a big moose head mounted above the door. The legal secretary looked around for an empty table with an awkward, uncomfortable smile on her face. Even after a year in Black Wolf County, she looked out of place, a city girl in Reagan country.

“You know about the two of them?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the hot gossip.”

“Do you think Ruby knows?”

Sandra shrugged. “I can’t believe she doesn’t.”

I watched Penny. She was alone, but women who came to the 126 alone didn’t stay that way for long. I wondered if that was her plan. Drown her sorrows over Ajax. Pick up a boy. When she took off her coat, I saw that she was spilling out of a seriously low-cut blouse and push-up bra. If she wanted attention from men, that outfit would get her plenty.

She was wearing the necklace, too.

Not a good idea.

I thought about going over and telling her to take it off. Anyone who looked at that necklace knew it was expensive, and there were people in the bar who would happily swipe it and hock it. But that wasn’t the real problem. If Ruby knew about Penny and Ajax, she was going to spot that necklace in a heartbeat.

“I don’t get it,” Sandra went on. “Ruby’s way hotter than her. I mean, I could see Ajax getting hung up on you, but why horn around with Little Swiss Miss over there?”

I was flattered by Sandra’s comment, but it reminded me that rumors had been flying about me and Ajax all year. “Penny had a thing for Ajax. I doubt he had to ask her twice.”

“Well, to screw, sure, but not to spend money on.”

I frowned, because Sandra was right. Penny would have been fine for a no-strings-fling, but she didn’t look like the kind of woman who would pull Ajax away from his wife. And yet he was buying her expensive gifts.

“Think she did it?” Sandra asked. “Sometimes it’s the quiet ones, you know.”

“Actually, I think she loved him,” I said. “Ajax probably let her think he loved her, too. She was naive enough to believe it.”

Sandra sucked on her Merit. “Men. If I didn’t like what they had between their legs, I’d give them up for good.”

I laughed. “Not likely.”

“No. Not likely at all.” She gave me a penetrating stare. “What about you? You got your eyes on anybody?”

“Yeah, because I’m a real catch looking like this.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a catch in any condition, honey. I just mean, you’re going to be a single mom like me. I wouldn’t encourage anybody to join the club. Life’s a lot easier with a man around.”

“Not always.”

Sandra frowned. “Well, I mean the right man. If there is such a thing. You got the wrong one, that’s for sure. At least he’s long gone. Good riddance to that son of a bitch.”

I glanced around to make sure no one was listening to us, not that they could have heard us over the noise of the bar. “Actually, Sandra, that’s something else I wanted to ask you. Have you heard any talk about Ricky lately?”

“What kind of talk?”

“About him being back.”

“Ricky?” Sandra hissed, with genuine concern in her voice. “Are you serious? Is he in town again? Have you seen him?”

“No, I haven’t seen him. I could be completely wrong. I don’t know, it’s just a feeling. On Sunday night, I could swear someone had been in my house.”

“Jesus.”

“Nobody’s said anything to you?” I asked.

“Not a word, and that would be a tough secret to keep. If he came back, he’d have to be bunking with a friend, right? I think the boys at the mine would know, and I’d hear about it fast.”

“Well, keep an ear to the ground, okay?”

“I will. Have you told Darrell?”

I shook my head. “He’d want me to come live with them, but he’s got enough to worry about with Marilyn.”

“If Ricky’s back, you’ve got shit to worry about, too,” Sandra replied. “This isn’t the time to be proud, honey. You’ve got a baby to think about.”

“I know.”

“That little prick should be in jail for what he did to you.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you need a gun? Are you packing?”

I patted the purse that was slung over my shoulder. “Always.”

“Well, good.” Sandra smiled at me, but then her face darkened. I saw her staring over my shoulder. “Uh-oh. Here comes trouble.”

“What?”

I turned around. Penny Ramsey had found a cocktail table by herself. She sipped from a glass of white wine in front of her, and she primped her hair and smiled nervously as the men in the bar whistled at the display of her cleavage. But unbeknownst to Penny, Ruby had spotted her, too. Like the black clouds of a storm front coming, Ruby stalked toward Penny across the 126, and silence fell over the bar, table by table, as Ajax’s widow zeroed in on Ajax’s mistress.

Penny didn’t notice Ruby until the two women were eye to eye. By then, it was too late to leave. When Penny tried to back away, Ruby grabbed her wrist and held it while Penny struggled. Ruby twisted the chain of Penny’s necklace around one of her fingers.

“He gave this to you?” she asked, tightening the necklace like a knot around Penny’s throat.

“That’s none of your business,” she retorted. “Let go of me.”

“You were sleeping with my husband. That makes it my business.”

“He didn’t love you anymore.”

“And you think he loved you? You’re a fool.”

“He did love me. He told me. You’re just jealous.”

“Jealous of a nothing little wallflower like you? The only thing that makes me jealous is this necklace. I want it, and you’re going to give it to me.”

Ruby bunched her fist together and yanked the necklace off Penny’s neck. Penny tried to grab it from her, but Ruby held it out of her reach, letting the chain dangle from her hand.

“Give that back,” Penny snapped.

“If my husband bought it, then it’s mine. Now be a good tramp and go away.”

“Give it back!”

“I said, stuff your boobs back in your coat and get the hell out of here.”

“No, I won’t. I want my necklace.”

“It’s mine now, so you can just go. Understand?”

Penny leaned into Ruby’s face as she swiped at the necklace again. “Ajax said it was over between the two of you. He was going to leave you.”

Ruby growled from deep in her chest, an animal cry of rage. “You. Little. Liar!”

Her face flushed deep red, practically matching the fire of her hair. With a scream, she flung the necklace into the crowd. Then she grabbed Penny’s wineglass and smashed it down on the table, making jagged edges like teeth. With a swish of her arm, she scored Penny’s cheek with the broken glass, cutting deep, bloody gashes into her skin.

“See how many men you get with that face, you home-wrecking bitch,” Ruby sneered.

Penny stared in silent shock as blood flooded onto her hands.

Then, with a wild scream, she toppled the table, and the two women attacked each other.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Why are you talking to me?” Penny shouted at us in the sheriff’s office. “You should be talking to her! She’s the one who started it. She’s the one who did this. Look at me! I mean, look at me!”

Penny touched the gauze pad covering the stitches on her face and began to sob. Darrell and I waited before we tried to say anything more. Despite the late hour, the office buzzed with activity behind us. We’d had to wake up Jerry, who wasn’t happy about the fight, and the sheriff’s wife had gone to Ruby’s house to pick up her kids from the babysitter. Ruby herself was in a holding cell in the basement.

“We are talking to her,” Darrell said quietly. “She’s under arrest.”

“Good!”

“We’ll charge her for the assault on you,” Darrell added. “If that’s what you want.”

Penny looked up from the box of tissues we’d given her. “If that’s what I want? Of course that’s what I want!”

“I thought we might be able to deal with this some other way.”

“Look what she did to me!” Penny screamed again. “The doctor says there could be nerve damage. I’ll have huge scars!”

“I understand. What Ruby did to you was awful. But Ruby’s a mom with three kids, Penny. Ajax was just killed, so she’s on her own to take care of those kids now. And you need to remember—”

I knew he was going to add: You were sleeping with her husband.

But he held back from saying that. He didn’t need to. I watched Penny bite her lip and finish the sentence in her head. Her hands were folded in front of her on the table, and she rubbed her thumbs nervously together.

“Just think about it,” Darrell added. “Okay?”

Penny shrugged but didn’t answer.

“We’d also like to talk to you about Ajax,” I interjected.

“What about him?”

“Given your relationship, you might be able to help us figure out what happened to him.”

“I have no idea. I can’t believe he’s dead.”

“When did you start seeing him?”

Penny sniffled. “About six months ago. It was right after Ms. Svitak came to town to take over the case. I thought I was going to lose my job, but she said she wanted people with history working on the lawsuit. So she kept me on. I decided to take a night out to celebrate, and I went to the 126. That’s where I bumped into Ajax.”

“Did you talk to him, or did he talk to you?”

“He saw me and came over to the bar.” She shook her head with awe. “I mean, he was so handsome. I thought that the first time I met him, but I didn’t think he’d ever be interested in me. But we talked, and we had a few drinks, and then he took me back to my motel. Honestly, I figured that would be the end, you know, a one-night stand. I really didn’t care. But he called and said he wanted to see me again. We began to meet up whenever we could.”

“Did it bother you that he was married?”

“That was between him and Ruby, not me. Plus, I was all by myself in this place. I liked having somebody to be with.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Thursday. We had drinks together at the 126.”

“Wasn’t Ajax concerned about people seeing you together?”

“We pretended it was an accident that we sat next to each other at the bar. I mean, I’m sure people knew, but we played it cool. Afterward, I met him at his house. Ruby was away with the kids, so we were able to stay there and use his bed. I liked that. I stayed with him all night.”

“What time did you leave?”

“About seven in the morning. He had to go to work, and so did I. That was the last time I saw him.”

Darrell leaned forward with a curious expression. “Did you see him on Friday night? Or on Saturday?”

Penny’s brow wrinkled unhappily. “No. He had to work.”

Darrell shook his head. “He didn’t. He wasn’t on the schedule this weekend.”

“Well, that’s what he told me.”

“Even if he was working, why wouldn’t you have seen him after his shift was done?” I asked.

“I called, but he wasn’t home.”

“When did you call?”

“Both nights. Friday and Saturday. There was no answer.”

“Did that concern you?”

“No. I figured he had to work late. And it’s not like I could leave a message or anything. He told me never to do that, in case Ruby picked it up.”

“Did you go to his house?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not? Did you think you’d find him with somebody else?”

“There was no one else. He loved me.”

I could see her trying to convince herself. “Penny, Ajax is dead. You need to tell us the truth. You thought he wasn’t alone, right? He wasn’t answering the phone, because he had somebody else with him.”

She lowered her eyes and gave the smallest of nods. “Sometimes, even when I knew Ruby wasn’t around, he didn’t call me. So I wondered.”

“Do you have any names of other women he was seeing?”

“No.”

“Did you go over there this weekend?”

“No!” she insisted. “I didn’t go to his house. You’re trying to make it out like I killed him, and I would never do that. Never! You should ask Ruby about it. You saw what she did tonight. She’s crazy!”

“Other than Ruby, can you think of anyone else who might have killed him?”

She shook her head. “Nobody.”

“Did he talk about having problems with anyone? Did he say if anything was bothering him?”

“No. I mean, not really.”

I heard hesitation in her voice.

“It sounds like there was something,” I said.

“Well, he talked about the lawsuit a lot. He asked me lots of questions about it. He was always pushing me for information. He wanted to know what I’d heard, what I knew, what Ms. Svitak was saying about the case.”

“Why was he so interested?”

“I don’t know. I figured it was because Ruby was a witness.”

“Did he ever talk about money?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did he ever mention getting monthly payments from the law firm?”

Her brow wrinkled. “Why would Ajax be getting money from the firm?”

“He never told you about it?”

“No.”

“Did he talk about getting money from anyone else?”

“No.”

“What about the lawsuit? Did you give him information like he wanted?”

Penny hesitated. “I don’t want to get fired.”

“Well, you say you loved Ajax. Don’t you want to find out what happened to him?”

It took her a long time to answer. “Okay, I probably told him more than I should. I wanted him to like me, and I didn’t really see the harm. Ruby was a witness for the mine, so it’s not like I was helping the plaintiffs. Besides, he wasn’t asking about the harassment or anything like that.”

“What did he want to know about?”

“He asked a lot about Gordon.”

“Gordon Brink? What about him?”

“He asked if the firm was hiding anything about him. Did Ms. Svitak know things that might come out at trial? Or did she have any idea who killed him? I thought that was weird, because everybody said Gordon was killed by his son. I asked Ajax why he wanted to know, and he told me his partner still had questions about the case. That you were pushing him to find out more.”

Darrell frowned. “He said I wanted the information?”

“Yes.”

I glanced at Darrell, who shook his head.

“What did you tell him?” I asked Penny.

“Well, I told him about a tape recording I’d heard. It seemed to upset him.”

“What was this tape?”

“Not long after Ms. Svitak arrived, she was going over archival records of our client relationship with the mine. I was there to take notes. She was listening to a cassette recording of a phone conversation between Gordon and the senior partner of the firm in Milwaukee.”

“What were they talking about?”

“Gordon said he’d tried to get Sandra Thoreau to quit the mine. He’d offered her a payout to leave, but she’d turned him down. After that, Ms. Svitak switched off the tape and told me to leave.”

“Did you ever hear more of the tape?”

“No. Later, Ms. Svitak told me to destroy my notes about it. That’s very unusual. I asked why, and she snapped at me and said not to ask any questions. My guess is, she didn’t want anything on paper that might accidentally show up in discovery. The firm doesn’t want the plaintiffs to hear what’s on that tape.”

“You told Ajax about it?”

“Yes, and he freaked out. I don’t know why.”

Darrell interjected. “Do you know when the call was taped?”

“Years ago.”

“How many years?”

Penny blinked as she tried to recall. “Seven, I think? I always label my notes with the date of the conversation, and I’ve got a good memory for that kind of thing. I’m pretty sure it was summer seven years ago.”

“Where was Gordon when he made the call?”

Penny shrugged. “Here.”

“Here in Black Wolf County?” Darrell asked.

“Yes. He said he’d met Sandra Thoreau that day, so he must have been here.”

Darrell eased back in his chair with a heavy sigh. Then he turned to me. “We need to pull the murder file again.”

“On Brink?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, but not just him. Summer seven years ago is when Kip and Racer were killed.”

We kept our files in the basement of the building. It was a dank, windowless room, not the best place to store documents, but we didn’t have a lot of extra space. Boxes of d-CON kept the mice from devouring our papers. The files were all in bankers boxes organized by date on a series of rusty metal shelves. The archives went back for decades, so if someone wanted to see their grandfather’s arrest record for skinny-dipping in the 1940s, it was probably still there.

Darrell didn’t say anything as we traversed the narrow aisles, with me squeezing sideways because of my belly, so I was the one who brought it up.

“What was Ajax doing?” I asked. “Trying to solve the murders?”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t explain the monthly payments.”

“At least now we know why Ajax was buying Penny gifts. He wanted information from her.”

Darrell nodded. “Ajax is caught up in all of this somehow. I have to assume that’s why he’s dead.”

We reached the area in the basement where the boxes were kept for the months of July and August seven years earlier. Everything Darrell had gathered in his investigation into the murders of Kip and Racer was crammed into three heavy boxes, typically filed on the top shelf. I wasn’t able to reach the boxes myself, or to lift them, not in my condition. But I didn’t need to.

The boxes were gone. The other records from that time frame had been squeezed together to make the gap less noticeable, but the murder files were gone.

“Somebody took them,” I said.

Darrell grabbed the log sheet that we used to record who removed materials and when. As he reviewed the top sheet, I could see Darrell’s own name from the last time he’d pulled the files, shortly after Gordon Brink’s murder. He’d noted the date and time in and the date and time out.

That was the last time the records had been touched, according to the log. No one had checked them out. But they’d vanished anyway.

“We need to check Brink’s file, too,” he said urgently.

Quickly, we made our way to the shelf that held the records from last December and then January of the current year. It took me only one glance to see that the box of materials we’d gathered on Gordon Brink’s death had disappeared, too.

“It was here,” I told Darrell. “I put it here myself.”

Darrell shook his head. “It had to be one of us. A cop took it. Nobody else has keys to get in here.”

“Ajax?”

“That’s my guess.”

“But why? He was part of the investigations. He already knew what we’d found.”

“I don’t know,” Darrell replied, “but we’re back to square one. Everything we know about the Ursulina murders, all our evidence, is gone.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The next morning, we met Sandra Thoreau at the mine. She arrived in the work site trailer from deep down in the terraced layers of the copper mine, wearing a hard hat and yellow reflective suit. She was dirty over every inch of exposed skin, the kind of dirt from which you probably never felt completely clean. She didn’t look happy to see us, and I was conscious of the fact that the mine was going to dock her for every minute she wasn’t on the clock.

She glanced at Norm, who’d come to the mine with us. The three of us sat in flimsy chairs inside the trailer, but Sandra ignored the chair we’d set aside for her and stayed standing. Outside, a constant rumble of machines made the trailer walls rattle, and we heard the shouts of men trying to be heard over the engines.

“What now?” she asked Norm with a weary sigh. “What do they think I did?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” he told her. “I’ll let you know what to answer and not answer. Just be truthful.”

Sandra shrugged. “Let’s make this fast.”

Darrell nodded at me to lead the questioning. I found that I liked doing my old job again, even if it was just for a little while. “Sandra, you mentioned a couple of times that the mine tried to buy you off to get you to quit.”

“Yeah. So what? I told them to shove it, but if you want proof, I can’t give it to you. They didn’t put any of this in writing. Their offer was cash on the table, take it or leave it.”

“When was this?”

She hesitated. “A few years ago.”

“Five, six, seven?”

“I don’t remember. I know it was summer, because it was hot.”

“Before the lawsuit was filed?”

“Yeah.”

“How did this offer come about?” I asked.

I saw a glimmer of understanding cross her dirty face. She knew why we were here. She rolled the answer around on her tongue for a while before saying anything more.

“A guy called me at home,” she told us. “An out-of-towner. A lawyer. He wanted to talk to me on behalf of the mine. When we met, he said they were willing to pay me a nice chunk of change if I’d voluntarily leave my job and sign some kind of release. He was willing to give me two thousand bucks right then and there. He even showed me the roll of bills.”

“You said no?”

“Two thousand bucks but then I’ve got no job? Yeah, I said no. The recession was hell back then. I didn’t know if I’d ever get another job around here. I was going to hang on to what I had.”

“Who was it, Sandra?” I asked. “Who was the lawyer?”

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “If you’re asking me about it, I assume you already know. It was Gordon Brink.”

“You met Brink years before his murder. Here in Black Wolf County.”

“That’s right. Although it wasn’t much of a meeting. I didn’t spend more than half an hour with him before I got up and left. It was just enough time for him to bribe me and me to tell him where to go. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what his name was or what he looked like, not until he came back here last fall.”

“Did you have any other communication with him in the interim? Letters? Phone calls?”

“No.”

Darrell, who was sitting on a rickety card-table chair, put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “After Brink was killed, why didn’t you tell us that you knew him before the lawsuit? That he’d been here before?”

“You didn’t ask.” She gave us a not-very-sweet smile. “If I’ve learned one thing from Norm during the lawsuit, it’s not to volunteer information unless someone asks me about it.”

“Were you afraid you’d be a suspect in Brink’s murder?”

“I already was, wasn’t I? From day one. You made that pretty clear, Darrell. I didn’t need to give you any more ammunition.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Where did you meet Brink?” I asked. “Where were you when he offered you the money?”

“He was staying at the Fair Day resort. I went to his cabin, we talked, and I left.”

“Do you know how long he was in town?”

“I have no idea. I turned down his offer, and that was that.”

“Who else knew about your meeting with him?”

