Excerpt from Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Justin calculates the distance back to the last town they passed, Eagle River, and then estimates mileage forward to Eagle Harbor, next on the map. Forward seems best. He runs back to Annie.

She sits silent on the ground, her legs out painfully straight before her, her eyes filled with tears. Justin's attention is drawn to the pattern of the fabric of her skirt: a pattern of tiny blueberries and green leaves. His mind is recording that to keep from attending to what has just happened. Blueberries, he thinks. I never noticed that those were blueberries.

The silence from the gap between the timbers is deafening, the darkness there impenetrable and magnetic as a black hole. They can see only a few inches into the opening: the leaf cover overhead is thick and the shade almost palpable. In the silence, the birds' twittering seems obscene, out of place.

And of course Ursula is in no danger. Of course. This will all be explained in a moment. We're on an old Candid Camera show. No, America's Funniest Home Videos, that's it. .

"Okay," Annie says, her voice belying her pounding heart. "Go then. I'll wait." She tries to think of something important to say about logistics, what he must not forget to do, but she can think of nothing at all. So she just repeats herself. "I'll wait." The tone is as if she were waiting her turn at the butcher's or the photo counter at Wal-Mart.

"Yeah, right," Justin says, his eyes wide with terror. He leans and kisses Annie on the top of her head. Her hair is warm. The pale skin of her part looks so vulnerable. He focuses on anything but that hole in the ground. "We'll get our miracle," he says.

"Hurry," she says, the audible quavering of her own voice this time scaring her. She squeezes his hand, and he's gone, the truck spraying up gravel.

Annie's mind is pulling up, as from a well, the tacit answer to that as yet unasked question. Annie cannot think of Ursula down that hole, so she thinks: So many generations, back into history and then prehistory, all concentrated into this one little girl. .

From Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill. Copyright Ingrid Hill 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.