Jill nodded gratefully. “Throw it in the trash at your house. Don’t let anyone see. If my mom asks, I’ll tell her I broke it.”
She walked Charles to the front door and followed him out onto the stoop. Together, they stared at the mist-veiled shadow that was Mrs. Smith’s house.
Charles said, “Do you have to go back there?”
Jill didn’t bother to disguise her misery. “Tomorrow. After church.”
“Can’t you just tell your mom that you don’t want to do it?”
“She isn’t like your mom,” Jill said with a conflicting mix of jealousy and pride. She wished her mom was soft and sweet like Mrs. Bernstein, but she was also proud of how smart her mom was. How strong. If Mrs. Bernstein was Aphrodite, then her mom was Athena. And Jill would rather be the daughter of a warrior. Especially if there was a monster in the water.
Witch. Demon. Beast. Child killer.
Jill said goodbye to Charles and returned to her room. Feeling a little better now that the music box was gone, she reached for a book calledMythical Beasts of the World. She ignored the beautiful illustrations of unicorns and griffins, searching only for creatures with a woman’s face.
She’d gotten through half of the book before her dad asked her to help make bologna and cheese sandwiches for lunch. Suddenly hungry, she yelled, “Be right there!”
After she ate her sandwich and a bowl of fruit cocktail, Justin asked her to play with him. She wanted to get back toher room, but he looked at her with his puppy dog eyes and she couldn’t say no.
They played Candy Land, which Justin won, followed by two rounds of Chutes and Ladders. Justin landed on the cookie jar space and had to go all the way down the long slide, but he didn’t pout, even when it was clear the action meant he’d most certainly lose. He just shrugged and waited for Jill to take her turn.
“Charles brought us a box of cookies,” she said after packing up the game. “Want to ask Dad if you can have some while you watch a show?”
“Yeah!” Justin trotted down the hall.
Back in her room, Jill continued looking thoughMythical Beasts of the World. She was reading a description of an Inuit sea monster called the Qalupalik when her dad knocked on her door.
“Phone’s for you, Jilly Bean.”
“Okay.”
Her dad surveyed the array of library books. “Working on your summer reading for school?”
“It’s research. For a story.”
As she passed him in the doorway, he gave her a one-armed hug. “My little Hemingway. Maybe you’ll work in the city one day. Your brothers and I will be on Wall Street, and you’ll be a reporter forThe TimesorThe Post. We could have lunch. I’d take you to all my favorite places.”
Jill didn’t want to be a reporter, but she loved the idea of meeting her dad for lunch. Even more, she loved that he saw her as being smart enough to land a job with a major newspaper.
She paused for a second to lean against her father’s warm chest. He kissed the top of her head and then gave her a gentle push. “Phone’s off the hook in the kitchen.”
Jill picked up the handset and said, “Hello?”
She fully expected to hear Heather’s voice and was startled when Charles said, “Jill? Hey. It’s, uh, Charles. I—I wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I had to stay after the service today to talk to the rabbi. He wanted to make sure I was ready to come back to Hebrew school after, you know, after the regatta.” Jill heard the rustle of paper in the background. “We were in his office, and I asked him if there were other creatures in the Torah like the Leviathan. The Torah’s basically the Old Testament of the Bible and the Leviathan is a sea monster.”
Jill stared out at the harbor, her eyes searching for shadows between the moored boats. “Okay.”
“The Talmud, which is all these Jewish laws and other stuff, mentions a bunch of monsters and demons. So, I asked Rabbi Greenberg if one was named Lamia, and he gave me a funny look. Then he went to his shelf and pulled out this really old, old book. It was brown with big, yellowy pages. There was no title on the cover or anything. He read to himself for a bit and then told me that Lamiaisin the Old Testament. Not in our Torah, but in a Bible like you’d use.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. The lines are from the Book of Isaiah. I wrote them down. They say, ‘And demons and monsters shall meet, and the hairy ones shall cry out one to another, there hath the lamia lain down, and found rest for herself.’”
Demons. Monsters. Lamia.