“Back then? Nobody. If anybody else knew, it came from Brink, not me. I didn’t talk about it at the mine. I didn’t want the other women finding out. The last thing I needed was to put the idea in their heads that they could grab a quick payout and quit. I wanted us to stick together. If one of us left, they’d work that much harder to get rid of the rest of us.”

“Do you know if Brink tried to bribe the others?”

“If he did, they didn’t say anything about it to me. But the mine saw me as the ringleader. I was the one they really wanted out.”

“What about Ruby?”

“I have no idea. Maybe. Who knows, she might have taken the cash. I’m sure she’d deny it, but it would explain a lot.”

Darrell glanced at Norm. “Did you know about Brink being in town?”

Norm phrased his answer carefully. “When Sandra came to me about the lawsuit a couple of years later, we discussed the bribe. I had to have a complete history of what the mine had done to try to push Sandra out. I knew they’d offered her money, but not that Brink was the one who’d done it. I didn’t know that until he came back, and Sandra confirmed he was the one. I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark about it last winter, but any information I had about Brink was privileged.”

Sandra pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch. She glanced out one of the small windows toward the dirt road leading down into the bowels of the mine. “Let’s move this along, okay? I’m losing money here. You might as well get to the shit you really want to know about.”

“What do you think we want to know?” Darrell asked.

“Come on, this is about Kip and Racer, right? You think Brink talked to me around the time the two of them got chopped up in Norm’s trailer.”

“That seems pretty likely, doesn’t it? Given the similarities between the crimes.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t even be sure it was the same summer. But if they got killed after I met Brink, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought back then. Kip and Racer had nothing to do with me or the mine. I had no reason to think there was any connection between them and Brink.”

“What about when you heard how Gordon Brink was killed?” Darrell asked.

Again Sandra glanced at Norm, but he nodded his approval. “Sure, it made me wonder, but I figured Brink was killed by a copycat. When the sheriff said it was Jay, I assumed that was the end of the story.”

“Except now there’s Ajax, too,” Darrell went on. “Was he in the mix on any of this?”

“If he was, I never heard about it.”

Darrell shook his head in frustration. “Sandra, we’ve got four murders, four brutal crimes committed in very similar ways. When Brink was killed, we didn’t find any evidence to link his death to the murders of Kip and Racer. There was nothing to tie the three of them together. But now we find out that Brink was in town once before, which you knew but kept from us. Our next stop is going to be at the Fair Day resort. When we check their records, I think we’re going to find out that Brink was staying at the resort right around the time Kip and Racer got killed. There’s no way that’s a coincidence. All these crimes are connected somehow, and right now, the only connection I’m seeing is you.”

“Well, I didn’t kill them, Darrell. I don’t know who did.”

“Brink came to town to see you. He tried to bribe you. Your lawsuit is at the center of all of this.”

“Maybe. But I’m not the Ursulina.”

“Where were you on Friday night? And on Saturday night?”

“Home with Henry.”

“You’re not exactly known to stay in on weekend nights. Why didn’t you go out?”

“I wasn’t feeling well. Stomach flu.”

“So you have no alibi,” Darrell concluded.

“I guess not.”

“As I recall, your alibi was soft for Brink’s murder, too.”

Norm stood up and put himself between Darrell and Sandra. “I think we’re done for now, Darrell. Sandra has to get back to work, and wild speculation isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

Sandra walked away to the trailer door, but I called after her. “Hey, Sandra? One more thing.”

Norm tried to shut me down, but Sandra waved at him to say it was okay. “What is it?”

“You turned down the bribe and told Brink to shove it. Then what?”

“I left.”

“No, I mean what did Brink say when you turned him down?”

Sandra scratched her cheek with black fingernails as she tried to remember. “He was pissed. Brink was a bully, you know that. He was the kind of guy who was used to getting what he wanted, and he thought he could intimidate me. He told me if I was holding out for more money, there wasn’t going to be any. And he said if I didn’t take the offer and quit the mine, I’d regret it.”

Chapter Thirty

The labor pains came back while we were driving to the Fair Day resort. This time, Darrell heard me inhale with a sharp breath and noticed my fists clenching and my whole body squirming in the passenger seat. He was immediately concerned.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

“Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“Last time the pains went away after a few minutes. Let’s wait and see.”

“I’d rather not have to deliver your baby, Rebecca.”

“That makes two of us,” I replied.

He pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and studied my face, which was taut with discomfort.

“Is this too much for you?” Darrell asked. “If being part of this investigation is putting you at any risk, I’ll drive you back home right now.”

“No, I want to be part of it. Really.”

I breathed steadily and tried to clear my head, which wasn’t easy. Fortunately, the pain settled down in a few minutes, as it had before, and my body relaxed. Even so, I knew you were coming, Shelby. You were getting ready to be part of this world. The clock was ticking, and I didn’t have much time to get answers to all my questions.

“I’m okay now,” I said, and I motioned to Darrell to keep driving. He looked relieved.

We arrived at the Fair Day resort half an hour later. It was situated on the far western edge of the county, built on the shore of one of our largest, prettiest lakes. Color had begun to dot the trees, and the sun was shining, making it a gorgeous October day. A few fishing boats trolled the water. The resort had been around since the 1930s, and a lot of us joked that the towels in the rooms dated back to that era, too. For its time, the place had been elegant, but decades later, it was just a collection of lakeside cabins with outhouses and a communal shower. It was seasonal, and the resort would be closing up for the winter in a few more weeks. I had a hard time imagining Gordon Brink staying here, but seven years earlier, he wouldn’t have had many options.

The owner of the resort was a man in his early fifties named Marvin Faraday, who was the son of the original owners. The Faraday clan went so far back in this area that some of us wondered if there was a Random Faraday centuries ago who gave the town its name. He was a rounded Paul Bunyan of a man, the sixth of six children, and he had seven kids of his own. Marvin was also the town mayor, which wasn’t a job that took a lot of time around here. He knew everyone, so when Darrell and I came inside the lobby cabin that doubled as his home, he was right there to put both hands on my belly to feel you kick. You must have liked him, sweetheart, because you kicked up a storm to say hello.

He poured coffee for himself from an aging Mr. Coffee machine in the corner of the office, and he held up the pot to the two of us, but we declined.

“Awful news about Ajax,” Marvin told us when we were all sitting down. “Awful, awful, awful. You know what happened?”

“We’re working on it,” Darrell replied.

“Ajax came here a lot, you know.”

“Did he?”

“Oh, sure. He had a cabin he liked, probably rented it out once or twice a month. Never came alone. For me, it was hear no evil, see no evil, know what I’m saying? He brought girls here, but I made a point of not noticing who. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and it wasn’t any of my business. As long as there weren’t any awkward scenes, jealous husbands showing up, that kind of thing, I didn’t care. I wish I could be more help.”

“Actually, we’re not here about Ajax,” Darrell told him.

“No?”

“We’d like to ask you about Gordon Brink.”

“You mean the lawyer who got killed last winter? What about him?”

“Did you know him?”

Marvin rubbed his beard and thought about it. “I’m trying to think if I ever met him. I don’t recall that I did. None of them stayed out here. There was a city council meeting about some of the vandalism the lawyers were complaining about, but as I recall, the mine sent some young associate. The only time I heard Brink’s name was after he got killed. Wasn’t it his son that did it?”

“We’re not so sure about that anymore,” Darrell replied. “The thing is, we think Brink may have stayed at the resort several years ago.”

“Oh, yeah? I guess it’s possible, but I don’t remember.”

“We’d like to look through your guest records from back then. Specifically from July seven years ago.”

Marvin shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

He retreated into a back room and returned a couple of minutes later with a shoebox in his hand. The box was labeled with a black marker for the months of June and July seven years earlier. Inside, hundreds of white index cards were squeezed together in no particular order that we could see. Each card listed little more than the basic information, including a name, cabin number, check-in date, check-out date, total bill, and method of payment. Back then, most of the guests had paid in cash.

Darrell took half the cards, and I took the other. The slowest part of the process was interpreting the handwriting, but when we were both done, we hadn’t found a card labeled with a name that even resembled Gordon Brink.

“Penny and Sandra weren’t one hundred percent sure it was seven years ago,” I pointed out. “Maybe we’re wrong about the timing.”

“I don’t think we’re wrong.” Darrell glanced at Marvin, who was reading a paperback Louis L’Amour novel. “Marvin? Do you typically ask for ID when people check in?”

The resort owner didn’t look up from the book. “Now I do. Seven years ago? I was pretty loose about things back then. As long as people had cash, I didn’t really care who they were.”

Darrell looked at me. “So Brink could have used a false name.”

“If he did, then we’ll never find him.”

But we went through the index cards again anyway. It took longer this time, hunting for the kind of fake name a Milwaukee corporate lawyer might use. The clue I spotted in the stack of cards turned out not to be a name, but a correction in the check-out date and the total bill. The guest had paid in advance for a two-week stay, but then the date had been crossed out and replaced with a new date that was only five days after arrival.

The name on the card was Jay Smith.

Jay. That felt like more than a coincidence.

I showed the card to Darrell, who spotted the significance of the new check-out date immediately.

“Norm found Kip and Racer’s bodies a few days later,” he said. “The bodies had been in the trailer a while. I think this is Brink, don’t you?”

We showed the card to Marvin, but not surprisingly, he didn’t recall one summer guest leaving the resort early seven years ago. If it was Brink, he’d come and gone without leaving footprints, which was no doubt exactly what he wanted. Darrell wandered out of the office with the card in hand, and I followed. A grassy slope surrounded the resort and led down to the lake and the guest cabins. Sunlight reflected on the water like orange stars, and dense forestland ringed the shore. The October air was cool.

“Brink comes to town, checks in under a fake name, and pays cash,” Darrell mused out loud, flapping the card as if it would offer up more secrets. “He pays for two weeks, but a few days later, he leaves early. Why? Because Sandra said no to the bribe? There’s got to be more to it than that.”

I shook my head and didn’t say anything. There was nothing I could add.

“Kip and Racer were on the run after robbing that liquor store in Mittel County,” Darrell went on. “They were hiding out in Norm’s trailer. And yet somehow the three of them are connected. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“The trailer is two hours away from here in the middle of nowhere,” I pointed out. “How would Brink have found them? And why?”

“I don’t know, but we’re missing something important,” Darrell insisted. “Brink left the resort early, and based on the timing, he must have left right around the time of the murders. We have nothing to connect him to Kip and Racer, but there has to be a connection.”

“You think Brink killed them?”

“I don’t know, but something happened out there. Either Brink saw it, or he was part of it, or he knew who did it. I think he was running.”

There was no point in asking what Brink was running from. The answer was right there between us, but we left it unspoken.

The Ursulina.

Darrell wanted to see the cabin where Jay Smith, a.k.a. Gordon Brink, had stayed seven years earlier. I wasn’t crazy about hiking down the slope to the lake and then having to hike back again, so I let him go by himself while I waited in the car with the passenger door open and my puffy legs dangling outside.

I hadn’t been sitting there five minutes when a yellow Cadillac, as long as a land yacht, pulled up next to me.

“Deputy Rebecca!” Ben Malloy announced happily, rolling down the driver’s window.

“Hello, Ben.”

I felt awkward seeing him again. I hadn’t actually talked to Ben since we were together at the frozen lake during the winter. In truth, I’d avoided him whenever he’d been in town for that very reason. I didn’t want to be reminded of the night when Jay killed himself. The night when I’d had my own emotional breakdown. The night when I’d seen the best and worst of men.

Ben clambered out of the Cadillac like an oversize leprechaun on the hunt for a pot of gold. His forelock drooped, and he pushed it back with a swipe of his hand. He dug into his pocket for his pipe and chomped down on it, but he left it unlit. “Looks like the big day is fast approaching,” he said to me.

“It is.”

“Well, I hope you don’t miss my Halloween party. I want you to see the new show. It’s fantastic.”

“That won’t be up to me,” I said, cupping my belly. “That will be up to Shelby.”

“Shelby? Is that the name you picked? I like it.”

“Thank you.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Officially, I don’t know, but I think she’s a girl.”

“Well, I’m sure she’ll be as lovely as you are, Deputy.”

“That’s sweet, Ben.” Then I added, “But you know, I’m only a deputy again for a little while, because of what happened to Ajax. Otherwise, I’m the department secretary. My job changed after last winter.”

His face fell, and he looked genuinely upset. “Seriously? Is that true? I’m disappointed. I hope our adventure in the woods didn’t contribute to your taking a different role. If I’d thought that, I never would have said a word about what happened.”

“Nothing that happened was your fault, Ben,” I told him. “I screwed up, and I’m lucky to have a job at all. You did the right thing by telling them about Jay’s confession.”

“Except we both know it wasn’t really the truth,” he replied with a sharp eye. “For what it’s worth, I emphasized to Darrell and Jerry that I thought the boy was lying when he said what he did. They seemed more interested in putting the case to bed than getting to the truth.”

“I guess sometimes the truth is overrated.”

Ben winked. “You’re preaching to the choir about that. I’m in television, which means I never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Except when it comes to our mutual friend, of course.”

I cocked an eyebrow with a question.

“The Ursulina!” he explained, as if that was obvious. “I haven’t forgotten our conversation, you know. Or the look on your face back then. Deny it if you want, but I’m convinced we’re both members of the club. We both know he’s real. One of these days, I hope to prove it.”

I said nothing to verify what he suspected about me.

Ben squatted down and put a pudgy hand on my shoulder. His eyes were serious. “Also, as long as we’re talking about that night, I wanted to say that I heard what happened to you later with your ex-husband. I was desperately sorry to find out what you went through.”

“Thanks. It was months ago, and I’m much better now. And you can deny it if you want, but I know you helped me with your anonymous gift, Ben. I really appreciate it. The money you gave me got me through some tough times.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” he replied graciously, getting back to his feet. He finally lit his pipe and primed it with several breaths. Then he gestured at the resort around us, which was showing its age. “So what brings you to the Fair Day? I stay here out of nostalgia, but with all due respect to Marvin, the place could use a serious sprucing up. Of course, it’s still better than staying with my mother.”

“I’m helping Darrell,” I replied vaguely.

“Ah, something to do with the latest killing, no doubt. Well, at least Darrell and Jerry are smart enough to keep you involved. That’s good. I couldn’t believe it when I heard what happened to Ajax. It’s tragic for poor Ruby, but a new Ursulina murder only a couple of weeks before my special airs? That’s ratings gold. I called the network as soon as I heard about his death. We’re filming a new ending to the documentary while I’m in town.”

“That’s not in very good taste, Ben.”

He shrugged. “Words that will appear on my tombstone! Would you like to be interviewed for the show? I know Darrell would say no, but what about you? The network would fall in love with your pretty face.”

“No, thanks.”

“Are you sure? We don’t have to talk about Ajax or the murder investigation.” His eyes twinkled. “We could talk about whatever it was you saw in the forest that you’re hiding from me.”

“No,” I repeated firmly. “No interview.”

“All right. If you say so. That’s a shame. Anyway, I hope I’ll see you at the party.”

Ben headed for the hotel lobby.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” I called after him.

He stopped and gave me a quizzical look. “Why, of course.”

I maneuvered my way out of the cruiser and stood up, with Ben giving me a little help. My voice was low, although there was no one around. Darrell hadn’t returned yet. “Seven years ago, you and all your volunteers did a lot of searching in the woods near where Kip and Racer were killed. I was wondering — did you find anything out there that you didn’t share with the sheriff’s department?”

Ben stroked his chin thoughtfully. “What did you have in mind?”

“Evidence of murder, rather than a monster.”

“Why would I hide anything like that?”

“Because it’s hard to sell a myth on TV when you’ve got a human being in jail for the crimes.”

“You think I’d let a killer go free just to get ratings?”

“Actually, I think you might.”

“Actually, I think you’re right,” he told me with a sly grin. “People don’t really want the truth, you know. They like the mystery. But in this case, the truth is, I didn’t find anything. I wasn’t able to prove the Ursulina did it, but I didn’t find evidence to suggest someone else did, either. Everything the volunteers gathered and brought in during the search, I turned over to Darrell. He told me he didn’t find anything useful to the case.”

I nodded. “Okay. Well, I had to ask.”

“However, I do have many hours of raw footage from the search stored away in my mother’s attic,” Ben went on. “Only a few minutes actually wound up on air. If you really believe a human being was responsible for these murders, rather than a monster, you’re welcome to go through the footage anytime you want.”

My brow furrowed. “Why would I do that? What do you think I’d find?”

“Well, whoever killed those men must have been pretty nervous about that search,” Ben replied. “If I were the killer, I would have wanted to be there to make sure nothing turned up that pointed a finger at me. So it’s just possible that somewhere in all those hours of footage, we got the murderer on film.”

Chapter Thirty-One

That night, I dreamed about you, Shelby.

It was the first of many dreams I would have where we were together. As strange as it sounds, you’ve always been with me. I’ve felt your closeness all these years. I’ve never stopped talking to you and wishing things had happened differently.

In my dream, you weren’t a baby or even a child. You were all grown up, a beautiful young woman around my age, with dark hair like mine, but straighter and parted in the middle. I could see so much of myself in your face, in those dreaming brown eyes, in the milky pale skin, in the inquisitive little smile on your mouth when you looked at the world and tried to understand it. Those are all things I gave you, even if you don’t realize it. It made me sad, though, to see you without the years in between, because it meant I’d missed your growing up. I hadn’t been there.

That night, though, the dream brought us together. Rebecca and Shelby. Mother and daughter. We held hands. We didn’t talk, but we felt no need to talk. There was this instant, intimate familiarity between us, of knowing each other, of connectedness. Being with you made me happy. You filled me with a glow of contentment, because you were smart and fearless and beautiful.

We were in the forest. Whenever I sleep, I go to the forest. It wasn’t night, but the crowding of the trees created a gloomy grayness around us. Birds flitted through the shadows, but oddly, they didn’t sing. The world was as still as a painting, no wind, no warmth, no chill. We followed a well-walked path side by side, but the dirt at our feet was dry as dust, and we left no footprints. When I looked back, it seemed as if we hadn’t been there at all.

I had so many questions for you. About your life. About your past. Are you married? Do you have children? Do you have friends? Do you laugh?

But I asked none of those things. I simply walked with you through the magical forest, and the farther we went, the more the grayness turned to dark. The birds went away. Night began to fall like a great shadow. A feeling of foreboding crept over me, and I knew what was coming next. It happened this way in all my dreams. In my waking hours, I hunted for the beast, but in my dreams, the beast hunted me.

I heard the noise that had haunted my life, that had become my secret obsession. It was the sound of the monster, drawing near, coming back for me. The reunion that I’d sought since I was ten years old happened every night when I closed my eyes. But this dream was different, because this time, I realized that the beast wasn’t here for me. No, this was much worse.

The Ursulina was coming for you.

A black shape crashed through the underbrush, its breath loud and heavy. In the darkness, suddenly, I had a flashlight in my hand, the way I did years ago. As the monster stormed toward us, my light shined on shaggy fur and the curves of sharp, huge claws. And I heard crying at my feet. When I looked down, I saw that you weren’t a woman anymore, Shelby. You were a baby again, nestled in my Easter basket among green paper curlicues.

