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.