Page 2 of The Women of Wild Hill

He took several steps toward her. “I can’t believe you’re real.”

He was so close now. It seemed impossible that the vision hadn’t yet come.

“Oh, I’m very real.” Brigid reached out and playfully pinched him as he picked up the tumbler.

Nothing happened. Brigid glanced down at her hand and rubbed her fingers together. Maybe they hadn’t made contact with his flesh. She reached out and pinched the man again, this time hard enough to make him yelp. Nothing. The motherfucker wasn’t meant to perish.

“What the hell? I believed you the first time.” He rubbed his arm then lifted the glass to his lips.

“Sorry, darling,” she said. “That whiskey will make it all better.”

Once the intruder had passed out in a heap, Brigid phoned the cops.

Then she frisked him before the police arrived.

In his backpack, she found syringes filled with a pale blue fluid and zip ties.

He wasn’t the first psycho to come for her—and he probably would not be the last. She often wondered if the Old One was testing her—seeing how much Brigid could take before she succumbed to the urge to take a life.

The policemen who arrived performed the same search and were far less sanguine about the contents of the backpack.

One took her aside while his colleagues marched the intruder away. He was at least ten years younger, but his muscles and masculinity gave him the confidence to talk down to her. “You live on your own?” he asked as though that made Brigid strange.

Overcome by a vision, Brigid didn’t answer right away. She saw the police officer writhing around on the ground, his hands on his pecker as a snake emerged from the leg of his pants. That was new and different. She made a mental note of his death. It would work well in her next movie.

“Ma’am? Do you live alone?”

“Yes.” Brigid snapped out of it. “Always have, always will.”

“A woman as famous as you should have better security,” the cop told her. “This guy could have killed you.”

Brigid just nodded and walked away. Why bother to argue? The poor bastard would be dead soon. And as always, Brigid Laguerre would be just fine.

THAT NIGHT, LONG AFTER THE sun had disappeared over the ocean, Brigid sat beside the pool. She had barely budged since the police left. There was no one inside to turn the lights on, and her beautiful Spanish colonial looked completely deserted.

Her phone hadn’t stopped buzzing all evening. Every media organization in the country was reaching out for a comment on the death of Calum Geddes. Brigid glanced down at the screen and saw the latest call was coming from a New York number. She ignored the call and clicked on a CNN link.

Calum Geddes, the billionaire media mogul, died today at the age of seventy-eight.

Raised in the Bronx by a single mother who often struggled to keep food on the table, Geddes’s rise to fame and fortune has often been cited as proof that the American dream hasn’t died.

Ironically, Geddes dedicated his career to ensuring that fewer Americans are able to witness their own dreams come true.

The country he leaves behind bears little resemblance to the one in which he was born.

Our people are divided, our lands have been ravaged by climate change, and our children live in fear of the future.

No single person bears more responsibility for the current state of America than Calum Geddes.

And yet it wasn’t that long ago that Geddes was ridiculed by his rivals as a washout.

Then, in 1994, personal tragedy struck when the love of his life took her own.

Flora Duncan was an heiress and mother of two teenage girls—one of them actress and producer Brigid Laguerre.

After Flora’s death, friends and associates say, Geddes was never the same again.

Brigid snarled at the screen. “Calum turns out to be evil incarnate, and it must be a woman’s fault.” Then she drunkenly hurled the phone into the pool. “Fuck you. Fuck all of you. And fuck you for bringing my name into it.”

She felt eyes on her and looked up to find one of the ravens standing on the table beside her. This time, it held a piece of metal in its beak.

“You again?”

The bird opened its beak and the metal object fell with a clang on the concrete. She picked it up and twirled it between her fingers. It was a cast-iron skeleton key.

“What is this?” Nothing on her property was anywhere as old as the key.

The bird flapped its wings. Then it hopped off the table and marched away. At the edge of the patio, it stopped and looked back at her. It was waiting for Brigid to follow.

“Guess we’re going for a walk,” Brigid muttered. She stuck the key, an unlit joint, and a lighter into her bra and polished off her drink.

THE MOON OVERHEAD, LOOKING FULL to bursting, cast a silvery light over the landscape.

No cinematographer could compete with nature.

Brigid admired the moon’s beauty, but she didn’t need the illumination.

She had always been able to see in the dark.