Crying. Cold. Scared. Alone.

The beast was coming, and I had to protect you from him. I felt fear like nothing I’d ever known, but also a determined, furious, vengeful rage at the idea that anything would threaten my child. I would never let him hurt you. The beast could have me, it could take me, it could kill me, but you would live. You would be safe. I saw the monster looming in front of me. Tall, hunched, huge. Its great paws raised high, its rancid snorts hot on my face. I saw the claws that would rip me to shreds, open up my body, spill my blood. The teeth that would tear and gnaw at my flesh and consume me until I was completely inside him.

But it would never, never take my baby.

I stepped in front of the basket, shielding you.

“It’s me you want!” I screamed at the beast. “It’s me you’ve always wanted. Here I am!”

My eyes flew open. I awakened from one nightmare into another.

I lay on the sofa in my cold living room, where I’d fallen asleep, as I usually did these days. The fire I’d built had died to embers, just enough to cast a faint orange glow. One of my kitchen chairs had been pulled into the middle of the room, and a man sat on it, watching me.

Ricky.

He was back.

For an instant, I wondered if I was still dreaming, but I wasn’t. Immediately, I grabbed for my purse, which was where I kept my gun, but Ricky gave a low chuckle and waved my revolver in the air.

Next I reached for the phone to call for help, but when I picked up the handset, I saw that he’d sliced the cord.

“What do you want, Ricky?” I asked, trying to cover my terror with the ice in my voice. “Why are you here?”

“Very nice, Bec. I haven’t seen you in what? Almost nine months, judging by the basketball you’ve got down there. And that’s how you greet your husband?”

“We’re not married. I divorced you after you beat the shit out of me.”

Ricky shook his head. His lips smacked as he chewed a stick of gum. “I don’t care what a piece of paper says. You’re my wife, and you always will be. We went to church. You swore before God to love, honor, and obey me. Until death do us part. Remember? There’s nothing a court can do to change that.”

“Get the hell out of my house.”

“Our house,” Ricky fired back at me.

He stood up from the chair. When he walked toward me, I cringed. I put my hands over my belly, as if I could cover your eyes, Shelby. I didn’t want you to see this man, to hear him speak, to have him be any part of your life. Maybe he was your father, maybe not, but he was dead to both of us.

“What do you want?” I asked again. “Money?”

“No, I don’t need money. I’ve got money now. I wanted to see you. I’ve missed you.”

Ricky caressed my face with the long barrel of the revolver. I didn’t wince or turn away. Not from him. The thought of grabbing the gun flashed through my mind. If it had just been the two of us, I would have done it. I wouldn’t have cared who lived or died. But I wasn’t alone. I had you, Shelby.

“You look good, Bec,” Ricky told me. “I’d forgotten how pretty that face of yours is. Glowing. Isn’t that what they call it?”

I swore at him in a loud voice. My eyes burned with defiance as I stared back at him, but he just laughed, because he was the one with the gun.

Physically, he’d changed since he’d been away. He’d shaved his bushy mustache, which only made his damaged nose more prominent. His blond hair was shorter. He’d lost the lazy flab he’d put on while he was unemployed, and he looked tough and muscled again. His stomach was taut, his forearms rippling, his fingers thick and strong. But the menace radiating from him hadn’t changed at all.

“I heard you were in Pennsylvania,” I said.

He shrugged. “I was, but only for a month or two. Then I moved on. I figured I’d try the desert for a while. I’ve been working construction in Nevada. There’s good money out there if you don’t pour it all into the slots.”

“So why come back?”

He dragged the barrel of the gun down my neck to my breast. “You and me. We have unfinished business, Bec.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I called a friend in town,” Ricky said. “Just to see what was up. Just to get all the news. Naturally, I asked about you. I wanted to know what was going on with my wife. He told me about that.”

Ricky moved the gun lower, until it pointed into the swell of my abdomen. He pushed the barrel in hard, making you kick. I felt my breathing coming harder and faster, terror and fury rolling together like the swirl of ocean waves. He slid the hammer back, cocking it. I didn’t doubt for a second that he would pull the trigger. Shooting me, shooting my daughter, would mean nothing to him.

“Who will it look like?” Ricky asked me.

It. Like you were an alien. Like you weren’t a person at all.

“Who will the kid look like?” he asked again. “Like I don’t already know.”

“Me,” I spat at him, while I squirmed on the sofa. “She will look exactly like me. Not you. Definitely not you.”

“Are you saying the kid’s not mine?” he asked, poking at my stomach with the gun again. “Is that what you’re telling me? Then why don’t you just admit that you’re a whore? You had it coming, Bec. I gave you what you deserved.”

“Get out, Ricky. Get out of here, and go back to the desert. As soon as Darrell sees you, he’ll put you in prison where you belong.”

“Yeah? You think I’d be convicted of anything because I slapped you around a little? A wife cheats on her husband, he’s entitled to payback. Put any man on the jury, and he’ll see things my way.”

“Get. Out!”

Ricky removed the gun from my belly. He undid the hammer and slipped the revolver inside his belt. Then, reaching out with the swiftness of a snake, he pinched my face until I had to cry from the pain.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m here to stay, Bec. This is my house. You’re my wife, and you’re carrying my baby. You may as well get used to the idea. You’re going to get the charges dropped. That’s the first thing. I don’t care what you tell Darrell, but you let him know that if he sees me, all he’s going to do is smile and say ‘Welcome home, Ricky.’ And then you and me are going back to church. You’re going to apologize to God for your sins and make a new vow to obey me. Got it? I’m going to move back in here, and I’m going to sleep in our bed again, and you’re going to spread those pretty legs of yours for me every single night.”

He let go of my face. “Understand? Tell me you understand.”

I worked the stiffness out of my jaw and snarled at him. “I’ll never take you back. It’s never going to happen.”

He sat down heavily in the chair again. “Oh, yes, it will. Soon enough, you’ll beg to take me back. Do you think I can’t hurt you? You’re wrong. I’m the one with all the power here. Look at me, Rebecca. I can take everything away from you whenever I want. I can take away your life. I can take away your baby. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

My hands curled into fists. My aching jaw clenched down, my teeth biting together. My nostrils flared as air pumped in and out of my nose. I wished I could spring off that sofa, fly across the room, and wrap my fingers around his neck. But all I could do was sit there, not moving. He snickered at my weakness and then got up and headed to the hallway that led out of the house.

When he got to the doorway, he looked back.

“Remember what I said,” he warned me. “You’re mine, Bec. You always will be. The sooner you accept that, the easier it will go for you. I own you. I’ve owned you from the very beginning.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

“I’ll find him,” Darrell said, trying to reassure me. “There’s no way that son of a bitch can hide from me.”

Darrell rarely swore, which told me how upset he was. I was pretty sure he’d made Richard Petty time driving to my place after I called him on the phone in my bedroom. He searched the house top to bottom and soon found the window in the basement that Ricky had broken to make his way inside. He nailed it shut with a few pieces of plywood, but we both knew that all Ricky had to do was break a different window next time. Or kick in one of the doors.

I realized that Ricky was right. If he chose to, he could take away my life anytime he wanted, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

“I’ve alerted everyone to be on the lookout,” Darrell went on. “Every deputy on our team, plus state patrol and cops in the neighboring counties, too. Anyone spots Ricky, they haul him in. I’ve let them know he’s armed and dangerous.”

We sat in the living room of my house. It was midmorning on what was going to be a cold, bright day. I huddled on the sofa with coffee, and while I kept a calm smile on my face for Darrell’s sake, I felt stress stabbing through my whole body. Plus, a couple of times, a labor pain.

“I’ve got people reaching out to every mine worker to see if he’s been in touch with them,” he continued. “Plus high school friends, drinking buddies, whoever — anyone who knew Ricky when he lived here. He’s got to be staying nearby. Someone knows where he is, or someone has seen him around town. It won’t take us long to track him down.”

I wanted to share Darrell’s confidence, but I knew Ricky. He knew this area inside and out, and he knew every hiding place around the county. If he didn’t want us to find him, we wouldn’t. Not until it was too late.

“Until we lock him up, you’ll stay with me,” Darrell said.

I shook my head. “No. No way.”

“It’s not up for debate. You aren’t staying in this house.”

“All I need is a new gun.”

“I can get you a gun, but I want you out of this place.”

“So I let him chase me out of my own home?” I asked. “He threatens me, and I run away scared? That’s what he wants, Darrell. He’s trying to terrorize me, and I won’t give him the satisfaction.”

“It’s just until we arrest him.”

“I appreciate the offer, but the last thing I’m going to do is put your family at risk. You’ve got Marilyn and the girls to think about.”

“Then you’ll go to a motel,” Darrell said. “You can stay there for a few days while we look for him. No one will know where you are. If there are other people around, it’s less likely that Ricky will want any trouble.”

I sighed. “I can take care of myself.”

“In most circumstances, yes. But right now, I’m sorry, you can’t.”

I couldn’t really fight him about that. So I finally gave in. I packed a bag so that I could be away for several days. Darrell put the suitcase in my trunk, and I followed him to a motel not far from the 126, where he got me a room and insisted on paying for it. I had to admit, it did make me feel better to see other cars in the parking lot and realize that there would be people in the rooms on either side of me. I liked knowing I could get help if I needed it just by shouting.

After I was checked in, I told Darrell I would go back to the sheriff’s office with him, but he refused to let me do that. He told me he’d bring me a takeout lunch a little later, and until then, I should relax. Sleep. Read. Take a bath. Whatever. I tried to do all of that, but I couldn’t get Ricky and his threats out of my head. I knew I was playing his game, but I didn’t have a choice.

I own you.

Locked inside the motel room, with the chain done, I also felt the black hole of depression opening up again. I slipped into its dark cavern, the way I had that night in January. And this time there was no charming stranger stranded in a pickup truck to rescue me. For a few brief months, Shelby, I’d been happy. You made me happy. I’d allowed myself to think I could escape my past. But I could see the end of everything coming soon. I just didn’t know what the end would look like.

An hour or so later, there was a knock on the motel door. Automatically, I tensed with fear. Was it him? But Ricky wouldn’t bother knocking; he’d put his foot to the door and kick it in. Then I wondered if it was Darrell, but it was too early for him to be back here with a hamburger from the 126.

I got up from the bed and went to the door and asked quietly, “Who is it?”

“Rebecca?” a woman said.

“Yes.”

“It’s Penny Ramsey.”

I frowned, then undid the chain and opened the door. Penny stood outside, her face still heavily bandaged from the cuts she’d received in the fight with Ruby. On the other side of the parking lot, I spotted a car with a trunk open and luggage inside.

Penny glanced over her shoulder, following my stare. “Yes, I’m leaving town. Ms. Svitak fired me. I’m going back to Milwaukee.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She says employees of her firm don’t get into bar fights. I told her it wasn’t my fault, that Ruby started it. She didn’t care. She told me I’d compromised the lawsuit with my behavior, that I’d interfered with one of her key witnesses. I don’t know, I guess she’s right. But that wasn’t what I was trying to do. All I did was fall in love with Ajax, you know?”

“Yes, I know.”

She shook her head sadly. “He was using me, wasn’t he? It was never real. He was stringing me along to find out what was going on with the lawsuit.”

“That was Ajax,” I said. “He manipulated people. You weren’t the only one.”

Penny scowled as she looked at her feet. “I got a call from the county attorney this morning. He told me that Ruby pled guilty to a misdemeanor and they turned her loose. Unbelievable. She pays like a hundred bucks to the court and promises to be a good girl. That’s justice, huh? I’ll never be able to look in a mirror again without crying for the rest of my life, and she goes home to her kids like it was nothing.”

“The scars may not be permanent,” I told her. “My ex-husband attacked me in January. I was cut like you. But the cuts healed, and now you can’t tell. Don’t assume it’ll be forever. Go see a doctor when you’re back home.”

“I appreciate your trying to make me feel better, but I’m not in the mood for that, okay? I’m in a mood where I just want to hate everybody and everything.”

“Believe me, I know how you feel.”

Penny fidgeted in the doorway, as if she were trying to make up her mind about something.

“Do you want to come inside?” I asked her.

“No, I should probably get in my car and go.”

“It seems like you came over here for a reason, not just to say goodbye.”

“Well, I was going to stop by your house before I left town, but I couldn’t make up my mind. And then I saw you checking in here earlier. I figured it must be fate telling me what to do.”

“So let’s talk,” I said.

Penny lingered outside the motel room. “Why are you here, anyway?”

“My ex-husband is back in town. He threatened me.”

“Jesus. While you’re pregnant?”

“Yes, that’s Ricky.”

She shook her head. “This place is poison.”

“Penny, what did you want to tell me?”

“Hang on. I need to get something.”

She walked across the motel parking lot. I saw her bend over at the trunk of the car and remove a paper grocery bag from the local market. Then she shut the trunk and returned to my door. The whole way, she walked furtively, casting her eyes in every direction. She motioned me back inside, and then she followed and quickly closed the motel door behind her. We both sat on the bed.

“There are still a lot of people from the firm staying here,” she said. “I didn’t want them to see me going inside your room.”

“You’ve already been fired. What more can they do to you?”

“Sue me. Bankrupt me. Make sure I never get another job.”

“Over what?”

“Giving you what I’m about to give you.”

Penny reached inside the grocery bag. The first thing she pulled out was a cassette recorder and an electrical cord. She looked around the room for an outlet and plugged in the machine. Then she dug into the bag again and removed a cassette tape in a plastic case.

“Ms. Svitak accused me of compromising the lawsuit. Okay, well, I really am doing that now. If she’s going to fire me, what loyalty do I owe her or the firm? The fact is, the mine deserves to lose this case. They deserve to be slapped down and hit with millions in damages. They made life hell for those women, and the execs sat in our depositions and lied their asses off. But it’s not just that. It’s not just the harassment. They’re criminals.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gordon Brink didn’t just come to town to buy off Sandra Thoreau. When she said no, he was planning to do other things.”

“Like what?”

“Take your pick. Assault. Rape. Maybe even murder. They wanted her out, and they were going to do whatever it took to make sure it happened. If Sandra wound up dead, you don’t think every woman in this county would have gotten the message? Stay away from the mine.”

I felt a wave of nausea and another sharp pain. I closed my eyes briefly and tried to focus. “Penny, what’s on that tape?”

“You remember the conversation I heard with Ms. Svitak? The one that freaked out Ajax? I found the tape, and I listened to the rest of it. I heard what else Brink said. I heard the shit that Ms. Svitak didn’t want me to know about.”

“You took the tape from the law firm?” I asked.

“Yeah. And now I’m giving it to you.”

I hesitated. What she was giving me was stolen evidence, and I didn’t know whether to take it or tell her to go. But then again, I had to hear what it said.

“Play it,” I told her.

Penny took the tape out of the case and popped it into the cassette player. She obviously knew the place she was looking for, because she watched the counter as she rewound and stopped at a specific location. She pushed the play button, and the first voice I heard was one I remembered very well.

Gordon Brink.

“It’s me. I met with Sandra Thoreau today. She’s the primary agitator at the mine.”

“How did it go?”

Penny paused the playback. “That second voice? That’s the managing partner at the law firm.”

“And this was seven years ago?”

“Yes.”

“If it’s incriminating, why would they record it? Why would they keep it?”

“They’re lawyers,” Penny replied. “They keep secret records of everything. You never know when you’re going to need leverage over somebody.”

She started the tape again.

“It didn’t go well. This Thoreau is a stubborn little—”

He used the word I expected Gordon to use. I’d heard him use it before, heard the naked contempt with which it came out of his mouth. I won’t say it out loud for you, Shelby, but you need to understand that this is how these men saw women. All women.

“I offered her two thousand bucks to quit. She turned it down.”

“Would more money change her mind?”

“I don’t care. I’m not crawling back to her with another cent. I told her to take it or leave it.”

“Do we have other ways of influencing her?”

“Maybe. She has a kid. No idea who the father is. I talked to the mine managers about whether we should work up a court action to get the boy taken away. Get someone from child services to pay her a visit. She’s a slut and a drunk, so with the right judge, we could probably get her declared an unfit parent. But the mine is concerned that the process would take too long, and in the end, we might lose. Plus, it could backfire and win her sympathy if our involvement comes out.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I think we need to look at a backup plan.”

There was a long pause where the managing partner said nothing at all. It made me think that the phrase backup plan had a particular meaning within the firm, and everybody knew what it was. Finally, the other lawyer spoke again.

“Is that absolutely necessary?”

“Well, if it were just a question of getting rid of this Thoreau bitch, I might say no. But it won’t end with her. If we don’t shut this down, the problem’s only going to get worse. Sooner or later, this will wind up in litigation, and the client could be looking at substantial liability.”

“Can it be done without risk of blowback to the firm or the mine?”

“I’m confident it can.”

“How do you propose to do it?”

“I’ve identified local assets. I’m meeting with them tomorrow.”

“Isn’t that a risk?”

“If necessary, I can deal with them. They won’t be missed.”

“All right. I’ll expect a report soon.”

“Leave it in my hands,” Gordon told the managing partner. “I’ll take care of everything.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

“A backup plan,” Darrell murmured. He took a bite of his hamburger and stared out the motel room window. “Did Penny know what that phrase means inside the firm? Has she heard anyone use it before?”

I joined Darrell at the window. Across the parking lot, I noticed that Penny’s car was gone. She was already on the road away from Black Wolf County on her way back to civilization.

“No, but she says the firm has represented clients in labor unrest and disputes for decades. The rumor is, they have a long history of using violent tactics for getting their way.”

“Except rumor won’t get us anywhere,” Darrell said. “No judge will let us use a stolen tape from a fired employee to get a warrant. The firm will hide behind privilege. Plus, whatever implications we read into that call, you know they’ll give us an innocent explanation for what they mean by backup plan.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

“It also doesn’t help that Gordon Brink is dead and can’t answer any questions about it,” Darrell added.

I picked up my own hamburger and put it down. I ate part of a french fry but threw it back in the box. I had no appetite. The nausea that had begun earlier was getting worse. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my skin had turned a ghostly shade of pale. Darrell didn’t seem to notice.

Instead, he went to the tape recorder and played the tape of the phone call again. He’d already listened to it six times, and the voices had been burned into my brain.

“ ‘Local assets,’ ” Darrell murmured. “He must be talking about Kip and Racer. If you were looking for muscle in this area for a job like that, they’d be the ones to call.”

I nodded. He was right.

“But that still leaves us with unanswered questions,” Darrell went on. “How did Brink know about Kip and Racer? And how did he even find them? They were hiding out because of the liquor store heist in Mittel County.”

“Norm knew they were in his trailer,” I pointed out.

“True, but I can’t see Norm helping Gordon Brink. Plus, Norm was already skirting obstruction of justice by hiding them at all. I don’t see him broadcasting the fact that he had two felons in his Airstream. And of course, none of this gets us any closer to the real question.”

I knew the question he meant. “What really happened to them?”

