Page 1 of Summer Ride

Prologue

Thirteen-year-old Mary Ester Boyle sat on her bed and tried to hold in her tears. Her bottom hurt from the belt her father had just used on it. It wasn’t the first time she’d been spanked. Nor, according to her pa, would it be the last.

She had been sent by the devil himself to test and corrupt the men of the world. Or so her pa kept telling her.

She didn’t care. She knew deep down in her heart that she had done nothing wrong. This time.

If it was a sin to look at pictures of girls like her dressed in nice clothes, ones that her family could never afford, then she didn’t want to believe in God anyway.

Her father had told her she was lusting after something that wasn’t hers.

She knew full well that her pa had lusted and sinned plenty of times, and he kept telling her how he was a godly man. How was he godly when all she’d done was look at a magazine and she’d seen him kissing other church women when her ma wasn’t looking.

That had to be a bigger sin than lusting after items she could never have or anything else that she’d done. Didn’t it?

How was it that her older brother Daniel never got in trouble? He was always picking on her, calling her names that she didn’t understand. Ruth Ann, the baby in the family, never got punished either when she cried and threw fits all the time.

Neither of them ever got spankings. Ever.

Mary Ester’s stomach growled loudly, and she bit the inside of her lip to stop herself from crying. It wasn’t the first time she’d gone without supper. Still, as the smells of the meal the family was enjoying without her floated under her bedroom door, her tears rolled down her cheeks like rivers, soaking her shirt and sheets.

She kicked off her shoes and flopped down on her bed. She rolled away from the door, as if trying to forget that her family was eating chicken and potatoes just down the hallway, without her.

If she had spent all her life trying to be good, but failing, then what was the use of trying anymore?

She was positive that it wasn’t her fault. It had to be her parents’ fault that she was the way she was. After all, she was only thirteen and did normal things other thirteen-year-old girls did. Didn’t she?

She knew that a few girls in church talked about having their woman time. She hadn’t gotten hers yet, but she knew all about it. No thanks to her ma, who refused to talk to her about, well, anything. She had questions, but who was she going to ask? Her pa or her brother?

She went to a religious school, so it was forbidden to talk about her growing body there. And when she asked her friends, they gave her conflicting information.

One said girls bled every day of the month except for one week. Others said you only bled for one day a month. That’s when babies were made. Others didn’t even know girls bled.

Kara knew for a fact they did. She’d gone to the bathroom after her ma plenty of times and had seen the pads soaked with blood in the trashcan.

Why was she in trouble for trying to find out?

She’d told her pa that she was only looking at the magazine for the pictures. But in truth, there had been an article about a girl’s time in the back that she’d wanted to read.

Her pa didn’t even know that she’d stolen it. She’d lied and told him a friend had given it to her.

It wasn’t as if she was going around burning things like that boy Jacob from church group did or hurting animals like Tommy claimed he did.

She hated her parents. They were the evil ones. It had to be them that were bad. Not her.

She was good. She just knew it in her soul.

She fell asleep that night believing that very thing.

Three years later, when the police found her standing naked in a dirty hotel room, covered in blood, and holding a knife in one hand and a dismembered body part in another, she no longer believed it.

No part of her was good.

She was pure evil.

She was, in fact, a creature sent from hell.

She had been put on the earth for one purpose.