She made her way across the bone dry landscape and effortlessly wove around the brittle skeletons of lavender bushes that hadn’t survived the long drought.

A snake hiding beneath a pile of rocks shook its rattle at Brigid as she passed.

Up ahead, the raven stood, still and stoic, on a low-hanging tree branch, waiting for her to catch up.

As soon as she arrived, it flapped its wings and glided to a boulder on the top of a hill.

Brigid climbed up to meet it. This time, it stayed put. Brigid had reached her destination.

“Okay, bird. What is it I’m supposed to see?” She turned around to gauge just how far she’d come. Below sat her beautiful white stucco house, with its red Spanish tiles and turquoise pool surrounded by the pale skeletons of dying orange trees. “What do you want from me?”

And then, as if the Old One had been waiting for Brigid to ask, she saw an ocean on the opposite side of the continent.

Her sister was standing beside her in a black dress.

She remembered the day well. It had been her last on the Island.

In thirty years, she’d never once gone back.

The Old One was announcing the time had come for a family reunion.

“You can show me anything you want. You know I’m not the one you’ve got to convince.” She felt it only fair to point that out. “All I ever did was tell that bitch the truth. She’s the one who cut me off.”

Brigid stopped. Movement had caught her eye.

There was a figure down below. She watched him dart from one hiding spot to the next, moving ever closer toward her house.

There was no doubt it was a man. At first, she thought it might be the intruder from that afternoon.

Could they have released him so quickly?

She dug in her robe’s pockets for her phone before she remembered tossing it into the pool.

She looked around for the bird that had guided her to safety, but the raven had left her to her own devices.

“I don’t give a fuck what he steals. I’m not going to kill him,” she informed the Old One. She’d just have to wait it out.

Then a light flared in the darkness. Just a spot of orange on black, like the flame of a cigarette lighter.

A dry bush near the house went up like a pile of kindling.

She saw the man take a step back and put his hands in his pockets as he watched the inferno build.

It wasn’t the intruder from earlier. It was the police officer who’d asked if she lived alone.

The fire climbed the back wall of the house. The home Brigid and her sister had grown up in. Her final connection to the mother who’d abandoned her. The place where three decades of designer gowns were stored. She wondered if, somewhere, Flora was sticking another orange pin in her map.

Brigid knew she was too far away to save her home.

But unless she could place a call, the fire could take the entire neighborhood with it.

There was only one way to get back to the house fast enough to do any good—the same way she’d come.

That meant going right past the arsonist. She’d have to kill him. Even as she thought it, she was moving.

She didn’t go out of her way to be quiet, but he never heard her.

As she drew closer, she could see him in profile as he watched the flames scale the wall and overtake the bedrooms. From the ecstatic look on his face, she could tell that it wasn’t the first fire he’d set.

Far from it. And she already knew what she needed to do.

When she heard the rattle coming from the same bush she’d passed earlier, Brigid reached inside and snatched the snake. It writhed in her hand and whipped at her legs, but she knew it wouldn’t bite. The ravens had decreed that someone would die that day, but it wasn’t going to be her.

“Hey there,” she said when she was on him.

If an actor in one of her films had ever shrieked the way he did, she’d have demanded another take. Too over-the-top, she’d have told them.

“Ms. Laguerre! I’m so glad you’re not in there.

I came back to check in on you and found the house on fire.

I’ve called it in, and the fire department should be here shortly.

” His eyes were drawn to the furious rattlesnake baring its fangs.

“Are you okay?” The cop took a step back as he tried to make sense of it all.

“No,” Brigid told him. “I’m very upset. You’re the first motherfucker I’ve killed in thirty years.”

“I don’t get—”

He got it when Brigid pulled back the waistband of his jogging pants and dropped the snake inside. She didn’t stick around to see what happened next. There was no need to watch his death twice. Instead, Brigid walked into her beloved childhood home for the very last time and dialed 911.

THE FIRE CREWS SAVED THE canyon, but the house wasn’t spared. They found the arsonist’s corpse with his pants down around his thighs and a nasty snakebite to the scrotum.

Brigid was taken to the hospital and treated for shock.

At eight a.m. the next morning, she was released into the care of her personal assistant.

Within hours, she was spotted boarding a plane all alone, looking somber and chic in her trademark head-to-toe black.

Tucked inside her breast pocket was a cast-iron key.