“That’s right. Brink tells the managing partner that he’s hoping to meet with local assets, which we assume to be Kip and Racer. Within a couple of days after that, Kip and Racer are dead, and Brink is checking out of the resort early and running back to Milwaukee. He doesn’t set foot in town for another six years, and when he does, he gets carved up like the other two. Then a few months later, so does Ajax. Four murders, presumably all connected. Presumably with one killer.”

“So how do you want to proceed?” I asked.

“Brink didn’t find Kip and Racer on his own. He had help. If not Norm, then who? I can only think of one person, can’t you?”

I frowned, but then one of the pieces in the puzzle I was wrestling with fell into place. “Ajax.”

“Right. Deputies were looking for Kip and Racer back then, and Ajax was part of the hunt. What if Ajax found them?”

“But how would Ajax get hooked up with Brink?” I asked. Then I answered my own question. “Ruby.”

Darrell nodded. “And remember, when Brink was killed, Ajax tried to steer us toward Norm and away from any connections that involved the mine or the lawsuit. He didn’t want anything pointing at him.”

“Except we’re just guessing. We can’t prove any of it.”

“I’m not so sure,” Darrell said. He went to the phone in the motel room and accessed an outside line.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“The sheriff of Mittel County.”

Those words sucked the air out of my chest. I hoped that Darrell didn’t notice. My face flushed. I sweated. I felt a roaring in my ears. Tom Ginn. The young, handsome sheriff of Mittel County. The man whose face I could easily picture, as if it had been only yesterday that I’d met him, not almost nine months earlier. The man whose arms I could feel around me, his body wrapped up in mine. The man who had saved me in the space of the few hours we’d spent together.

“Why call him?” I gasped, choking on my words, hating myself for being so obvious, even though Darrell had no idea what was happening to me.

“He can look up the file on the liquor store robbery seven years ago.”

“Yes. Sure. Of course.”

I wanted to rip the phone out of his hands. And at the same time, I wanted to make that call myself and talk to Tom and thank him for being there and tell him all my secrets. But too much time had gone by. I was part of his past.

“Are you all right?” Darrell asked, because I couldn’t hide the emotions flooding across my face.

“Fine.”

“Do you need a doctor? Is it time?”

“No.” But it was almost time. You were almost here, Shelby. I could feel it. Was it a sign that on that day of all days, Tom Ginn would become a part of my life again?

“Are you sure?” Darrell asked.

“I’m fine,” I said again.

“Okay.”

Darrell dialed our office and asked for the name and phone number for the sheriff of Mittel County. He announced the number out loud as he wrote it down, but I knew it by heart, because I’d dialed that number dozens of times from my home this year before putting the phone done without even letting it ring.

When Darrell made his next call, I sat right beside him, listening.

“Sheriff Ginn, please,” Darrell said to the woman who answered.

Seconds later, in the dead silence of the motel room, I heard that voice. Two words on the phone, barely louder than static on the line, but they were like a broadcast from a loudspeaker in my mind. “Tom Ginn.”

Could Darrell see my reaction? Could he see my whole body tremble and my heart stop beating?

“Sheriff, this is Deputy Darrell Curtis over in Black Wolf County. I’ve got a question about an old Mittel County case. I was wondering if someone there might be able to pull the file and answer some questions for me.”

No!

I didn’t want Tom handing off the call to another deputy. I wanted to hear him talking. I wanted to remember. I wanted to lose myself all over again in the mellow calm of his voice.

“What’s the case?” Tom asked.

Yes — the voice, the voice, the voice. It couldn’t have affected me more if it were Frank Sinatra serenading me over the phone. Tom, I’m here. It’s me. Rebecca. From that night in the snow? I just wanted to say — there are so many things to say—

But I said nothing at all.

“You probably wouldn’t remember it,” Darrell went on. “It was a liquor store heist. Garden-variety smash and grab. This was back in July, seven years ago. The suspects were two Black Wolf County thugs in a stolen car. Kip Wells. Racer Moritz.”

I heard Tom chuckle. I remembered that sweet laugh. The laugh of a good man. “In fact, I remember that robbery very well, Deputy. Mostly because it was my case. I answered the call.”

“Is the file still in your archives? Would someone be able to pull it?”

“Well, I pride myself on remembering details, Deputy. If I need the file, I can always grab it, but what is it you wanted to know?”

Tom. It’s me. I’m here.

Tom, let me tell you about everything. Let me tell you about Shelby.

“We had a manhunt going for Kip and Racer after the heist,” Darrell said. “Later, we found out they’d been holed up in a trailer outside Random.”

“Yes, I remember they were dead when you found them,” Tom said. “These were the Ursulina murders, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Has there been a break in the case?”

“Maybe. We have reason to believe that someone found Kip and Racer while they were hiding out. It may have been one of our own people. I’m sure you were in close contact with the department here in Black Wolf during the investigation, so I was wondering if there was anything you remember that could help us.”

There was a long pause.

Tom, are you there? Tom, talk to me, keep talking, I just need to hear you.

“Actually, you’re right, I did get a tip about their location,” Tom said. “I passed it along myself.”

“You did?”

“Yes, one of my colleagues was testifying at a trial in Stanton that week. He was on a break and heard the defense attorney in the case talking on a pay phone in the courthouse. He was sure he heard the attorney mention the names Kip and Racer and something about a trailer. He mentioned it to me when he got back to Mittel County, because he thought maybe the perps in the liquor store robbery were trying to round up a lawyer. I called your office to pass along the tip. I thought it might give your team some clue of where the two of them could be hiding out.”

“Do you remember who you talked to?”

“Well, my main contact on the case was a deputy named Arthur Jackson. I remember him because we were both young cops about the same age. I’m sure I would have talked to him about it.”

“Ajax,” Darrell said, shaking his head.

“That’s him.”

“Do you happen to have any documentation of the call?”

“I’m sure I do in the file. I’m a stickler for that sort of thing. I’ll track it down and send you a copy.”

“I really appreciate your help, Sheriff.”

“Not at all. You’ll have to fill me in about this case when you wrap it up.”

“I will. Goodbye, Sheriff.”

I saw Darrell begin to put down the phone, but then — oh my God! — Tom said something more.

“Actually, Deputy, as long as we’re talking, can you answer a question for me?”

“Of course.”

“Is there still a woman named Rebecca Colder working for the sheriff’s department?”

Darrell stared at me with surprise and curiosity, and I couldn’t hide my own shock. He was about to say what any normal person would say in that situation — yes, actually, she’s sitting right beside me — when I frantically waved my arms and mouthed a single word at him.

No!

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t make small talk in front of Darrell. If I was going to talk to Tom, it had to be private and profound. I couldn’t pretend my relationship with him was nothing when it was everything.

“Y-yes, there is,” Darrell replied, with a faint stutter in his voice. “I know Rebecca very well. In fact, she—”

He stopped again, watching my face, trying to decide what to say.

“She was my partner for a while,” he went on.

“But not now?”

“No.”

I heard Tom’s hesitation. Would he ask about me? Would he ask why I wasn’t still Darrell’s partner? Would he ask where I was and what I was doing and how I was and when it was that my whole life had changed?

But Tom spoke again, more slowly, as if somehow he could see me in the room. As if he could read my mind through the phone. “Well, when you see her next, please tell her that Tom Ginn says hello. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Goodbye, Deputy.”

“Goodbye, Sheriff.”

Darrell hung up the phone and looked at me. He wanted answers, and I had none to give him. “Rebecca?”

I was still without words. Without breath. I had to stop myself from crying. My emotions crested like a wave. Your emotions, Shelby. I could feel you kicking. You knew him, too.

Did that mean what I wanted it to mean?

Was Tom your father?

“I met him,” I replied blandly. “I met Tom once.”

Darrell looked as if he wanted to ask me more questions, but he had the grace to let it be.

I simply sat on the bed and thought: He remembers me.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Darrell and I found Ruby sitting in her kitchen, with her youngest asleep in a little swing beside her. She stared blankly into a mug of tea. Ruby was a woman whose emotions often ran hot — I’d seen it for myself when I was on the receiving end, and I’d seen it at the 126 when she attacked Penny Ramsey — but that morning, she couldn’t summon any fire to her face. A kind of nothingness had overtaken her. As we sat down across from her at the kitchen table, she barely looked up from her tea. Her cheeks were red, her eyes were red, both set against her dirty red hair.

“It’s time you told us the truth, Ruby,” Darrell said. He had a calm seriousness in his voice that made you hate to keep secrets from him.

Ruby still didn’t look up. “The truth about what?”

“Everything. Ajax. The lawsuit. Gordon Brink.” Darrell paused before dropping the guillotine. “Kip and Racer, too.”

There it was. She finally looked at us, with a little flinch that gave it all away. At the mention of Kip and Racer, fear flitted across Ruby’s pretty face like wind through the tall grass. We’d been right about everything. She knew. All this time, she’d been covering up a guilty secret, along with her husband.

“What are you talking about?” Ruby asked lightly, still pretending to be in the dark.

Darrell put the tape recorder on the table and pushed play. I heard it again, the conversation between Gordon Brink and his managing partner. I listened to Brink discussing in a cold, horrifying way his intent to arrange for payback against Sandra Thoreau. Ruby listened, too. There was no mistaking on her face that she knew exactly what these two men were discussing.

“That’s Gordon Brink,” Darrell said, “but I think you know that.”

“Yes. I recognize his voice.”

“This was recorded seven years ago. You don’t have to read too far between the lines to know what he’s talking about.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Ruby replied. But she did.

“Gordon Brink tried to bribe Sandra Thoreau to quit the mine,” Darrell continued, with a snake’s patience. “When that didn’t work, he had a backup plan. In other words, he was going to make sure something bad happened to Sandra. And the men who were going to carry it out for him were Kip Wells and Racer Moritz.”

Ruby’s lips puckered nervously. “What does that have to do with me?”

“Brink wasn’t local. He didn’t find Kip and Racer on his own. He needed someone who knew the area, who could make an introduction. We both know that the person who helped him was Ajax.”

Ruby didn’t deny it. Or confirm it. She did what guilty people do and tried to wriggle out from the truth. “I don’t see how you expect to prove that after all this time. Not with Ajax gone.”

“I talked to the sheriff of Mittel County today,” Darrell retorted. “Seven years ago, he called Ajax to tell him that Kip and Racer had reached out to Norm. So Ajax knew. He checked Norm’s trailer. He found the two of them hunkered down in the forest. Ajax could have brought a team of deputies out there and arrested them, but he had other plans for Kip and Racer, right? Those plans involved Gordon Brink.”

Listening to Darrell made me think about how things might have been different. Fate hinges on the smallest of accidents.

If a deputy hadn’t overheard Norm talking to Kip and Racer on the courthouse pay phone, there would have been no hint of where they were hiding. Ajax never would have checked Norm’s trailer, and Gordon Brink never would have met Kip and Racer. The rest of the dominoes wouldn’t have fallen. There would have been no Ursulina murders.

All the other ripples, the ones that came later, never would have happened, either. I wouldn’t have joined the sheriff’s department or visited that lake where Tom Ginn was stranded. There would be no you, Shelby.

So maybe some things are simply meant to be.

Maybe we can’t escape fate. One way or another, it has its way with us.

Ruby reflected on what to say. Really, she shouldn’t have said anything at all. What we had was nothing but suspicion and conjecture, but I could see that with Ajax gone, Ruby was tired of concealing her husband’s crimes. She wanted the weight lifted from her shoulders.

“Am I at risk myself?” she asked. “Are you going to arrest me for the murders?”

“Were you involved in any of them?”

“No.”

“Was Ajax?”

“No.”

“Do you know who killed them?”

“No.” Then she added, “But someone knows what happened. Brink, Kip, Racer. Someone was there.”

Darrell’s forehead wrinkled with confusion. “What do you mean?”

But Ruby didn’t answer us right away. Instead, she went back to the earliest part of the story.

“You’re right, you know,” she admitted wearily. “Seven years ago, Brink came to town to try to get Sandra out of the mine. They figured if she quit, the rest of the women would go, too.”

“How did you find out? Sandra says nobody knew.”

“Ajax was visiting me at the mine. He spotted two of the senior managers talking with an out-of-towner. I didn’t know who he was, but Ajax had been out at the Fair Day that morning, and he’d seen the same man talking to Sandra. He put two and two together. You know Ajax. He could smell a dirty deal a mile away. Whatever was going on, he figured there was money to be made from it. So he followed Brink to the 126 and offered to help with whatever Brink was doing. He had his uncle call one of the execs at the mine and tell him they could trust Ajax with anything they needed. Jerry’s been in the mine’s pocket for years.”

“Jerry knew?”

Ruby nodded. “Jerry knew.”

“What did Ajax and Brink talk about?”

“How to get rid of Sandra.”

“They talked about killing her?”

Ruby shook her head, and her eyes widened. “No, no, they were just going to scare her, maybe rough her up a little. Not murder. Ajax wouldn’t have gone for that.”

“Did you know this was going on?” Darrell asked.

“No! I swear I didn’t. I would have told him to stop it. But he didn’t tell me until later. Until after Kip and Racer were murdered. At that point, there was no going back.”

“So what was the plan?”

“Brink wanted locals who could do the dirty work on Sandra,” Ruby went on. “He was looking for a couple of men who had nothing to do with the mine and who couldn’t be traced back to him. Ajax said he’d put out some feelers. But the next day, he got a call about Kip and Racer, and he figured out where they were hiding. They were perfect. He talked to them and said he could either turn them in, or he could look the other way if they did a job for a friend. He offered to get them off the hook on the liquor store heist, too. They jumped at it. Ajax told Brink where they were hiding and set up a meeting.”

“Did Ajax go, too?”

“No. He made the intro, that’s all. Brink gave him a thousand bucks cash for setting it up, but Ajax made Brink go by himself. I don’t know...”

“What?”

“Ajax didn’t say so, but I wondered if he knew what Brink was really doing. Maybe he thought the plan was to kill her, and he didn’t want to be there when they talked about that.”

“So what went wrong?” Darrell asked.

Ruby shrugged, as if she’d asked herself the same thing many times. “I have no idea. Neither did Ajax.”

“Now’s not the time to hold anything back, Ruby.”

“I’m not. I swear. Ajax went to the Fair Day to talk to Brink a couple of days later, but Brink was already gone. He’d left town. So Ajax went out to the trailer. Jesus. He saw the bodies, and he ran. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that scene. He didn’t go back until Norm found Kip and Racer and called you.”

“Did Ajax try to contact Brink?” Darrell asked.

“Sure he did. He called him at the law firm, but Brink denied knowing anything about the murders. Ajax said Brink sounded stunned to hear what had happened. Brink said Kip and Racer were alive when he left. The deal was done, and he wanted to be long gone when Kip and Racer went after Sandra. He had no idea who’d killed them.”

We heard hesitation in her voice.

“But?” Darrell asked.

“But Ajax thought Brink was hiding something.”

“Like what?”

“Ajax didn’t know.”

“Is that when Brink started paying Ajax? To keep him quiet?”

Ruby’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared with some of the anger I was used to seeing from her. “Paying him? What are you talking about?”

“Ajax had a separate bank account. He was getting five hundred dollars a month from somewhere. We suspect Brink was the one behind it, because the payments stopped after Brink died. And that makes sense if Brink wanted to stay clear of a murder investigation.”

“Five hundred dollars? A month? That little—”

Ruby hurled an obscenity at her dead husband.

“You didn’t know?” I murmured.

“No. He never told me. Sometimes I was surprised that he could afford the things he did. I had no idea he had that kind of money coming in on the side. He never let me near the bills. He said he would take care of everything.”

“Did Ajax have any contact with Brink after that summer?”

“Once,” Ruby replied, nodding. “When some new guy at the mine tried to feel me up, he called Brink and said the mine better get rid of the guy. They did.”

“What about when Brink was murdered?” Darrell asked. “Ajax had to be worried that Brink’s death was connected to Kip and Racer.”

“Yeah, he was scared about that. He was concerned that you’d figure out that he was connected to all of it, too. Or that—”

I stared at her. “What?”

“Or that the killer would figure it out and come after him next.”

“Did he have any idea who the killer was?” I asked.

Ruby focused on me with her wild eyes. “We both figured it had to be Sandra. I mean, you know what she’s like. You hit her, she hits back twice as hard. Ajax assumed Kip and Racer took her to the trailer to whack her, and she managed to take them out instead. And when Brink came back to town, she finished the job. But Ajax and I weren’t going to say anything about it.”

Darrell leaned across the table. “You said that someone else was there. What did you mean?”

Ruby drummed her painted fingernails nervously on the table, and then she pushed back the chair and got up. We heard her go to another room, and when she came back, she had a white number ten envelope in her hand. She pushed it across the table to us, and Darrell picked it up.

“I found this taped to my front door this morning,” Ruby told us. “I don’t know who did it, but to me, it felt like a threat. When I saw it, I figured I couldn’t keep any of this secret anymore. I’ve got my kids to think about. I was going to call you, but then you showed up before I had the chance.”

Darrell opened the envelope.

Inside was a black-and-white photograph. I leaned close to Darrell to examine it, and when I did, I couldn’t help the stunned gasp that escaped my lips. I don’t know what I expected, but the sight of that photograph felt like Mount St. Helens leveling forests in its path.

The picture had been taken among the dense trees, but I saw a glint of sunshine reflecting off a silver bullet. It was Norm’s Airstream trailer. There were three men standing near it, arranged close to each other in a half circle, and although the shot was slightly out of focus, I knew each of those faces well.

Kip Wells. Racer Moritz. Gordon Brink.

Together, seven years earlier. Together, before the murders happened.

“There was a witness,” Darrell murmured with a kind of wonder. “Someone saw them at the trailer.”

Yes. And that changed everything.

Chapter Thirty-Five

You’ll have to forgive me, Shelby, if the next few hours of that day are foggy in my memory. I was struggling to focus, and I’ve blocked out many of the details. I recall only bits and pieces, and the rest is just driftwood on a sea of pain and joy. But I’ll tell you what I can.

Darrell and I returned to his cruiser, but we didn’t go anywhere, not at first. We sat in the driveway outside Ruby’s house, and he stared at the photograph in his hand with a fixed concentration.

“Who took this picture?” he murmured, more to himself than to me.

That was the first question he was struggling with. Who saw Brink, Kip, and Racer together while their murder plot was unfolding? Because let’s be honest about their intentions. No matter what Ruby said, this was not an effort to scare Sandra into quitting. When you enter into this kind of plot, you don’t leave witnesses behind. They were going to do terrible things to her, and then they were going to bury her in the forest.

“It must have been Ajax,” Darrell speculated aloud. “He knew they were meeting. He hid out there with a camera in order to blackmail Brink later. That would explain why Brink was paying him.”

“That makes sense,” I said, through my own haze of confusion.

But Darrell wasn’t satisfied with his own explanation. “Except Ajax is dead. He didn’t tape the envelope to Ruby’s door. Whoever did that had to assume Ruby would give the photo to the sheriff’s department. This person wanted us to have it. Why?”

That was the other question. The burning question.

Not who took the picture, but where did it come from?

