Una liked Fire Island. The sand was smooth and sunbaked. It wasn’t riddled with the broken shells and horseshoe crab husks like the beach behind the Scotts’ house. There were no sharp things to draw blood from the bottom of her foot. No eels hiding in the shallows.
Ever since her amma had told her of thehrökkáll, a giant eel that oozed venom from its skin and could slice a person open with its razor-edged fins, Una had been afraid of eels. She was afraid of things in the water she couldn’t see, so she never swam too far past the sandbar. She stuck to the shallows, where she knew exactly what moved beneath her.
“Come on, slowpoke,” Kristofer teased as Una climbed into the car.
The library was busy that Saturday morning. Patrons browsed the shelves and milled around the newspaper and magazine section. There was a line at the checkout desk, which wasn’t unusual. Mrs. Stapleton liked to chat while she stamped the cards in the back of their books.
There were no copies of Kissinger’s book, but Kristofer said there were other fish in the sea and meandered away to browse the biography section.
Una headed for the rows of books with a magnifying glass decal on their spines. She was so familiar with the mystery section that she easily found the latest releases in the Brother Cadfael and Amelia Peabody series, as well as number eleven in the Inspector Wexford series. Cradling these treasures in one arm, she also selected books by Martha Grimes and Anne Perry, authors she’d yet to try.
Knowing that Kristofer always took twice as long to choose his books, Una wandered over to the card catalog. Pulling out the drawer labeledCOD–CON, she flicked through the cardsuntil she reached a listing for a book calledCold Harbor: ATimeline.
She closed the drawer and returned to the stacks. As she scanned the 900s in search of 974, she realized how little she knew about the town she called home. She’d been too busy building a life to learn the story of Cold Harbor.
She knew it had started as a fishing village and that its most famous landmark was a mansion built by one of the Vanderbilts. The yacht club was the social and recreational focal point of the area, and while there were a few stores and churches, all the schools and major businesses were located in adjacent towns.
Una wanted to discover the history of Mrs. Smith’s house. It had stood on its lonely hill for a century before the rest of the houses on Tidewater Terrace were built. As old as it was, Una hoped to find a record of its origin.
She pluckedCold Harbor: A Timelinefrom the shelf and, after placing her stack of mysteries on the floor, began to read.
The slim volume was mostly a pictorial history. Una flipped through pages of grainy photographs, mostly of grim-faced fishermen, occasionally pausing to read captions about saltbox houses that no longer existed.
These flat-faced, unadorned structures were nothing like Mrs. Smith’s house.
“Not here,” Una muttered.
The other local history books devoted only a few pages to Cold Harbor. Most focused their attention on larger neighboring towns like Northport or Huntington.
Una was on the verge of abandoning her search when she spied a book with a plain brown cover on the top shelf. The words on the spine were faded, and a current of unease ran through her body as she opened to the title page.
“The Secret History of Cold Harborby Jonathan Stapleton,” she murmured to herself.
She flipped to Chapter One and was quickly engrossed by what she read.
First established as a fishing hamlet in 1705, the area now known as Cold Harbor was originally called Bone Harbor. According to local lore, the name stemmed from the vast number of whale skeletons found along the beaches. This was over a century before the whaling industry became prevalent in the waters around Long Island, and there is no documentation to explain the presence of hundreds of carcasses of varying species. The Matinecock Indians living in present-day Huntington warned the settlers away from Bone Harbor, claiming the waters were haunted. Their people refused to fish in the area, and though they retrieved bones to use as tools and ornamentation, they took care when collecting these treasures and would walk the beaches only during low tide on a clear day.
A rush of cold air swept over Una’s skin, raising gooseflesh on her arms. She glanced up, expecting to see a vent in the ceiling, but the ceiling tiles over her head were solid.
Returning her attention to the book, Una kept reading.
Bone Harbor was renamed Cold Harbor in 1836 following a particularly long and bitter winter. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whaling trade was in full swing, and docks popped up around the harbor’s edge like rib bones. Fishermen built huts around the new mill, while wealthy merchants and captains erected spacious homes with large tracts of land sweeping down to the water.
As Una studied pen and ink drawings of these houses, another blast of icy air slammed into the back of her neck.The cold sank deep into the vertebrae of her spine and spread across the wings of her pelvis. Pivoting this way and that, she searched for the source of the phantom gust. There were no vents near the stacks, in the ceiling, or on the wall under the window.
She heard the buzz of an agitated insect and saw a massive horsefly battering against the window glass. Scuttling toward the end of the bookshelf, Una looked in the direction of the checkout desk to see if Kristofer was ready to go. No one was waiting in line, so she continued to study the drawings of nineteenth-century houses.
None were familiar to her, which was no surprise as more than a dozen had been destroyed by fire in 1873. Those untouched by the flames had either been razed or renovated so many times that they bore little resemblance to their original structures.
Una turned the page and froze.
A photograph of Mrs. Smith’s house filled the entire page. Una took in every detail, comparing it in her mind to its current state.
There was no electric gate, of course, but the fence with its spiked finials was there. In the photo, the fence gates were closed, and the house looked just as hostile and unwelcoming as it did now. The windows were shuttered. Vines clung to the walls. Ragged shrubs dotted with arrowhead-sized thorns grew in waves along the length of the fence. Banks of dark clouds drifted behind the steep roof.
There was a figure on the porch. A woman in a long black dress and oversized black hat. She must have been in motion when the camera shutter closed because she wasn’t quite in focus. Her face was turned to the side, revealing a flash of pale cheek and a swoop of dark hair that covered her ear and rose upward until it vanished under her hat. Her hands, shroudedin a pair of dark gloves, were knotted into fists. The pointed toes of her black boots peered out from under the hem of her dress. Her brow was lowered. Her mouth was set in a hard line.
“Didn’t want your picture taken, did you?” Una whispered.
