“Please do. She and the books will both be drenched if she goes back out in this deluge.”
Una walked past bookshelves, peering down the 200s–300s aisle without seeing Jill. She found her in the 500s, sitting cross-legged on the floor, books spread out all around her. It looked almost ritualistic, the way the books formed a circle around the girl, especially considering most of the illustrations featured snakes or dragon-like lizards.
“There you are,” Una said. “Are you still hunting for Medusa?”
Jill refused to meet her gaze. “No. Something else.”
“Another monster that’s part snake?”
Jill kept her eyes glued to the book in front of her, which had a double-page illustration of a horned viper. Just looking at it made Una’s skin crawl. There were no snakes in Iceland, and Una had yet to encounter one in her garden. Hoping to keep it that way, she’d planted extra garlic, onions, and marigolds around the perimeter and routinely sprayed vinegar on the ground to deter them from slithering into her yard.
As far as Una knew, Jill wasn’t afraid of snakes. However, her red cheeks were pink with embarrassment, and she was on the verge of tears. Una knelt down and laid a hand on Jill’s shoulder.
“What it is, sweetheart?”
Jill’s fist hovered over a book page filled with photographs of reptile scales. The patterns were characterized as tubercular, imbricate, or overlapping. Under these headings were more categories like rhomboid, polygonal, juxtaposed, or granular.
“I was looking for a match for this.” Jill opened her fist to reveal a diamond-shaped object. “This is what cut me. I think it’s a scale. Like this one.”
She pointed at an illustration under a caption readingmucronate scales. Una glanced between the scale and the illustration. According to the book, a mucro was a sharp point. The scale from Mrs. Smith’s garden had sharp points at both ends.
“But it’s also shaped like this one.” Jill tapped a photo labeledganoid scales. “Diamond-shaped. Some reptiles have these, but this book says they’re also on a fish called a gar. It’s a really old fish. It has teeth and it eats other fish.”
Jill picked up another book and showed Una a photo of a gar’s mouth. Its jaw was loaded with dozens of needlelike teeth.
“Oh, my,” Una whispered. “That mouth looks like two saws coming together.”
“Gar eggs are poisonous. To humans, anyway.” Jill picked up the scale and held it out to Una. “This is too thick to be a fish or snake scale. It’s more like a crocodile’s, but the shape is wrong.”
Una gingerly poked one of the sharp ends into the soft flesh of her finger. “Imagine a whole body covered with these.”
Jill didn’t answer. She frowned at the stack of mythology and folklore books. She wouldn’t be able to fit them all in her bike basket, which meant she had to skim through several of them before she left.
Una regretted that she hadn’t been able to convince Natalie to keep the kids away from Mrs. Smith’s yard. She’d used the only reasons she could think of—poison ivy and wasps—and her attempt had failed. If only she’d taken the kids to the movies, Jill wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
“How’s your hand today?” she asked.
“It still hurts, but the soaking helped.”
They fell quiet, listening to raindrops pummel the roof. At one point, Jill seemed on the verge of speaking, but then her gaze fell on the strange scale, and she bit back whatever she was going to say.
Una heard murmuring from other patrons and knew she couldn’t leave the box at the circulation desk much longer. She also couldn’t leave Jill. The girl had ridden her bike in the rain in search of answers. The scale had cut Jill’s skin like a scalpel and Una didn’t think the wound was healing properly. She understood why Jill was trying to identify it.
The scale came from Eel’s Nest.
Una thought of the black-and-white photo she’d seen the last time she’d been in the library. Even now, she felt the darkness of that woman’s stare.
Had Jill seen something, too? Something outside the realm of belief?
Turning the scale this way and that, Una said, “You said the gar is a very old fish. Maybe this also came from a very old animal. Like a fossil. Was there anything else in the garden that seemed old?”
Jill met Una’s curious gaze. “There’s a stone face with a bunch of wavy brick paths coming out of it. I thought it was a sun at first. Or maybe Medusa. J.J. thinks it’s a mermaid—that the paths are her hair—but she’s got a mean face. She could be a siren, I guess. In some books, they look like mermaids. They sing to sailors until they jump overboard and drown.”
“So, it’s a mean face surrounded by wavy rays?”
Jill’s brow furrowed. “Actually, there weren’t any paths coming off the top of her face, like, where hair should be. They were here.” She mimed waves originating from her cheeks. “And here.” She repeated the gesture under her chin.
“Like an octopus?”