“There’s nothing incriminating in the photo itself,” Darrell went on, still wrapping his head around the puzzle. “The three men are all dead. It doesn’t help us figure out who killed them. And yet Ruby’s right. It feels like some kind of threat, showing up now. Like someone’s taunting us. But about what? What does the picture tell us?”

I felt it, too.

Even as my head swirled — even as I sweated and my heartbeat accelerated and I felt the first embers of what would become a ring of fire circling my middle — I sensed the malevolence behind the appearance of that photograph. An evil spirit, like a cold mist coming in from the sea.

Look what I know.

Look what I found.

“Someone had a key piece of the puzzle in their hands for seven years and deliberately kept quiet about it until today,” Darrell continued. “Who?”

I shook my head silently. I had no answers to give him.

Instead, I focused on what was happening to my body. Pain clamped onto my insides like a vise, knots of pain that came and went in intervals. My throat was choked with fear, and my brain whirled with uncertainty. What was happening to me? Was it you, Shelby? Were you coming soon? Or was I simply engulfed in the shock of seeing that photograph?

Darrell turned on the engine and said with his usual decisiveness, “Let’s go talk to Sandra.”

I should have told him no.

I should have been honest that my body was hoisting a flag of warning, but I found myself paralyzed, at a loss for what to do or say or think. I kept making excuses for what I felt. It was gas. It was nausea. It was pressure. It was stress. Anything but what it really was.

“Take me to the hospital,” I should have said. Not even home. I was already beyond going home.

But all I said was, “Yes, okay, let’s talk to her.”

We drove to the mine. That was about the worst place for me at that moment, filled with men and machines and dust and tumult, a dizzying chaos of noise reverberating in my head. I was trying so hard not to let everyone see the tornado of sensations whipping around me. Even Darrell was oblivious. I had to lean on him to make it to the work trailer, and he was so caught up in his questions and his mysteries that he didn’t realize — why couldn’t I just say it? — I was having a baby.

We sat inside while the foreman went to collect Sandra. He didn’t look happy about pulling her off the job again. Darrell and I said nothing, and I could tell that his mind was distracted, because he never even looked at me. Anyone who looked at me would have seen the truth.

Sandra did.

A few minutes later, she came into the trailer in her dirty work clothes, saw my face, and immediately did a double take. “Jesus Christ, Rebecca, are you in labor?”

That was the first time Darrell saw me — really saw me — and realized that something was very wrong. But I shrugged off her comment with a forced smile. “I’m just a little uncomfortable.”

Sandra gaped at me as if to say, Honey, do you want your baby born on the floor? But when I didn’t say anything more, she sat down and wiped her brow. “I don’t know what you want, Darrell, but if Norm’s not here, I’m not answering questions.”

“Then how about you just listen?” he said.

She grabbed a cigarette from her pocket but didn’t light it. She waved it in the air and fiddled it with her fingers. “Whatever. Go ahead.”

“We confirmed what we suspected,” he informed her. “Brink met with Kip and Racer. Ajax was the one who introduced them.”

Sandra made a little spitting noise between her teeth. “Ajax, huh? Nice.”

“Now all four of them are dead.”

“Well, that’s a big loss,” she commented with heavy sarcasm, ignoring her intention to stay quiet.

Darrell passed her the photograph. “Someone left this picture on Ruby’s door. It shows Brink, Kip, and Racer together outside Norm’s trailer. Sometime not long after this picture was taken, Kip and Racer were murdered.”

Sandra studied the men in the picture. Her face bore no expression, no anger, no disgust, no sadness, no regret. Silently, she passed the photograph back to Darrell. “So what?”

“Did you take the picture? Did you leave it for Ruby to find?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Kip and Racer? And Brink? And Ajax?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Darrell ignored her denial.

“We received this tape, too,” he said.

He produced the cassette recorder and again played the conversation with Brink and his partner in Milwaukee. This time, strain overtook Sandra’s eyes as she understood the meaning behind what the men were saying. The lines of her hard life deepened on her face. Like me, she knew this conversation was not about scaring her off or roughing her up. This was about men who were planning to kill her, to treat her like a helpless animal, abused and then thrown away. They wanted to send a message to any woman who might follow in her footsteps by working at the mine: Don’t even think about it.

When the tape ended, Sandra nervously peeled the wrapper away from the cigarette and let the tobacco fall to the floor.

“Remember what I told you?” she said, eyeing me. “These people are evil.”

“I remember.”

“Did Ruby know?” she asked me.

I didn’t answer, but she read the truth in my silence. She curled her lip with disgust as if she were chewing on something foul. “Ruby may be the worst of all, you know. The others were men. I expect that shit from them. But Ruby lied to protect them, even knowing what they did. She threw me and all the other women to the wolves.”

Darrell put his hands on his knees and adopted a fatherly tone. “Sandra, it’s clear that Brink intended to do you harm. He said you would regret turning down the money. In light of this tape, that was obviously a threat. Did he tell you that your life was in danger if you didn’t quit the mine?”

“No. He didn’t say anything like that. I just figured the harassment would get worse, and the mine wouldn’t do shit to stop it. I was right.”

Darrell eased back in the chair and stared at her, letting the silence draw out in the trailer. Although there was really no silence around us. The ground vibrated. The metal walls shook. Men shouted. Engines rumbled. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, as if my brain could block everything out. It was cold in here, but sweat poured down my face. A spike drove through my back, or at least, that was what it felt like to me.

“You know what I think?” Darrell asked.

He used that calm voice I’d heard many times, the voice that lulled a suspect into confessing everything. Tell them a story. Use a few little bits of evidence to tie everything together, and hope they didn’t realize that he couldn’t prove anything he was saying.

Sandra shrugged. “Tell me. I can’t wait.”

“I think Brink underestimated you,” Darrell said. “Everyone underestimated you, didn’t they? They figured you’d fold. Quit. Run away. But you were tougher than they thought. A lot tougher. You had your kid to think about. So you stuck it out, no matter what the men did to you. After everything you’d been through at the mine, you weren’t going to let some lawyer scare you out of your job.”

In my head, their conversation began to go in and out, like poor reception on a television set. My breathing got ragged. I opened my mouth wide to suck in more air. I clutched the sides of the chair.

“See, I think you turned the tables on Brink,” Darrell went on. “You followed him from the resort. You saw him meeting with Kip and Racer, and you knew what that meant, didn’t you? The three of them were planning how to get rid of you. Right? Is that how it happened? You knew they’d come after you sooner or later, and you figured you’d better strike first. It was kill or be killed. It was self-defense.”

The pain inside me nearly lifted me out of my seat, shot me through the roof, sent me into space.

“How did it go down, Sandra? Did Brink leave? Once the plan was done, he wasn’t going to hang around in Black Wolf County. He’d want to be long gone when Kip and Racer grabbed you. Did you stay in the woods and wait for your chance? I studied the crime scene, so I know Racer was killed first. That makes sense. You wouldn’t have wanted to take them both on at the same time. Did you wait until Kip left, and you had an opportunity to confront Racer one on one? He was probably drunk. Easy prey. Easy to kill. And when that was done, you hung around until Kip came back, and you did the same thing to him.”

Sandra didn’t say anything. I’m not sure she was even paying attention to Darrell anymore. She was staring at me in horror.

“I don’t blame you,” Darrell went on. “I really don’t. Believe me, I know the kind of men Kip and Racer were. If they’d managed to get hold of you, they weren’t going to make it quick. Brink probably told them to enjoy themselves. Did you hear him talking about what they should do to you? Did they laugh about it? There just comes a time when you snap, Sandra. I get it. A time when you’ve taken all the abuse you’re going to take. Is that what happened? Is that why you killed them?”

I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.

The pain between my legs crashed toward shore like a tidal wave, and when it cascaded over me, I screamed. With my face beet red, I screamed. I lurched to my feet and screamed.

That’s the last thing I remember, Shelby. Everything else is black, until much later that night, when I was in the hospital and you were in my arms.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Two weeks.

We had two weeks together, Shelby. The wonder of that time is emblazoned on my brain. When I’m lonely, when I’m bereft, when I’m crying, I go back to those days and replay the scenes of that movie. It’s like God gave me a consolation prize of perfect recall for the brief moments we had.

I spent three days in the hospital. Everyone visited. Darrell. His girls. Ben. Norm. Will. Sandra. They brought flowers, gifts, stuffed animals, and my favorite cherry-nut fudge. They marveled over you, and you didn’t cry at all when they held you. Nothing about this new world seemed to frighten you, which I loved. I hoped you would stay that way your whole life. Fearless.

The nurses told me you were the calmest baby they’d ever seen, angelic but so earnest. Life was serious business to you. You had this strangely intense curiosity about all the things you were seeing and experiencing for the first time. Including me. You seemed to know me from the beginning. We lay on the hospital bed, with you on my chest, and we stared at each other for hours. Me memorizing you, this tiny girl with dark hair like mine, this fragile being I’d created. And you trying to understand who this woman was, the mother who’d carried you, the person who would love you forever and do anything to keep you safe.

I treasured our time the way you treasure summer sunshine, with the knowledge that it doesn’t last. Yes, I could dream, plan, fantasize, and imagine all the landmarks we would share as you grew up. First steps. First words. School. Games. Books. Christmases and birthdays. But I’m not the kind of woman who can pretend to herself for very long. Deep down, I already knew the truth. You would experience those things without me.

On the fourth day, I brought you home.

Darrell wanted me to go back to the motel, but I was having none of that. I had my own house and my own bedroom in which to sleep, and your crib was there for you to sleep near me. We were a family. The first night, Darrell pitched a fit until I agreed to have his oldest daughter stay with me, but the next day, I told her to go home. I said I was fine. And I was. I’ve known women who talk about the baby blues, but that wasn’t my experience. Despite what my body had been through, I felt strong. I could deal with all of this myself. The feedings. The waking up. The diaper changings. I knew the exhaustion would hit me eventually, but during those days, I was Rebecca Colder, a little bit stronger, a little bit bolder.

After I sent Darrell’s daughter home, he came back to lecture me. I told him that I loved him, but I was determined to live my life. What I didn’t tell him was that if it came down to protecting my daughter or his, I would choose my own. That was harsh but true. If someone was staying in my house, that was the choice I would have to make sooner or later. So it was better that I stay in the house alone.

We made the most of our time, you and me. Friends and neighbors stocked my fridge and freezer while I was in the hospital, so we had plenty of food. You took to my breasts with ease, much to my relief. You slept better than I had any reason to expect from a newborn, but during those times when we were up together overnight, I would talk to you, just the way I’d been doing for months. I told you my stories. My childhood. My girlhood. My womanhood. The good and the bad. The pain and the loss and the happiness and the mistakes. When you were days old, you already knew things about me that I’d never told another soul.

I read to you. If you were awake, I read to you all the time. Children’s books like Dr. Seuss and Winnie the Pooh and Shel Silverstein. And poetry. Some of it from the Little Golden Book I had as a kid. Some of it just silly poems I made up myself. Where were you when the firefly flew? Were you a firefly too? And classics. I read you classics whether you were awake or asleep. If you find yourself with a strange affinity for Dracula, well, blame that on me.

I sang to you, too. I played my guitar and did my own off-key versions of “Careless Whisper” and “Making Love Out of Nothing at All.” When I did “Radio Ga Ga,” I would poke you in the tummy with every “goo goo” and “ga ga.”

Oh, Shelby.

The love of those days. I crammed so much into those two short weeks. I barely slept, carried along on this strange river of adrenaline, but I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to miss a thing. Not a single expression on your face, not a coo as you dreamed. I filed every second away, carefully wrapped up in my memories.

And then we came to Thursday night, ten days after we’d come home.

Halloween night.

I’d always loved Halloween. I carved up a pumpkin with a scary face, and I put a candle inside, and I set it out on the front porch to flicker and grin at the trick-or-treaters. I got a lot of them. I always did. They would ring my doorbell in their costumes, dressed like monsters, faeries, witches, and clowns. No store-bought costumes in Random; everyone made their own. Same with treats. If you handed out Hershey bars, you were lazy, so people made brownies, cookies, Rice Krispies squares, popcorn balls, coconut candies, and seven-layer bars. Me, I was known for mixing up Chex and M&M’s and nuts and chocolate chips and any other sweet things I had in the pantry. I poured it all into paper lunch bags to hand out.

Of course, some of the kids came with their parents, and they wanted to see you, Shelby. From five o’clock to eight o’clock, the parade came and went, hardly ever stopping for more than a minute or two. Knocks and doorbells, and screams of “Trick or Treat!” and mothers lightly stepping into the living room to tell me how beautiful you were. Which you were, Shelby. Absolutely beautiful.

By the time the candle in the pumpkin had melted down and gone out, and the kids had returned to their homes, I was exhausted with the efforts of the night. It was midevening. I ate a Wonder Bread, Buddig ham sandwich, and I fed you, and we both decided it was time for a nap. You fell asleep in a hand-me-down onesie with pink stripes, in the Easter basket I still kept from the day the doctor had told me I was pregnant. I held your hand, and you grabbed my finger, and I drifted off to sleep on the sofa next to you.

I was twenty-six years old, soon to be turning twenty-seven.

That was the single best moment of my entire life.

Then it was over.

I awoke, and you were gone.

I still had the dizziness of sleep, and my eyes landed first on the clock on the mantel, which told me that it was nearly eleven o’clock. Then I looked down at the little Easter basket with the blissful anticipation of seeing your face, only to find that you weren’t there.

Instantly awake, instantly panicked, I bolted to my feet. “Shelby! Shelby!”

I tore at my black hair. I wept; my nose ran. I shouted, “Who’s there? Hello! Where are you?”

No one answered me.

I called Darrell’s name, praying it was him. Or one of his girls. They’d come in and found me sleeping, and they were with you somewhere else in the house. That was it, right?

But no. I knew that was not it.

Like a madwoman, I ran to the front door, which was still bolted shut. I wrenched it open and ran out to the yard, but the street was empty and dark, and there were no cars nearby. Crazy with fear, I ran back inside and slammed the door so hard the walls trembled.

“Shelby!”

At that instant, I heard you crying. Wailing for me. The noise was muffled; you were upstairs in my bedroom. I sprinted for the stairs, and if I’d been running next to Jesse Owens, I would have beaten him. I took them two at a time and skidded breathlessly into the bedroom, which was lit only by the glow of the moonlight outside. But that was enough for me to see. There was a rocking chair by the window, where we’d spent hours together.

The Ursulina sat in the chair.

The beast had you in its lap, as you shrieked for your mother.

No, I wasn’t dreaming. This was real. The beast had furry legs, golden brown. The fur on its torso didn’t match; instead, it was shorter and more chocolate in color. The hands were wrapped in brown leather gloves. The beast had a strangely elongated neck, and above it, a large head made out of papier-mâché. Where the fur ended at its ankles, I saw dirty black combat boots.

A Halloween costume.

One of the gloved hands tugged at the cardboard neck. A little door opened below the false head, and I saw Ricky’s evil face.

“Boo,” he said.

I ran to get you back, but he put his hands around your little throat and warned me away. “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh. Stay away, Bec.”

“Ricky, stop it. Give her back to me.”

“We’ll see. I don’t know, maybe I’ll keep her.”

“Give her back!” I shouted, adding in a long list of obscenities that I’d rarely used in my life.

Ricky laughed as I swore at him. He held you in the air, letting your tiny legs dangle. “She’s cute. That mop of dark hair. Just like you. The eyes, the nose. So small, too. Hard to believe we ever grow up when we start out as these puny little creatures. Any little mistake, any little accident, and that’s the end.”

“Don’t you hurt her,” I hissed. “Don’t you dare hurt her. If you do anything at all to her, I swear to God I—”

“What?” he retorted. “What will you do to me, Bec?”

I closed my eyes for a moment to get hold of myself. I wiped the tears from my face. “Just don’t hurt her, Ricky. She’s innocent. She never did anything to you. I’m the one you hate.”

“I don’t hate you. You’re my wife.”

I’m not, I wanted to scream, but I held my tongue.

“Besides, I would never hurt my daughter,” he went on casually. He caressed your face with false compassion, his fat fingers on your neck, making me twitch with fear. “I mean, she is mine, isn’t she? My baby. My little girl. She couldn’t be anyone else’s. Right, Bec?” Suddenly, he bellowed at me. “Right?”

I refused to answer him. Even if I knew for sure who your father was, I would never, ever say the words: She’s yours. No. Because you were not his. You would never be his. I would never allow it.

“What do you want?” I asked him, laboring to be calm. “Tell me what you want.”

“You already know what I want. I want my wife back. I want my life back.”

I shook my head in despair. “Why? Why do you want what we had? We were both miserable and unhappy.”

“That was because you didn’t know your place,” he said. His voice rumbled out of his throat like the growl of a mean dog. “Do you know your place now, Bec? Have you finally figured it out? Do you understand why you’ve always been mine?”

“Ricky, please. Just let me have my baby.”

His eyes hardened into ice. “Beg.”

“What?”

“Beg me.”

“Ricky, for God’s sake.”

“Did you not hear what I said? Do you still not get it? I’m in charge. From now on, you do whatever I tell you to do. And what I want you to do is beg.”

I swallowed down my hatred. I felt the horrible years of my marriage rising up in my memory like bile in my throat. All the degradation. Every humiliation I’d endured to keep the peace. I couldn’t go back to that. I wouldn’t. And yet my life was no longer my own. It belonged to you, Shelby. Not him — you.

“Let me have her back,” I whispered. Then I choked out the next words. “I’m begging you.”

“Louder.”

“I’m begging you.”

“Get on your knees.” He added with a snicker, “You were always best on your knees.”

“Ricky, please—”

“On your knees. If I say something, you do it! Do you understand me?”

I was crying, furious, desperate, helpless. Rage welled up inside me like an animal consuming my soul, but I did what he wanted. I had no choice. Slowly, I slid to my knees. I put my hands together, as if I were praying. “Give me my little girl. I’ll do whatever you say. Just give her back to me.”

“That’s more like it. That’s the wife I remember.”

He extended his arms, which were robed in fake mink fur, and offered you up like a gift from the king. I scrambled to my feet and swept you away from him. I folded you up in my chest and held you and kissed you and cried with relief. With you back in my arms, all was right with the world again.

Ricky stood up from the rocking chair. He snapped the little door shut in his costume, closing off his face, leaving only his eyes barely visible through dark mesh. What was left was a bizarre caricature of the monster, seven feet tall, with mismatched fur top and bottom, and red eyes and sharp teeth painted onto the papier-mâché head. It was so false, so fake. And yet the whole effect of it was terrifying enough to make me feel as if I were ten years old again.

“Be at the party at the 126 on Saturday,” he said.

“What?”

“I want everyone to see we’re together again.”

“I can’t go. I have Shelby.”

“Find someone to watch her.”

“I’m not going—” I insisted, prepared to shut him down, but then I stopped. I didn’t dare set him off again, not when he was acting like — like a monster. “All right. Fine. If that’s what you want, I’ll be there.”

“Good.”

He towered over me in the corner. His gloved hand reached out like a paw to stroke under your chin. I shrank back, trying to shield you, but I was up against the wall and had nowhere to go. You began to cry again, afraid of his touch. He drew his hand back and curled it into a fist, and for a moment, I thought he might strike me. Or do something worse.

