Chapter 8 Una
Una
Una closed her book with a sigh of satisfaction.
“It was good?” asked Kristofer.
Una smiled at her husband. “Very good. It’s also the last one from my pile. I’ll have to go to the library today.”
“I’ll come with you. I want to get that book by Kissinger.” Kristofer folded his newspaper and drank the last of the coffee
in his mug. “Are you ready for me to brush?”
Una nodded and pulled her chair away from the patio table and the protective shade of its umbrella. As the morning sun lit
her face, she closed her eyes and raised her face to the sky.
“You look like a cat,” said Kristofer, laughter in his voice. “A cat with long, silver fur.”
Standing behind his wife of forty-two years, he began to brush her hair using gentle, rhythmic strokes. Una had washed it
earlier that morning and left it to dry in the summer air. While Kristofer showered, she’d made breakfast and carried it out
to the patio overlooking their garden. For the next hour, they ate, drank coffee, and read. A mystery novel for her and The New York Post for him.
Saturday mornings were Una’s favorite time of the week, especially during the summer.
She and Kristofer would sit outside in companionable silence broken only by birdsong.
When he was done reading the paper, he’d pick up her brush and run it through her hair, which fell down her back like a curtain of silver water.
“Like Skógafoss,” Kristofer always said. To him, Skógafoss was the most beautiful waterfall in the world. It was where he’d
asked Una to marry him, where he’d taken her hands in his and declared that he’d found the lost treasure hidden in the cave
behind the falls. “You’re the treasure. I found you.”
Una had thrown her arms around him, dizzy with happiness. There’d been no silver in her hair when she’d kissed him on the
rocks below the falls. She’d been young and glowing with promise. Her cheeks had been wet from mist and tears, and when Kristofer
told her to look up, she’d seen a rainbow dancing across the sky.
Even though she’d been young and inexperienced with the ways of the world, she’d looked into Kristofer’s kind face and known
that he would never take her for granted. He’d brushed out her hair on their wedding night, and he’d been doing it ever since.
His touch was as tender as it had been all those years ago. He was still the kind, appreciative man she’d kissed by the waterfall.
She saw how time had marked the skin on his hands as he laid the brush on the patio table, but she loved him all the more
for his brown spots and swollen knuckles. They’d earned their wrinkles together, the two of them. They were the lucky ones.
After dropping a kiss on Una’s forehead, Kristofer collected their breakfast plates and went inside the house.
Una stayed where she was, surveying her garden while she braided her hair into a long rope. She then wrapped the braid around
and around into a bun and pinned it in place.
A bee hovered over the table, demanding something from her, so she poured a little water into a saucer for it and turned back to her garden.
The bulbs Una had planted in the autumn had survived the winter. Nestled in the soft soil, they’d received all the rain they
needed in April and May. By June, every bulb had burst out of the ground, ripening in the sun until the buds fell open to
reveal jewel-toned flowers.
The red lilies were especially vibrant. Una had read somewhere that red lilies were a symbol of fertility.
I should bring some to Beth Pulaski next week, Una thought.
She wished she could do more for Beth. If only she could remember which plant her amma would have used to make a fertility
tea.
As a girl, she’d had no interest in fertility or childbirth. Her amma’s tinctures and teas meant little to her. It was Amma’s
stories Una craved.
For Beth’s sake, Una wanted to remember, so she moved through her garden, touching the plants and whispering their names in
her native language, hoping to spark a memory.
She walked to the edge of their property, where the cucumber vines and pole beans covered the back fence in a curtain of green.
Next, she checked the vegetables for signs of insect damage. The lettuce leaves had small spots around their ruffled edges,
but nothing to be concerned about. The carrot tops looked like a small, lush forest—a place for the elves to hide.
Stepping over a row of onions and radishes, Una saw nectar-dusted honeybees tunneling in and out of the golden lily flowers.
She followed the flight of a singular bee for a while before making her way to the herb bed below the kitchen window.
After scanning the tidy rows of dill, basil, and wild garlic surrounded by a border of marigolds, she pinched off a dead marigold
head and thought about the tooth Jill had found.
There are no elves in this land. But there are monsters.
Despite being bathed in sunlight, Una shivered and turned toward the north, toward the harbor.
Mrs. Smith was on the other side of town, secreted inside her ash-gray house, but Una could still feel her. She could sense
her power.
Her darkness.
Una worried about the two families living in her shadow. No, it was more than worry. She was frightened for Charles Bernstein
and the Scott children. She didn’t know Charles well because she usually cleaned for the Bernsteins when he was at school,
but she’d seen his shy smile in photos and heard the love in Elaine’s voice when she spoke about him. He seemed like a nice
boy. A nice but vulnerable boy.
As for J.J., Jill, and Justin, Una loved them dearly. She’d watched them grow up. They were like a second family. She wanted
to shield them from the presence inside Mrs. Smith’s house.
Something was stirring behind the closed door and shuttered windows; she could feel it like the shift in the air before a
storm.
Something was waking.
Something strange and terrible.
Una hadn’t shared her fears with Kristofer. He was a man of facts and figures. Of newspapers and biographies. He liked freshly
ironed clothes and a ham and cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper in his lunch box. He listened to classical music on the
radio and watched sports on TV. He went to church on Sundays and grabbed a beer with his coworkers on Fridays. His penmanship
was neat, his papers were stored in a file cabinet, and his socks were lined up in his dresser drawer like a row of turnips
in a garden bed. He kept the gutters cleared and the grass mowed.
Kristofer’s amma never told him the old stories. He didn’t believe in hunches. He didn’t think there were messages hidden in a person’s dreams.
Then again, his dreams weren’t haunted. Not like Una’s.
Una believed in the impossible because she had reason to, which was why she’d spent a decade trying to block out Mrs. Smith’s
presence and the shadow cast by her sinister house.
But she couldn’t ignore the feeling in her gut. Turning her back and averting her gaze wasn’t going to work anymore. It was
time to learn what kind of creature lived next door to the Scotts and the Bernsteins. What sort of monster had human teeth
buried in the lawn.
“Kristofer!” she called, entering the kitchen and depositing her coffee cup in the sink. “Ready to go?”
“Ready!”
He met her at the door carrying a tote stuffed with their library books. Una took the tote, and he scooped up the keys from
the wobbly clay bowl Gunnar had made. He’d been in the second grade then, a dark-haired, gap-toothed boy, as sweet as the
raisin buns Una’s mother used to bake. Like most American children, Gunnar loved hamburgers and hot dogs. He loved Shake ’n
Bake pork chops and fried chicken. Kristofer joked that they were raising a giant, and by the end of junior high, his prediction
proved to be true. Their bright, handsome college boy was now six-four with linebacker shoulders and lumberjack legs.
Last summer, Gunnar had lived at home. Una had cooked all his favorite meals and fussed over him whenever she got the chance.
This year, however, he was working on campus and would spend only the month of August with his parents.
“Gunnar would like today,” Kristofer said as if reading Una’s mind.
“It’s perfect beach weather.”
“Maybe not enough wind. You know he likes big waves. We’ll go to Fire Island when he comes home.”
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 the hrokkáll, 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