Page 44 of The Women of Wild Hill

“Maybe. Eventually,” Sibyl conceded. “I have a few other things to say before I let you completely off the hook. But we have other business to deal with right now. There’s something else you need to see.”

She opened the door to the root cellar, releasing a powerful wave of the same stench that had greeted them.

Without windows or electricity, the room was pitch black.

Sibyl pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight.

Then she walked down the stairs until the light revealed the source of the odor.

The dirt floor of the cellar was black with fungi—a field of black mushrooms no more than three inches tall with thin round caps.

Phoebe joined Sibyl on the last stair. “Are these what I think they are?” She bent and plucked one. “It looks like a little goth parasol.”

“They’re the same mushrooms Lilith used,” Sibyl told her. “This is why the ravens gave you the key. It’s what Bessie and our ancestors wanted us to find.”

“But why?”

“Well, it seems pretty obvious if you ask me. We’re supposed to make poison. A lot of it, by the looks of things.”

“No, not me.” Phoebe dropped the mushroom and wiped her hands on her pants. “That isn’t my gift.” She wasn’t going to get involved. Death had been her lifelong enemy.

Sibyl studied her mother, halfway between annoyed and amused. She’d never seen Phoebe so skittish about anything. “It’s not mine, either, as far as I know,” she replied. “But here we are.”

“You may not know all of your gifts yet, but I know mine,” Phoebe told her. “I don’t kill. My job is to heal.”

Somewhere in the house, a door creaked opened. Their heads swiveled toward the light at the top of the stairs.

“What was that?” Phoebe whispered.

“Dunno. Let’s find out.” Sibyl raced back up the stairs to the kitchen and stopped in the hall. In front of her, a door that was closed when they came in now stood wide open.

Phoebe joined her daughter but stayed one step behind her. “Where does it go?”

“No clue,” Sibyl admitted. “The ancestors didn’t show me.”

Phoebe maneuvered around the open door. Past the opening was another set of stairs—one that led up, not down.

She stood on the first stair and waited to see if her feet crashed through rotten floorboards or invisible hands shoved her back down to the basement.

When nothing happened, she stepped up to the second stair.

Then the third. Before she was fully prepared, she found herself standing in front of a second door, this one embellished with an ornate brass knob.

It struck her that a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old brass fixture should have been green with age.

Instead, it was the gleaming yellow of recently polished metal.

“What are you waiting for?” Sibyl was right behind her.

Phoebe looked back at her. “Do you think we should?” she asked. “Do you think it’s time?”

“If it’s open, it’s time. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

It was. And yet it had never occurred to Phoebe that she would be the first inside the mansion. Her hand shook as she turned the knob and opened the door.

She and Brigid spent their childhoods fantasizing about what might lie behind the vine-covered windows of the mansion.

Brigid imagined giant cobwebs spanning entire rooms, with monstrous black spiders that ate all who stumbled into their traps.

Phoebe liked to think that the pretty ghost who lived in the mansion had fashioned it into her own magical castle with talking mirrors like the one in Snow White and a bewitched prince lying on a bed of roses.

“I can’t believe it,” Sibyl said. “The whole place is perfectly preserved.”

They were standing in a servants’ passage, on the threshold of a grand dining room, where a table with thirty-nine place settings stretched from one side to the other.

The crystal glasses were as clear as the day they were made.

The silverware was untarnished and not a single mote of dust appeared to have settled on the plates.

Cards handwritten in swooping letters on heavy stock directed guests to their places at the table.

“Who is Nessa James?” Sibyl wondered, but her mother had already left the room.

In the front parlor, velvet-covered love seats faced one another, and a clock kept the time on the mantelpiece. A study, billiards room, library, and conservatory followed. On the second floor, they counted ten beautiful bedrooms, with majestic wood beds and fresh logs in the fireplaces.

“This place was supposed to be home to a family of four?” Sibyl marveled.

“And their army of servants,” Phoebe said.

When they reached the last room on the second floor, Phoebe stopped at the threshold. Bessie stood at the window where Phoebe and her sister had spotted the ghost countless times in the past.

“Hello!” Bessie appeared to cheer at the sight of them. “Come in! Come in! Are you pleased with the house? I’ve kept it in very good shape, have I not? I hope it will suit your purposes.”

“Our purposes?” Sibyl asked.

“I don’t understand,” Phoebe told the ghost. “This has been your mansion since it was built. We already have a home.”

“Oh no,” Bessie said. “The mansion was never meant for me. I enjoyed the library right enough, but I’m a simple girl with simple tastes. I would have been happy with a nice, strong tree.”

“So what is it for, then?” Phoebe asked.

“It’s for all the others, of course,” Bessie told them.