“He bragged about it, you know,” Ricky snarled.

“Who?”

“Ajax.”

My stomach churned with fear. “Ajax? What about him? What are you talking about?”

“I called him. He bragged about you carrying his baby.”

I stared back at Ricky, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Except yes, I really could.

“Ajax? Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? I never slept with Ajax! How many times do I have to tell you that?”

“It’s too late to lie, Bec. Ajax found that out.”

“Oh my God! Oh shit! Ricky, what did you do?”

“I warned him,” he replied. Even though I couldn’t see it behind the mask, I heard the sadistic grin in his voice. “I warned him, but he didn’t believe I was serious. I told him the Ursulina was coming to get him.”

“Jesus Christ, Ricky. You idiot.”

“It’s better this way. We have a clean slate without him. I’m willing to forgive you, despite everything. You broke your vow, but with Ajax gone, we can start over. You, me, and our baby girl.”

“You killed him! You killed him for nothing! It was you!”

Ricky shook his head. His eyes gleamed with a strange, unshakable confidence. “But you’re not going to say anything, are you? Everyone knows who really killed Ajax. It was written on the wall. Just like all the others. It wasn’t me. It was a terrible, vicious, savage beast.”

Nausea made my stomach lurch. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Oh, I know exactly what I’m saying. Believe me.” Ricky raised his arms high over his head and curled his fingers like claws. He bent down, and he shoved that horrible monster face into my own. I heard the noise of his breath. Hufffffff.

“You, see, I have what the whole world has been looking for,” he went on. “Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch. I have what all the monster hunters are dying to see. And the sheriff, too. I have a picture of the Ursulina.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When dawn came, I bundled you up in a little coat and put the tiniest hat on your head. I wrapped you in a blanket to keep you warm. Then I put you in your car seat, and the two of us drove to the Fair Day resort. The early morning was crisp and cold, the kind of chill you can feel like needles inside your nose. It was below freezing. Out on the lake, a gray film of ice waited to melt with the sun.

I saw the yellow Cadillac in the parking lot, so I knew Ben Malloy was still there. I didn’t know which cabin was his, but I nestled you inside my jacket, and I crunched across the frosty grass from door to door until I found one that had a smell of pipe tobacco wafting from inside. I knocked.

Ben answered the door in sky-blue pajamas. His cherubic face lit up through a cloud of smoke when he saw me. “Deputy Rebecca! This is an unexpected pleasure. And little deputy Shelby with you, too! I’m honored.”

“I’m sorry to come so early, Ben.”

“Oh, I’m typically up at five, so this really isn’t early to me. I still have lots of publicity details to deal with for tomorrow’s broadcast. Are you going to be at the party, by the way?”

“Yes, it looks that way.”

“I hope so. Put Shelby in a costume. An Ursulittle to go along with all the Ursulinas.”

I tried to smile, but I couldn’t. To Ben, this was a big joke, a carnival like Ursulina Days in Mittel County. To me, this was my life falling apart, crumbling down. I could already see the future, and it made me want to rip my heart out. Ben must have noticed the distress on my face, because he unclamped his lips from around his pipe, and his eyebrows knitted together with concern.

“Are you all right, Rebecca?”

I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell anyone.

“I need a favor, Ben.”

“Of course. What is it?”

“You said you had raw footage from seven years ago stored in your mother’s attic. All the film you took during the Ursulina hunt near Sunflower Lake, the parts that didn’t make it into the documentary. Is that true?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“I need to see it. Can you arrange that?”

Ben shrugged. “Sure, that isn’t a problem. When would you like to do it?”

“Now.”

“Now? You mean today?”

“Yes. This minute. I’d like to go over there right now. I’m sorry, but it’s urgent. Is that possible?”

He looked thoughtful as he drew out his words. “It is.”

“I know this is an imposition. You’re very busy. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“Well, okay then, let’s go. I have an old projector in the attic, so it’s not hard to set up. My mother will keep you supplied with coffee and muffins, too, as long as you don’t mind banana-nut-cat-hair. You do realize, though, that we’re talking about hours of unedited film? If you’re looking for something specific, it may take a while to find. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, no order, no dates, no labels.”

“I understand.”

He sucked on his pipe again. “You’re being very mysterious.”

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you can’t tell me what’s wrong? You may not believe it, but I can be discreet when necessary. I also have a weakness for pretty young women in trouble. Can I help you?”

My face was dark. “No one can help me.”

For a moment, my remark left him speechless. “Well, give me five minutes to change, and then we’ll be on our way.”

“Thank you, Ben.”

While he changed, I took you down to the lakeshore. I watched the morning glow on the water and listened to the honking of the geese. My breath made little puffs of steam. I held you close to me and kissed your head and your pink cheeks and murmured over and over how much I loved you. I didn’t even realize it until I wiped my face, but I was crying.

Ben was true to his word. Five minutes later, he opened the door with a flourish, dressed in a white turtleneck and plaid sport coat, with pleated tan slacks and penny loafers. He marched across the grass to the resort parking lot and hopped inside the yellow Cadillac. You and I followed him in my car. We drove all the way across Black Wolf County to one of the other small towns tucked among the trees. He parked outside a century-old Victorian house, neatly painted in red and white.

I’d never met Mrs. Malloy. She was tall and heavy and looked a lot like her son, but she was as dour as Ben was cheerful. Her expression didn’t change as he said hello, and her eyes traveled over me with grim disapproval. Even you didn’t lighten her mood, Shelby. However, she poured hot coffee for me, and after I fished out a cat hair, I was glad to have the caffeine.

Ben and I took the stairs to the second floor. Then he led me to what felt like a secret staircase climbing into one of the house’s turrets. The tower had a circular wall and windows looking out in every direction, with a roof that rose to a conical point above us. The wooden floor was dusty, littered by a few dead bugs. Spiderwebs dangled in the shadows. There was nothing much up here but cardboard boxes. Ben seemed to know exactly where to look, and he dug among the boxes and found one in particular, which he carried over to me.

Inside was a Super 8 projector and a stack of more than two dozen silver film canisters. He dragged over another box and propped the projector on top of it and plugged the cord into what seemed to be the only electrical outlet up here. He took the first of the film cans and showed me how to feed it through the machine. Then he retreated to the wall of boxes and located a white screen, which he unfolded and set up. The windows had heavy curtains, and he shut them, leaving the room mostly dark.

“There, you’re good to go,” he told me. “When you’re done with one, you can move on to the next. These are all four-hundred-foot reels, so each one lasts about twenty minutes. Stay as long as you want.”

“Are you heading back to the resort?” I asked.

“No, I’ll stick around for a while. I haven’t been to see Mom in a few days, so I owe her a visit. I can make phone calls while I’m here.”

“Don’t stay on my account.”

“Well, I’ll check on you in a bit, and I’ll let you know if I need to leave.”

“Thank you again, Ben. I really appreciate it.”

“In the end, will you tell me what this is all about?” he asked.

I hesitated and told him what I believed to be the truth. “In the end, you’ll know.”

He frowned as he left, and I heard him descending the stairs with heavy footsteps. I was alone with hours of film. I looked around for a chair and saw one near the back wall, so I pulled it across the floor. It was a recliner that had seen better days, but it was comfortable. I’d brought the old Easter basket with me, so I situated you in the basket beside the chair. You were already asleep, and you didn’t wake up.

I turned on the projector, listening to its clickety-clack as I watched empty white frames click through the screen. Then, with a rush of color, I was back in the past. Seven years of life melted away. I saw the beach near Sunflower Lake, the pines, the flaky birches, the summer light glinting on the water. Dozens of volunteers in shorts, T-shirts, and bathing suits tramped through the woods at the fringe of the beach, wearing orange baseball hats that Ben had produced, which read: URSULINA HUNTER. Some wore backpacks; some carried buckets. Most were in their teens or twenties.

Seven years earlier. More than a quarter of my life.

Ben had operated the camera himself. He turned the camera around, showing his face in close-up. He looked younger, too, less gray hair, a little thinner, but still with the pipe between his lips. He gave the camera a dramatic stare, rattled off the early August date, and announced in crackling sound, “This is Ben Malloy in Black Wolf County. It has been two weeks since the Ursulina committed these horrific murders. This is our third day of searching the woods for any evidence that the beast left behind. Will today be the day that we find proof of the monster’s existence?”

From there, the film passed from one choppy scene to the next. Ben interviewed searchers about the horror stories they’d heard of the Ursulina growing up, and they recited some of the tall tales I remembered from when I was a girl. He asked people if they’d ever seen the Ursulina themselves. No one had, but they told stories of noises and grunts in the darkness, of a friend of a friend of a friend who’d seen a strange beast walking upright, of men who went out to hunt in the forest and were never seen again. A couple of the scenes — five seconds here, ten seconds there — had shown up in the original documentary on television. I remembered them.

Some of the searchers called Ben over to view what they’d found. The camera zoomed in on paw prints (they were bears’), giant scat (bears again), and a bloody scene of bones and fur that looked like a wolf kill. With every find, Ben offered breathless commentary that suggested they were on the brink of tracking down the Ursulina’s lair. He was a showman at heart.

I finished off one reel and switched to another. Then another. I emptied my coffee and went downstairs to get another cup. I tried one of the cat-hair muffins. When you woke up and cried, I changed you. At one point, because I was exhausted, my eyes drifted shut while the film was playing, and I had to rewind and watch it again. The whole morning passed that way, reel after reel. I knew I was looking for a needle in a haystack, without even knowing whether the needle was there at all. And yet I kept going.

Along the way, I spotted a few people I recognized. High school friends. Mine workers. A lot of beer got drunk; a lot of practical jokes got pulled. You could see the Ursulina myth taking on a life of its own the longer the search went on. The stories got more lurid; the claims got wilder and harder to believe.

During what was probably the ninth or tenth reel, I saw myself. It was just for a few seconds. We weren’t far from Norm’s Airstream, because I could see its silver frame through the trees. Ben was interviewing an old man who said his grandfather had told him of seeing the Ursulina come down to the beach under a monster’s moon, while he was in a fishing boat in the middle of the inlet. According to the man’s grandfather, he and the beast had stared at each other for almost an entire minute before the Ursulina turned around and stomped back into the woods and vanished.

In the midst of this story, I passed behind the old man. I didn’t look at the camera, but it was me, with my scraggly black hair and pale face. I was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt that I’d left untucked. My eyes were glued to the ground as I used a cross-country ski pole to push through the undergrowth and find whatever might be hidden there. I went across the screen from left to right in a few seconds, and then I was gone. I’d been on the search the first day, and I’d come back on the second and third days, too. Like everybody else, I’d found nothing.

Sometime after noon, Ben came upstairs to check on me. He carried a whiff of his pipe smell with him.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Mom’s got leftover hotdish in the oven. It’s better on the second day.”

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

“Are you warm enough? I can get you a blanket.”

“No, I’m okay.”

Ben glanced at the screen. This was a nighttime reel, black trees dotted by lanterns, the camera whipping around at every sound. The interviews were conducted in hushed voices.

“You know, if you gave me a clue of what you were looking for, I might be able to help you find it,” Ben told me. “I’ve been through these reels dozens of times over the years. I always think maybe I missed something important. By now, I think I’ve memorized most of them.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I need to do this myself.”

“Well, whatever you say. Anyway, I came up here to say I need to leave. I’m going to drop by the 126 and make sure everything’s ready for the party tomorrow. Are you okay to stay here on your own? Mom will leave you alone.”

“Yes — thanks.”

“Okay then. Bye for now.”

He returned to the doorway, but then he stopped. “Rebecca, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’m still convinced you’ve seen the Ursulina.”

I didn’t answer.

He gave me a curious smile, and then he disappeared again. I stopped the playback, and I went to one of the windows that looked down on the street, and pushed aside the curtain. Not long after, I saw Ben go outside. He went to his Cadillac, but before he opened the door, he glanced up at the turret, as if he knew I’d be watching him. He put his finger to his forehead in a little salute. I put up a hand. No smile, just a wave.

I sat down in the recliner again. You’d begun to get restless, so I picked you up and rocked you in my arms. I turned on the projector again, and I finished the nighttime reel and went on to the next one. The stack of canisters in the box shrank as the day wore on, and I was beginning to believe that I wouldn’t find what I was looking for. I knew it was a shot in the dark anyway.

But with only four reels left, there he was.

I found him at the beginning of a reel from the first day. Ben was giving his introduction about the date and time of the hunt, and a man passed behind him, grinning over Ben’s shoulder. He was there and gone in a blink. If you didn’t look fast, you’d miss it.

Ricky.

I had to rewind the film to make sure what I’d seen. Then I rewound again. And then again. I must have watched that scene two dozen times before I turned off the projector, and each time felt like a lightning bolt searing my brain.

I wanted to see if he was carrying it, and he was.

Of course he was.

Ricky held a leather strap, swinging it as he walked. At the end of the strap was a camera.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

That was my darkest day, Shelby.

When I saw the camera in Ricky’s hands, I knew he was the one who’d put the photograph on Ruby’s door. I knew he wasn’t lying about the Ursulina. Or about what he’d done to Ajax. I realized at that moment that there was no safe place for us in Black Wolf County. You were in mortal danger from him, and you always would be. That was when I made my decision. The thought of it suffocated me with grief, but I was a mother, and I did what a mother had to do.

I sacrificed myself to save you.

That afternoon, I drove to Sunflower Lake. I sat in the parking lot where I’d found Tom Ginn in January and thought back to that night. I remembered what it was like to be in his arms. I thought about hearing his voice on the phone again when Darrell called him. I felt a surge of emotion about what might have been. In my life I’ve known very few good men, but Tom was one. He is yours, and you are his, Shelby. I don’t care what genetics may or may not say.

You have only one father.

I spent hours by the lake that afternoon with you. I prayed for time to stand still, because I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want to let go. I talked to you and sang to you. I pointed out the birds when I saw them and the rabbits and squirrels when they crept onto the beach. I plucked the colored leaves from the autumn trees and tickled your face with them. I told you how much I loved you, how much I would always love you, how every single moment of every single day, you would still be in my life, even if I wasn’t in yours.

The whole time, I held you, and I sobbed. I cried for everything I was going to miss, and I cried for the things I couldn’t give you. I cursed all the events that had led me to that moment and wished I could change them, but finally, I realized I was wrong to think that way. If fate had gone differently, you wouldn’t be in my life at all, and I wouldn’t have traded you for anything. So I had to make peace with how I’d gotten there. I had to tell myself that the end, the point of it all, the meaning behind the suffering, was you.

You made it worthwhile.

It was a beautiful, blissful afternoon, Shelby, but all good things must end. As the sun set, as darkness crept across the lake, I put you back in the car seat, and I began to drive. You know where I went. I drove and drove in a kind of perfect peace and stillness. We had a long way to go, the two of us, along empty highways, past empty forestland, with the monster’s moon shining overhead. But I knew where to go and what I had to do.

And when it was done, I returned home the next day. My plan of action was clear. There was no going back. I went to my house for what I knew would be the last time. I slept on the sofa for a while, to get my strength back, but I really didn’t sleep much at all. When I did, I had my usual nightmares.

Night had already fallen when I awoke. It was time for the party at the 126.

Time to meet Ricky.

It took me a while, digging in the closet, to find the hat Ben had given me seven years earlier, along with all the other volunteers who were searching in the forest. I still had it.

URSULINA HUNTER.

I wanted to send Ricky a message by wearing it, and I was sure he’d understand.

I know.

Then I drove to the 126.

Everyone was there, seemingly the whole county crammed shoulder to shoulder. There were half a dozen televisions mounted around the bar, all of them tuned to NBC. The documentary would be starting in half an hour, but I saw commercials for it. Ben Malloy Discovers: The Return of the Ursulina. The promos featured quick clips of Ben using words like murder, monster, and blood, plus fake footage of a beast’s hairy legs tramping through the forest.

Some people wore recycled Halloween costumes from Thursday evening, but most had come as Ursulinas, short and tall, thin and fat, silly and scary. The 126 had been transformed into a bizarre, drunken zoo, filled with people letting out beastly growls. Ben himself stood on a makeshift stage with a microphone in hand, clapping and egging them on as he paced restlessly back and forth.

I looked for Ricky among the monsters. With his papier-mâché head and long, thick neck, he’d be easy to find, but I didn’t see him yet. Instead, I found Sandra, who was obviously going after the prize for sexiest Ursulina, because she wore a fur bikini, along with fur boots and a shaggy wig. She was drinking hard stuff that night, whiskey on the rocks, and she had a pack of cigarettes jutting out of her bikini top.

“Hey, you,” she said to me. I heard a looseness in her voice, and I suspected the whiskey wasn’t her first.

“Hey.”

“Two weeks after you deliver, and you look like that. It kills me.”

“Thanks.”

“Where’s Shelby?”

I’d been prepared for that question. I had a lie ready. “One of my neighbors offered to babysit.”

“I’m impressed that you were able to leave her so soon.”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I changed the subject, because if I didn’t, I was going to cry all over again.

“Hey, Sandra? I want you to know I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“All the things Darrell said to you.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry about that. Ever since, rumors have been getting around that I’m the killer. Now the men at the mine are afraid of me. I love it.”

“Still, I feel bad.”

Sandra cocked her head as she looked at me. “You okay, honey?”

“I’m fine,” I said, lying again.

“The early weeks are tough. I know.”

“Yeah, that must be it.”

She drained her whiskey and then patted my cheek and left me alone. Around me, everyone else was having a good time. Drinking. Laughing. Growling. My own dark eyes kept probing the bar, going from monster to monster. I wondered if Darrell was here somewhere, but I knew this wasn’t his scene. It was better that way. There would only be trouble if he came.

Then I felt a paw on my shoulder.

When I turned around, I saw the cartoonish face painted on the head, the fake mismatched fur top and bottom.

“You’re here,” Ricky said, with a little surprise.

“You told me to be here,” I replied evenly. “I do what you tell me now. Isn’t that our deal?”

“Good girl. Where’s the kid?”

“She’s safe.”

That answer made him pause, as if my dull voice were broadcasting a kind of alarm. But Ricky was Ricky, and he didn’t let it trouble him for long. “This is good, you know. You and me back together. I’ve missed you, Bec.”

“Sure you have.”

“We should celebrate later,” he said. “Celebrate like man and wife.”

“Sure we will.”

I couldn’t muster any false emotion on my face to reinforce the lie. I was beyond anger, beyond regret, beyond humiliation. I’d already done the worst thing I could possibly do in my life, so what was left?

“Let’s surprise them,” Ricky suggested. “Come on, I can’t wait to see their faces.”

His gloved hands went to his neck, where he peeled away the tape that held the cardboard neck in place. He reached up and removed the balloon-shaped head and pried off the cardboard tube at the same time. With the mask gone, his face was revealed. My ex-husband stood in front of me.

Everyone in the bar saw him. He was right about the reaction. An uncomfortable quiet spread through the 126 like the ripples of a wave in the water. Then the low murmurs began all around us.

Ricky.

