Two local men, Kip Wells and Racer Moritz, had been squatting in a trailer in the woods an hour outside Random. The trailer was owned by our local lawyer Norm Foltz, who was away at a trial in Stanton County on the far side of the state. Kip and Racer probably knew he was gone, which was why they’d felt comfortable trespassing. Based on the evidence found inside Norm’s trailer, the two men had spent several days emptying out vodka and whiskey bottles, roasting rabbits over a fire pit, and poaching endangered bald eagles.

And then something happened to them. Nobody knew exactly what it was.

When Norm got back to Random, he discovered the bodies of Kip and Racer in his Airstream. The two men had been hideously slashed to death, and just like the murder of Gordon Brink, the killer had left behind a message painted on the trailer wall in their blood:

I am the Ursulina

Darrell had been the investigating officer on the case. He’d told everyone that the wounds on the bodies had been made by repeated stabs from a common kitchen knife and that there was no mythical beast involved, just two particularly gruesome homicides—but it didn’t matter what he said. The fire had been lit. Everyone in town wanted to find the Ursulina.

Maybe the story would have stayed a local novelty, but a B-list sci-fi actor named Ben Malloy, who’d been born in Random, came home to exploit the crime. He turned the Ursulina killings into a lurid television special, complete with a search by hundreds of volunteers canvassing miles of the national forest for any sign of the beast. I was out there hunting, along with half the county. We didn’t find any clues, but Ben got what he wanted. Huge ratings. A profile in Time. And, soon after that, a weekly series about mysteries and myths called Ben Malloy Discovers.

After that, our area became known as Ursulina Country. People came from around the world to launch quests to find the monster. Hours away in Mittel County, the city fathers scooped us by launching a popular festival called Ursulina Days. It didn’t matter that the murders had taken place nowhere near there. They laid claim to the Ursulina by arguing that the pioneer family whose deaths started the legend had lived in Mittel County. Of course, they’d made that up, but there was nothing those of us in Black Wolf County could do about it.