People headed our way immediately, zeroing in on us. Sandra got there first. I had to insert myself between them, because she was on the verge of launching a drunken assault. She shoved her face over my shoulder and bellowed her disgust at Ricky.

“You! What do you think you’re doing here? I can’t believe you’d have the balls to show your face in this town again. Get the hell out before the cops throw your sorry ass in jail.”

Ricky just smiled, using that smile that was more like a sneer. He’d used it on me that very first day at the high school football game when we met. Back then, I’d had no idea what it really meant. All those years since then, and I’d never guessed the truth, never guessed what he was concealing from me.

“Didn’t you hear the good news, Sandra?” Ricky told her. “Bec and I have reconciled.”

She unleashed a curse of disbelief. “Bullshit. That’s bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

Sandra turned her attention to me with her face just inches from mine. “Say the word, honey, and ten men will toss this asshole out to the street.”

Ricky draped a paw around my shoulder. “Don’t be like that, Sandra. Be happy for us. I’ve apologized, and Bec’s forgiven me. We were both wrong. We both did things we regret. The main thing is, we have a child now, and we have to put her first.”

Sandra stared at me with a mix of anger and horror. “Honey, you can’t be serious. You cannot take him back.”

I took a deep breath. “It’s okay, Sandra.”

“Okay? Are you kidding? What’s wrong with you?”

“Leave it. Please.”

But Sandra wasn’t the only one in the bar trying to rescue me. Norm came up to me, too. “Rebecca? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Has Ricky hurt you in any way?”

I shook my head. “No. He hasn’t.”

“Ricky, you need to leave,” Norm told him in a firm voice. “You’re not welcome here. Not after what you did.”

“I think that’s up to Rebecca, don’t you?” Ricky replied confidently, not intimidated by the crowd gathered around us, half of whom were dressed like monsters. “What do you say, Bec? Should I stay or go?”

My face must have looked like the rigid papier-mâché mask that he’d worn. “You can stay.”

Sandra swore again, more loudly than before, and Norm’s eyes narrowed with shocked surprise. He stared at me as if I must be a robot operated by remote control, with Ricky pushing the buttons and telling me what to say.

“Rebecca, did Ricky threaten you in any way? Or did he threaten Shelby?”

“No.”

His face darkened with a new thought. “Where is Shelby?”

“Safe,” I said.

“Safe where?”

“She’s safe,” I repeated.

Sandra looked ready to spit. “That’s it. I’m calling Darrell.”

“No.” I grabbed hold of her wrist. “No, don’t do that. It’s fine. Really.”

“It’s not fine. You’re not fine.”

“This is my choice.”

“She just told you she’s fine, Sandra,” Ricky interjected. “It’s time for you to mind your own business for once in your life and leave my wife alone.”

“Rebecca is not your wife anymore,” Norm pointed out.

“That’s up to her, not some piece-of-shit lawyer like you.”

Norm shook his head. His eyes pleaded with me to take a different road. “Rebecca, this man has no control over you. You owe him nothing. He’s not your husband. All you have to do is say the word, and Darrell will take him to jail.”

“That’s not what I want.”

“Rebecca!” Norm went on, his frustration boiling over. I hadn’t seen him lose control like that very often. “Have you forgotten what this man did to you?”

Just for an instant, my eyes smoldered. “I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

I wanted to say: For Shelby. That was the reason. That was the one and only reason. Everything in my whole life was about you. But there was no way for me to explain.

Instead, I looked at Ricky and said, “Let’s get out of here. I don’t care about the show. Take me away from here.”

“You heard her,” Ricky announced to the crowd. “My wife says we’re leaving.”

He took my hand in a tight grip. As we headed for the door of the 126, a path parted slowly, just wide enough for the two of us to get through. Sandra, Norm, and others followed right behind. When we reached the door and Ricky opened it, Sandra called after me.

“Rebecca, do not leave with him. Honey, please. Stay here.”

I froze in the doorway and looked over my shoulder at her. My face was stricken. A part of me wanted to stay, but it was too late for that. A part of me wanted to explain, but I couldn’t do that, either. I opened my mouth to say goodbye, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything at all.

Someone screamed. Not in the bar. On the television. The introduction to Ben’s new documentary began with the sound of a woman screaming, making my flesh ripple. Then we heard Ben’s dramatic voice filling the silence of the room.

“I’m Ben Malloy. Seven years ago, I brought you to a remote place called Black Wolf County, where a murderous beast known as the Ursulina had ripped apart the flesh of two men in a savage attack. Ever since that awful day, the people in this area have lived their lives in terror, wondering when the monster would return. Well, last December, they got their answer. The Ursulina came back... to kill again.”

I didn’t need to hear any more.

Ricky and I left the bar together.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Where are we going?” I asked Ricky as we drove.

He stayed on the arrow-straight highway, leaving Random far behind us. We continued under the moon’s glow, and snow flurries fell from the cold night sky. After a while, I guessed what our destination was, and I said nothing more. Honestly, it felt right to go there, like the end and the beginning of my story coming together in the same place.

It took us an hour to reach Norm’s trailer. I could sense my stress rising as we got closer. My heart always felt it, like a shadow coming over my soul. We traveled first on the highway, then on the rutted dirt road through the national forest. Eventually, I saw the familiar glint of the silver frame through the headlights. Ricky pulled off the road onto a bed of fallen leaves and stopped. I could see in the tire tracks that he’d been coming and going for several weeks.

“You’ve been staying here?” I asked.

“Yeah. Ironic, huh?”

“Weren’t you afraid Norm would find out?”

“A buddy of mine rented it from Norm for a couple of months. Told him he was having trouble with the wife, and they needed time apart. So we have our privacy here, don’t worry. It’s just you and me.”

I got out of the car. Ricky headed straight for the trailer, but I lingered by the woods. Somewhere nearby, I heard the hoot of an owl, like a sign, like a warning. When I’d been ten years old, an owl had tried to alert me that the Ursulina was close by. That I was in danger. I inhaled, to see if I could smell the beast. I listened for the hufffffff. There was nothing. But I could feel its presence looming over me, the way I had that night near Sunflower Lake. If I plunged into the darkness, I was sure I would find it, or it would find me. We would be reunited, the monster and the girl. In my heart, we’d been inseparable ever since that moment. The two of us joined together by blood.

I followed Ricky inside the trailer. My chest convulsed with terror when I closed the trailer door, as if no time had passed. It was seven years ago again. I was right back where everything had started.

Ricky sat on the bed. He didn’t turn on the lights, so he was nothing but a dim shadow. He still wore the fur coat, the fur pants; he still looked like the beast, waiting for me. The trailer floor creaked under my feet as I walked toward him. He patted the bed, which was unmade, and I sat down beside him.

This was my moment of truth.

I’m sorry, Shelby. I wish I could keep this from you forever. I’ve held back my secret from you, and maybe that was wrong of me. Maybe I should have told you at the beginning — told you who I am and what I did — but then what? I couldn’t expect you to understand it until you knew me. Until you knew my whole story.

But now?

Now I have to tell you who your mother really is. You can decide for yourself if there is any salvation possible for someone like me.

I stared at Ricky. It was obvious what he wanted to hear, and there was no point in holding it back anymore. It was time to say out loud what we’d both known and both kept from each other.

“So you knew all along that I killed them,” I said. “You knew when you met me that I was the one who murdered Kip and Racer.”

There was enough moonlight through the window for me to see his white teeth.

“Yeah. That was part of the thrill.”

I stood up from the bed. I had to swallow down the urge to vomit, hearing my own confession. For seven years, I’d hidden my sins from the world. I’d lied to Darrell. I’d lied to everyone. I’d lived in terror of being discovered. And all along, the whole time, Ricky knew.

He’d found my camera.

“Where are the rest of the photographs?” I asked, with a kind of clinical curiosity. “I want to see them.”

“They’re in the cabinet over the sink.”

I went and turned on the small light there, and then I opened the cabinet door. There was a small envelope of pictures on the lowest shelf, next to a dated thirty-five-millimeter camera. I grazed my fingers across its familiar frame.

It was the camera that I’d seen in Ricky’s hand in the film I’d watched at Ben Malloy’s house.

The same camera I’d used to take the photograph of Gordon Brink, Kip Wells, and Racer Moritz seven years earlier.

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.

He glanced at the other two men and said simply, “Get her.”

I ran.

I screamed for help, but no one was around to hear me, not out there. I beat my way through the woods, the branches drawing blood, the vines tripping me up. Behind me, I heard their footsteps trampling through the underbrush like beasts, like monsters. I ran even faster, to get away, to lose them. Somewhere, I don’t know where, the limb of a tree ripped my camera away from my neck. It dropped; I just kept running. I zigzagged, changing directions when I heard them getting closer. Desperation drove me on. Maybe I would have gotten away, because I was young and fast, but my foot hit the bulge of a tree root, which flipped me into the air. I landed hard, twisting my ankle, and when I got up again, I couldn’t run anymore. I limped for a while until it got too painful to move, and then I squatted down and tried to hide, but they found me.

The men came at me from two sides, and they had me trapped. They tied me up with belts around my wrists and ankles. Gagged me with one of their shirts. Hit me in the face, the first of many blows. And then they carried me, struggling and fighting, on their shoulders like trophy game. The other man was waiting at the trailer.

“Kill her,” he directed them, with a hard, casual glance at my face. “Bury her where no one will find the body.”

But the one holding my legs — later, I’d find out that was Kip — laughed at him. I remember his exact words. “Just like that? Juicy Fruit like this one? No way, man. First we play.”

First we play.

That was what they did, Shelby.

For the next thirty-six hours, they played with me. A day and a half. They played. More than two thousand minutes, each minute making me wish I were dead. They played. I was Juicy Fruit, and they chewed me up. They tied me to the bed, moving me when they wanted to change the game. Faceup. Facedown. On all fours. On my knees. They took turns. Kip. Racer. And the third man. Gordon Brink. He played, too.

I was a virgin when they carried me inside. Soon I wasn’t a virgin or a girl or a woman or even a human being anymore. I became an animal, and I did what animals do. I survived. I distanced myself from the body on the bed. She was not me. She was weak, a victim. I dug a hole for my emotions, and I buried them and shoveled dirt over their grave. The only thing still alive inside me was my brain. The brain of Rebecca Colder, stronger and bolder.

Rebecca Colder, who would watch them, study them, learn from them, find their vulnerabilities. Rebecca Colder, who would figure out how to stay alive.

Racer was the weak link. I realized that quickly. Brink was intelligent, Kip was sly, but Racer was stupid. He drank and drank from the dozens of liquor bottles in the trailer. He smoked weed until the cloud made me choke. He had a hundred pounds on me, so I couldn’t overpower him, but he was impatient and careless. When he was the one who tied me up, he didn’t get the knots right. That didn’t matter if all of them were in the trailer to watch me, but if I had a time when Racer was alone with me, then I had a chance.

Thirty-six hours later, Kip and Brink got ready to leave. Brink was done with me, done with the game. I’d seen something on his face the last time he raped me that made me realize he’d begun to hate himself for what was happening. He wanted out. He wanted to erase me and this whole experience from his memory. Whenever Kip got back, that would be the end. If Rebecca Colder was going to get away, it would have to be while they were gone.

So in the darkness, after they left, it was just me and Racer.

He had his way with me again. I no longer even cared, because I knew that when he was done, he would drink. He always did. He drank and drank and drank and drank, and I waited for him to pass out. But the minutes ticked by in agonized frustration, and somehow he stayed conscious. I was terrified that Kip would return, and my opportunity would be gone for good. If Racer stayed awake much longer, I’d have to slip my wrists out of the loose rope and hope that he was clumsy enough that I could evade him. But the trailer was small, and he was huge. I didn’t like my chances.

Then, at last, his head tilted back, his eyes blinked shut, and he was out cold.

I freed myself quickly. It took only seconds, because Racer had barely even tightened the knots this time. Silently, I got up from the bed, feeling torture in my body from everything they’d done to me. The trailer groaned with each step I made, so I went slowly, trying not to awaken Racer. I didn’t have to worry. I slipped right past him, and he never moved at all. His snores were like blasts from a trumpet.

Ahead of me was the trailer door. Beyond the door was the forest, the night, and my freedom. All I had to do was gather up my clothes and go through it, and I would be gone.

But I didn’t leave.

I’m not sure if I can even explain what happened to me next. There were dirty plates in the sink from their dinner, and among the plates I saw a long, sharp kitchen knife. I took it in my hand. I wanted a weapon, because as soon as they discovered I was gone, they’d lay chase. Or at least, that was what I told myself. But as I held the knife, a sensation came over me that was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. A murderous fury bubbled out of that hole in which I’d buried my soul, like a hot spring. I was not weak. I was not a victim. I would not run away from this man, tail between my legs. Standing there in the trailer, I felt myself grow bigger. Taller. Stronger. My breaths came hot and deep from my chest, and when I exhaled, I recognized the smell of the beast from when I was a girl. When I looked at my fingers, I didn’t see my own tiny hands anymore. I saw giant paws.

And when I looked at Racer, I saw prey.

You may not believe any of this. I don’t know if I believe it myself, except it happened to me, and I know it’s true. I was not Rebecca Colder anymore. I had transformed into a monster, just like the legend said. I had become the Ursulina. And with a fierce growl, I leaped upon Racer with the knife, stabbing and stabbing, his blood spurting and flying, soaking me, covering the walls. He awoke in agony after the first blow and tried to push me away, but this huge man was helpless beneath my body. My paws went up and down, up and down, burying the knife over and over until there wasn’t enough blood left for his heart to beat anymore.

When I was done, I stood over him, drenched in his blood, and I unleashed a savage, primal, aroused scream of joy.

I could have left the trailer then.

I could have escaped.

But there was more prey to be killed. More vengeance to be done. I stood motionless in the darkness behind the trailer door, and I waited patiently. How long did I stand there? An hour? Two? I could have waited for days if I’d needed to. Then, finally, I heard footsteps crunching in the dirt outside. The door opened, and Kip was back. He had only a split second to see the gory scene that was waiting for him before I struck. My knife rained down on him like a hailstorm, and the more blood that drained out of him, the wilder I became. Until he was dead, too. Until all that was left to do was sign my name on the wall.

To let everyone know who I was.

To make them tremble in fear.

Outside, afterward, I marched into the woods. I made my way to the lake and purified myself in the cold water. When I emerged naked onto the shore, I was Rebecca Colder again. The beast had left me. I barely even remembered what I’d done. I found my way back to the place where I’d parked my car, and I drove home. I had no guilt. No regret. There was nothing to tie me to the murder scene. No one had known where I was going. No one had known I was gone.

It was only when I awoke from a dreamless sleep that I remembered my camera.

The thought of it panicked me. If someone found the camera, the pictures I’d taken would show the world who the Ursulina really was. So I went back to the killing ground to search. Norm hadn’t found the bodies yet, and when I saw the trailer again, I felt a wave of horror knowing what was inside, as if the ghosts of the corpses would rise up and surround me. I wasted no time. I looked everywhere, I spent hours, but I had no idea where I’d dropped the camera. There was simply too much ground to cover.

So I sweated out the next few weeks, terrified that someone else would find it and that my secret would be revealed. But no. The knock on my door never came. Even after deputies went through the woods. Even after Ben’s Ursulina hunt with all his volunteers. No one showed up to arrest me. As the time went by, I began to believe I was safe.

I never dreamed when I met Ricky that he’d already found the camera, developed the film, and decided to collect me like a rare breed of carnivorous butterfly. He found me at a time when I needed to pretend that I was still an ordinary woman, not a killer, not a beast. I needed to punish myself for what I’d done. So no matter what Ricky did or said to me, I kept the Ursulina locked away as the sentence for my crime.

That was my life for six years. A gray, loveless life that probably would have gone on forever.

Until Gordon Brink came back to town.

Until the Ursulina came back.

At that point, sweetheart, I had no idea who Brink was. My mind had a face, but no name. And obviously, Brink was terrified of running into me. I can only imagine the horror he’d felt when Ajax told him about the murders. He’d assumed that Kip and Racer had buried me in the forest along with his sins. Instead, he knew there was a woman in Black Wolf County burning for vengeance, a woman who would never forget his face.

Maybe, if not for the pig’s blood dousing his wife, he and I never would have met again. She called the sheriff’s department without telling Gordon, and I was the one Jerry sent to investigate. Fate. When we saw each other, he didn’t miss the surge of violence on my face, the shock that became blinding rage. He knew I’d be back for him. He knew. That Sunday before Christmas, while the town and my husband were at the 126 watching Jamie Lee Curtis take off her shirt, I was knocking on Gordon Brink’s office door out in the woods.

He was no fool. He had a gun, because he assumed I was there to do to him what I’d done to Kip and Racer. It was kill or be killed. But I tried to put him at ease. I told him that too much time had gone by, that neither one of us wanted the truth to come out. I said I was there so we could come to some kind of arrangement. Money. A lot of money. I suggested we drink on it.

As he poured the whiskey, I hit him in the back of the head.

When he was unconscious, I dragged him to the bed. I could feel the beast in my bloodstream, putting me into a kind of fugue where I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing. When I awoke from my transformation, I was soaked in blood, the meat shredders in my hands. Gordon Brink lay on the bed with the look of someone who’d seen the face of hell before dying.

The message from the beast was already painted on the wall.

In that moment, Shelby, I thought — I swear I thought — I was free. It was over. Done. I’d purged the beast. The past was the past, and it had given up its grip on me. But of course, no evil deed comes without consequences.

There was a horrific price to be paid for my revenge, a bloody trail of grief, loss, and death that followed in my footsteps. Will paid the price. Jay paid the price. Even Ajax did, though that one was by Ricky’s hands, not mine. And in a way, Ruby, Penny, and so many others, they all paid for what I did, too.

So did you, Shelby.

You most of all.

In the end, the Ursulina claimed us both.

Chapter Forty

I waited until the Xanax did its work.

Ricky didn’t understand at first what was happening to him. Right to the end, he was a fool. His mind spun like a merry-go-round; his muscles grew thick and heavy; his words slurred. When he finally realized what I’d done to him, he came at me in a clumsy charge and wrapped his hands around my throat. Despite my plans, he nearly won. I kicked and fought him, but even drugged, he had the steel-strong grip of a mine worker. I was already blacking out when his fingers finally loosened from my windpipe, and he fell backward.

I stood over him, coughing and choking, as he lay unconscious on the floor. In his ridiculous costume, he was more beast than man. A bully. A brute. I felt no mercy toward him. I thought about him holding you by the neck, Shelby, and my heart turned ice cold.

I didn’t hesitate. I took my gun, and with two shots to his head, I made sure he would never hurt you again.

Afterward, I burned the photographs and negatives from seven years earlier. I brought my old camera to the lake and threw it out into the water as far as I could. There would be no evidence to tie me to the Ursulina murders. No headlines about the girl who became the monster, no publicity, no magazine covers with my face, no new Ben Malloy documentary on NBC. Actually, Ricky did me a favor by taking out his revenge on Ajax using my own disguise. No one would believe that Rebecca Colder, not even a month away from giving birth, had vivisected Ajax. So no one would believe I’d committed the other murders, either. They would remain unsolved. Four victims of a monster whose legend would only grow with time.

That was what everyone wanted. They wanted the myth.

Of course, that didn’t mean I was free. I knew that. I was still a killer.

When I got back to the trailer, I took a chair outside to wait for Darrell. I was calm at that moment. Serene. It was the middle of a bitter fall night, with snow swirling around me, but I didn’t feel cold. I breathed crisp air into my lungs and listened for the Ursulina, but the beast had gone away. I was my own woman again, ready for what came next.

Darrell arrived at dawn.

I could see his headlights approaching on the dirt road through the dusting of snow. He got out of the car, and when he saw me, a huge grin broke across his face, and he exclaimed in relief, “Rebecca, thank God! I’ve been looking everywhere. Are you okay?”

He rushed toward me, but he stopped when he saw the revolver at my feet. His smile vanished.

“You’ll want to bag that,” I told him. “It’s evidence.”

His eyes took on a stricken look. His face turned ashen. Without saying a word, without picking up the gun, he ripped open the trailer door and ran inside, and a moment later, I heard his howl of despair. The entire Airstream shuddered as Darrell pounded his fists on the walls.

When he came back outside to confront me, tears were rolling down his cheeks. He shook his head over and over. “Rebecca, why?”

“You know why. He was going to kill me. He was going to kill Shelby. Nothing you did would ever keep him away from us.”

“I would have put him in jail.”

“For how long, Darrell? Six months? A year? Then he would have gotten out and come back.”

“Rebecca, I can’t hide this. This is murder. I can’t protect you from it.”

“I would never ask you to. I knew what I was doing. I made a plan and carried it out. I drugged my ex-husband and shot him in the head. I’m guilty. I accept the consequences.”

With another awful groan, Darrell fell to his knees in front of my chair. He reached out and hugged me tightly, and I hugged him back. I felt miserable, seeing his disappointment in me. This was my sin, my crime, but he felt responsible, like a father who’d failed his child. Somehow, he should have been able to save me. Keep me from harm.

I understood how he felt. I understood only too well.

He kept his hands on my shoulders, with his wretched face right in front of mine. I watched dread spread across his features, a horror of things unknown and unsaid. Then he asked me the question I knew was coming.

“Rebecca, where is Shelby?”

“She’s safe, Darrell,” I told him, my voice cracking, my heart breaking. “My baby is safe.”

“Where is she? I have to know where she is.”

“She was in danger. I needed to protect her.”

“How? How did you do that?”

“I took her away from here.”

“Where? You need to tell me where you took her.”

“To a place where no one can ever hurt her again.”

Darrell put his hands on both sides of my head. He leaned his forehead against mine. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Rebecca, please don’t say that. You can’t tell me that. Rebecca, what did you do?”

What did I do?

I did the only thing I could do, Shelby. I saw only one way to save you. And to save myself.

I wasn’t going to be free to raise you. I was going to prison for murder, for years at least, maybe for the rest of my life. Even if someone from Black Wolf County agreed to take you in, that wasn’t the childhood I wanted for you. Do you think I could live with you seeing me once a month and putting your little hand against mine on the other side of a sheet of glass?

No.

My other choice was to let the state take you away. Except I couldn’t pretend or fool myself. I wasn’t going to have a choice. Murderers don’t get to pick the family to adopt their baby. That’s not how it works. The state was going to take my little girl away and give you to total strangers in some other part of the country, and I would never even know who they were. I would sit in jail, and for the rest of my life, I would have no idea where my daughter was, or what your name was, or whose family you’d joined, or whether they were good to you, or whether you were happy and safe. You were going to disappear from me as completely as if you’d never existed at all. I couldn’t bear that thought.

So I put you in my car, and I drove you far away from here. I drove for hours to the other side of the state. That drive is still so vivid to me, Shelby. That long, long drive. The road was ours, nothing but the glow of my headlights and the immense black forest and the stars overhead. You slept peacefully, with no idea that your little life was about to change forever.

I drove to Mittel County. I drove to Tom Ginn.

I arrived after midnight at his house in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t sure I was in the right place, because the house looked like a church, glowing with stained glass, with high walls and a steeple rising over the white roof. But when I got out and checked the mailbox, I saw that this was where Tom lived. I took you out of your car seat and secured you in that silly little Easter basket among the paper curlicues. I couldn’t bear to go back home and see the basket sitting there, like a reminder that you were gone.

I put the basket — I put you — at Tom’s doorstep. And I rang the bell.

Part of me wanted to run. Drive away. I thought about leaving you there in his care anonymously, like a gift from God. I wasn’t sure I could bear to see his face again when he answered the door. What would he say? What would I say? I was terrified that he would reject me, that he would reject you. As I stood there in the cold, it all seemed suddenly absurd, that I could ask this man with whom I’d spent a single night nine months earlier to take my baby. To accept a child into his life from a woman who was about to confess to him that she’d killed three men and was planning to kill a fourth. By all rights, he should arrest me, not help me.

But I remembered how I’d felt in January — that if I were in trouble, I could go to Tom, and he would suspend everything else in his life to be there for me. I still believed that. I hoped I was right.

Except of all things, he didn’t answer the door. I rang the bell again and again before I had to accept the fact that he wasn’t home. I’d driven all this way, and Tom wasn’t there. I had no idea if he was on patrol, gone for the night, looking after his father, or on vacation somewhere thousands of miles away. I didn’t know what to do. I sat down on the doorstep next to you, listening to the wind, watching the night, wondering what I could possibly do next when I had nowhere else to turn.

How long did I sit there? I don’t know. It felt like hours. I took off my coat because you were cold, and I wrapped you up in it, and I shivered. Then I cried. And I prayed. God had no reason at all to listen to the prayers of someone like me, but I hoped that maybe, maybe, maybe, he would answer my prayers for you, Shelby. You had done nothing wrong. You were innocent, pure, and perfect.

To this day, I believe God listened, because it was in the midst of my prayers that Tom came home. Down the road, I saw a truck coming at high speed. He didn’t even pull into his own driveway. He stopped the truck in the middle of the road, got out, and saw me. I’ll never forget the look on his face. He ran — he ran! — up the steps, and in the next moment, we were holding each other, kissing like lost lovers. If you ever wonder whether one night can change your life, Shelby, I swear to you it can. I’d spent one night with this man nine months earlier, and I was still madly in love with him. I’d been in love with him ever since that night.

Do I dare say it out loud?

He loved me, too. I saw it in his eyes. I felt it in how he kissed me.

When we breathlessly broke apart, he said in a rush: “I was at the lake. I was in my boat out on the water, and — this sounds crazy, crazy! — an owl flew down and sat on the end of the boat. It was like a sign that I had to go home. Someone was waiting for me. And here you are. God, here you are! What’s going on, Rebecca? Tell me how I can help you.”

I bent down to that little Easter basket and lifted you up and cradled you against my breast. “Meet Shelby,” I said.

Tom stared into your eyes, and you stared into his. Just like him and me, it was love at first sight for the two of you. He didn’t ask why I’d brought you there. He didn’t ask if you were his. He beamed at you with a sweetness I didn’t think was possible in this cruel world. He reached out in that moment and took you from me and pressed your cheek against his soft brown beard.

“Shelby,” he murmured, with a kind of reverence in his voice.

And I knew. There was still so much to explain, so much to tell him, so much I had to ask, so many questions and answers. We had hours ahead of us to talk, but I knew right then and there when I saw you in his arms.

Everything was going to be all right.

So you see, Shelby, by the time Darrell found me at the trailer, I was already at peace. I’d made peace with my past, with my crimes, with my choices. You had a father who would love you and care for you, and no matter where I was, I would know that you were safe with him.

That’s why I was able to tell the terrible lie I did.

Because I had to lie. We both did. Tom and I made a sacred vow between us, a promise sealed with a kiss and blessed by God, an oath to keep you safe. It was also a crime. He knew what I’d done, because I told him. I confessed, holding nothing back. By letting me go, he was risking his career and his future. If anyone found out about us, he would have been ruined. They would have put him in prison like me. They would have taken you away, too, and everything we’d planned would have been lost.

So he lied. He had to erase me from your story. There was no Rebecca Colder, no night of love in a blizzard last January. The woman who left the baby at his doorstep was a mystery. She put that sweet child there, thinking she’d left you at a church, and then she drove off into the night and disappeared. All that remained was the owl. The sign from God that brought Tom home to find you. The little girl who would become his daughter.

And I lied, too. I told the worst lie of all.

Rebecca, what did you do?

I lied to Darrell when he asked me that.

I lied again to Norm when he asked me the same question later that day. Rebecca, what did you do?

I lied to the judge when I pled guilty and accepted my punishment.

If I hadn’t lied, they never would have stopped looking for you. Rumors would have spread across the state. Questions would have been asked. Sooner or later, they would have found Tom, and they would have found you.

You wouldn’t have the wonderful life he gave you, Shelby.

So I had to lie.

Rebecca, what did you do?

I lied. No matter what it did to me to say those words, I lied.

I told them that I’d buried my little girl in the woods and that they would never, ever find her.

Chapter Forty-One

And now you know the truth, Shelby. That’s how your story began. The rest of it, everything that followed, belonged to you and Tom, not to me. Life passes so quickly, doesn’t it? Yours did. Mine did, too.

I spent twenty years in prison for the murders of my ex-husband and my baby daughter. Don’t feel bad for me about that. I did terrible things, and regardless of what had been done to me, I had no illusions that I should have escaped punishment. I also won’t give you any illusions that it was anything but hard. For months, I did nothing but cry every day, drowning myself in self-pity. For months after that, I became angry and combative with the guards and the other prisoners, and none of that went well for me. And then more months — years — passed in a dreary endlessness of boredom and routines, every day exactly like every other to the point of numbing my brain into a kind of dead despair. The only things that would break up the routine were not the things you wanted. Fights. Bullies. Threats. Twice, there were riots. When that happens, you find yourself craving boredom again.

I spent most of my time alone, but people came to see me from Black Wolf County. They had to drive a couple of hours to get to the state facility where I was housed, but many of them made the trip. Sandra saw me almost every month in the early years, until she moved to the Florida Keys to live on a yacht. After the revelations about Brink, Kip, and Racer came out, the mine settled the lawsuit and paid her and the other women several million dollars. That’s right. Millions. Sandra stuck it out in the cold for a while, but then she decided that she’d had enough of winters. I still get postcards from her. It looks nice down there.

Ben Malloy visited whenever he was home to see his mother. We talked a lot about the Ursulina. I never admitted to him what had happened when I was ten years old, but he remained convinced that I was one of the chosen few who’d seen the beast. I also think — I don’t know, it was just a glint in his eyes — but I think he was the only person who genuinely suspected that I was the Ursulina. That I’d been the one to commit the murders. Not as a woman, mind you, but as the monster I became. He never said it out loud, but I think he would have loved to do a documentary about me.

Norm was my lawyer, so he came to see me, too. Not that there was really much law to be handled after I pled guilty. He reminded me regularly that we had attorney-client privilege between us and that I could tell him anything without fear that he would pass the information along. I knew what he was driving at. You see, Norm never believed that I had harmed you, Shelby. Not for one little minute. He was sure I’d figured out a way to set you free; he just didn’t know how or who’d taken you in. He wanted to help, but I wasn’t going to take that risk. After a while, he realized that I was determined to leave things the way they were.

Will accompanied Norm to the jail a few times, but just as I’d expected, Will left Black Wolf County after college and moved to New York. He only made occasional visits home after that. He became a lawyer like his father and signed on as counsel for a human rights organization. I was proud of him, and I’ve written to tell him that more than once.

There was only one person who didn’t visit me, one man from my hometown that I really missed. Darrell never came. Not once. His daughters all did, and they apologized on his behalf, but I just don’t think he was able to face me. I told you, Darrell saw life and people as black and white, evil and good. Somehow this girl who’d been like a daughter to him had proved to be both, and he simply couldn’t deal with it.

Two years after I went inside, Darrell’s wife passed away of cancer. I wrote him a long note of condolence, but he never replied.

And so it went for me.

Twenty years is a long time. You don’t dare think about the end, because thinking about it only makes it seem farther away. Instead, you live each day, expecting nothing. Eventually, you give up obsessing about what you can’t have and resign yourself to the few things you can have. I decided that I still had a life, even behind bars. I read hundreds of books. I taught myself Spanish. I got a four-year degree in English Literature and then a master’s degree. And I wrote you letters, Shelby. Letter after letter, pouring out my thoughts, hopes, and dreams for you. I never mailed them, of course, but I wrote several times a week throughout those twenty years. If you’d like to see them, I still have them.

Tom wrote to me, too. He had to use a kind of code, of course, because there is no privacy for prisoners. He never mentioned your name; he simply told me about his daughter. It was like keeping you in my life. I was so grateful to him for that. He shared all your landmarks, all your special occasions. Every now and then, he dared to send a photo, too, and you grew up just the way I thought you would.

You looked just like me.

At the age of forty-seven, I rejoined the world and had to figure out how to live in it again.

The first thing I did was take a bus to Mittel County. You were twenty years old then, already working with Tom in the sheriff’s office. I saw Tom in secret on that trip, and he pleaded with me, begged me, to introduce myself to you, but I didn’t think it was safe. There were too many ways for my presence to open up Pandora’s box, even after twenty years, and I wasn’t going to risk upending the life you had. Or his.

But I can remember sitting in a booth at a restaurant called the Nowhere Café, across the street from City Hall. You were in another booth with Tom, whose hair had gone prematurely silver, making him look even more handsome and distinguished, if that was possible. Yes, seeing him made me fall in love with him all over again, and I flatter myself that he still had feelings for me, too. He’d never married. His whole life, he told me, was you — and obviously, the feeling was mutual. I could see that in how the two of you looked at each other. You idolized him, Shelby. You would have done anything for him. That was as it should be.

Being free again, I had decisions to make. Tom said I should move to Mittel County and adopt a false name if necessary. He even hinted at the idea of our being together. I thought about it. Oh, yes, I thought about it. But there are some realities in life. I wouldn’t have been able to be so close to both of you day after day and still keep my secret. Sooner or later, it would have come out. I told myself that I was protecting the two of you, but I guess the truth is, I was also protecting myself.

I was scared, Shelby.

Scared of you. Scared of what you’d say to me, how you’d feel about me, if you knew who I was. I’ve said I would understand if you hated me, and I mean that. But I couldn’t bear to actually hear those words from your mouth. It was easier to keep you as a sweet little dream and not have to deal with the ugly reality of making amends for my past.

But I couldn’t move far away, either. I couldn’t simply leave you behind. So I moved to the little resort town of Martin’s Point on the far side of the county, and I got a job at an ice cream shop. My claim to fame was suggesting a flavor called Ursulina Poop — chocolate-hazelnut ice cream swirled with fudge and studded with nuts and malted milk balls — which became their biggest seller. It was part-time seasonal work, but I still had some money in the bank, enough to live a frugal life in a little apartment. I was an independent soul growing up, and I still am. I didn’t really need people, and after years behind bars, I found it hard to be around others for any length of time. I spent my days quietly. I had the library, and I had the national forest.

Yes, I still hiked whenever I could.

I still listened.

But in all these years, I’ve never heard it again. Hufffffff.

Every now and then, I found an update about you, a bit of news to make my heart sing. I saw you in the newspaper from time to time. A couple of times, you even came into the ice cream shop, but I deliberately stayed in the back and didn’t talk to you. You had your life, Shelby, and you didn’t need me in it. I simply watched you quietly and enjoyed what I saw. You looked beautiful and strong. A little lonely like me, maybe, but no one has a perfect life. Still, you looked happy.

That was all I needed to know.

It was fifteen years later when I saw the news about you becoming sheriff of Mittel County. I couldn’t have been prouder.

But not even another year after that, my heart broke when I read in the paper that Tom had passed away. I remembered his fears from years earlier that he would suffer early dementia, the way his parents had, and tragically, those fears were realized. He was only sixty-six, just four years older than I was. I’d lost the love of my life.

I couldn’t stay away from his funeral. I had to be there. I drove to the little church on that Saturday afternoon, but I had to struggle to find a seat, because the church was packed with mourners and friends. People came from miles away. Everyone knew Tom. Everyone loved and respected him. And they felt that way about you, too, Shelby. I could see that. There were so many tears, so many people who stood up and talked about what Tom had done for them, what Tom had meant to them.

The eulogy you gave him made me sob, Shelby. You talked about him finding you on his doorstep. You talked about the life he’d given you. You cried, smiled, laughed, and joked. You stood up there with my dark hair and my dark eyes, and you got through that awful day in a way that would have made Tom proud. You were just what I’d always wanted you to be. Fearless.

I wished I had the courage myself to go up to you and tell you my story. To tell you our story. To explain, to help you understand, to answer the questions you had. I already knew what I would say when it came to that, when we were finally together, because I’d had those first words in my head for years.

I know you’ll never forgive me for what I did.

But it was too late for ancient history.

So I waited until the very end, until everyone else was gone, and then I had to go to the front of the church and look at that wonderful man in his coffin, with his silver hair and a face that had a sweetness and grace even in death. I put a finger on my lips, and then I put that finger on his lips, and I whispered through my tears, “Thank you, Tom.”

And when I turned to go, there you were in front of me.

Shelby. My little baby, now thirty-five years old. The sheriff of this county in your crisp, pressed uniform. Courageous, lovely, even when you were heartsick with grief. You’d just lost your father, and I was the woman who’d given you away.

“Hello,” you said to me.

It was the first time my daughter had ever spoken to me, and I had to choke out my own reply. “Hello.”

“I’m Shelby. Tom’s child.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Have we met before? You look familiar to me.”

“No, I’m sure we haven’t. My name’s Rebecca. Rebecca Colder.”

“How did you know my father?”

I tried to figure out what to say. How do you say anything, when your heart is so full and so broken at the same time?

“A long time ago, he saved my life,” I said.

“How did he do that?”

I wanted to tell you the truth, Shelby, because the truth was simple. By saving you. But nothing about my life was simple.

“I was in trouble a long time ago, and he got me out of it,” I said.

“I’m glad.”

“He was a wonderful man.”

“Yes, he was.” Then you added, “I was very lucky to have him.”

“I’m sure he felt the same way about you,” I said, wishing I could reach out and take your hand. Hug you. Put my hands on your cheeks. Tell you about that day in the snow with Tom and the little Easter basket and the hundreds of letters to you that are still in a box under my bed.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I went on.

“Thank you.”

That really should have been all. That should have been the end. I wasn’t about to ask you or God for anything more. I’d already been blessed far more than I deserved in life. So I took a last glance at Tom’s peaceful face, I smiled into my daughter’s lovely dark eyes, and I walked away down the aisle of the church to live the rest of my life alone.

That was when you called after me, Shelby.

It was just the two of us in the church, and you called after me with a strange, hopeful certainty in your voice. I heard you walking down the aisle behind me, your steps getting faster as if you didn’t want me to leave. Then you said the one word I’d wanted to hear from your lips since I first held you in my arms.

“Mom?”