Page 49 of The Women of Wild Hill

“Someone like me? An entrepreneur? An artist? A three-time SNL host?”

“The kind of girl who would have made my father’s head spin.” He bit his lip as if imagining something particularly naughty. “A bad girl.”

“Ah.” Brigid smiled. “See, I’ve always preferred the term witch.”

“Well, you certainly cast a spell on me.” He pulled in a deep breath as if to fortify himself against temptation. Then he stole a quick look over his shoulder at the house lights in the distance. “You’re Liam’s guest, aren’t you? What are you doing all the way out here on your own?”

Two sentences chock-full of meaning. She was alone and vulnerable out here, away from her protector. Only his loyalty to his host stood in his way. Brigid stifled a laugh. The motherfucker had no idea what he’d gotten himself into.

“I am Liam’s guest, but I don’t belong to anyone,” Brigid informed him. “I was about to go for a swim. And now that you’re here, I’m not alone.”

Encouraged, he stepped forward. “I’m Josh Jacobs.”

“I know,” Brigid said, planning her next move should he take another step toward her.

“You’re the junior senator from Arkansas.

But aren’t you supposed to have an accent?

” The same man who sounded like an investment banker from Greenwich, Connecticut, was Foghorn Leghorn whenever he stepped in front of a camera.

“Back home they want to be represented by people who talk like them,” Jacobs answered with no hint of embarrassment. “That’s why I was elected—to give the people what they want. If they’d rather have a rube than a lawyer with a Yale degree, so be it. I aim to please. That’s how the game works.”

“The game?”

“That’s all it is,” he told her. “I’m in the entertainment business, just like you. Of course I wouldn’t go around saying that. But we’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

The question threw her for a moment before she remembered it wasn’t just a party—it was a meeting of a club that Calum Geddes had spent the last half of his life assembling. That she’d been invited told Jacobs they were on the same side.

“Oh, definitely.” She felt herself beaming. She’d been following Josh Jacobs’s career for a decade. Meeting him on the beach told her the Old One had been listening after all—and she’d sent poor, suffering Brigid a wonderful gift. It wouldn’t make up for Liam, but it was a pretty good start.

SHE’D FIRST HEARD JOSH JACOBS’S name the day he took the political world by surprise, soundly defeating a popular incumbent in the Arkansas state primaries.

Though the senator he eventually replaced had the third most conservative voting record in the Senate and an A+ rating from the NRA, Jacobs had successfully branded the man as a socialist. His crime?

Supporting environmental laws designed to clean up the state and benefit lower-income communities at the expense of corporations.

Jacobs’s attack ads featured Black, brown, and white trailer park residents thanking his opponent for sticking up for the little people.

His dog whistle was heard loud and clear.

Jacobs wasn’t the sort to let moss grow on him. After he won the election by twenty points, he embarked on a crusade to overturn those same laws, roll back regulations, and defund the Environmental Protection Agency.

Not long after, one of his campaign’s corporate contributors quietly released caustic industrial chemicals into a river in the Ozarks.

The summer was particularly steamy that year, and kids who lived in a trailer park less than a mile downstream from the factory spent their days in one of the river’s swimming holes.

When they began coming home with strange burns, their parents told them to spend less time in the sun.

But the rashes they took for sunburns refused to fade.

Instead, giant blisters began to appear and ulcers formed.

Then the river’s fish started floating up to the surface, their scales and skin peeling off.

By the time anyone thought to test the water, two dozen children were left disfigured by the chemical burns. Three died from infections.

The second the media got a whiff of the scandal Josh Jacobs was immediately on the scene, blaming everyone but the guilty parties.

He shed crocodile tears while talking to reporters.

He sat with the children in the hospital.

He cursed the president of the United States for being too high and mighty to visit the afflicted.

Soon, the country had grown bored of the story.

Jacobs slithered back to Washington unscathed.

The laws he’d fought against were not reinstated.

The children and their families were left to fend for themselves.

The company paid each family a few grand and washed their hands of the controversy.

With the regulations still lifted, their profits soared. A rare species of trout went extinct.

“SO I TAKE IT YOU knew Calum Geddes?” Brigid asked Jacobs.

“I owe everything to Calum,” Jacobs said. “If it hadn’t been for AMN’s coverage, I would still be slaving away for Goldman Sachs. ’Course, I paid him back handsomely over the years.”

“And now that Calum’s son has taken over the company?”

“Oh, we’re all expecting great things from Liam. If anything, he’s even bolder than his dad. I have an election coming up soon, and he’s already stepped in to help promote my latest book. He says he loves the message.”

“Is that the book about the dangers of feminism?”

Jacobs winked at her and finished his Scotch. “No offense,” he said. “As you can tell, I actually like strong—”

Brigid could hear the man talking, but her mind had left the scene and focused instead on one a few minutes in the future. What she saw there brought her great pleasure.

“So you two aren’t involved?”

“Sorry?” Brigid returned to the present. “What was the question?”

“If you and Liam aren’t an item, maybe you and I could spend some time together.”

“I thought you were a happily married man. Aren’t you and your wife outspoken advocates of traditional marriage?”

He wasn’t thrown. If anything he seemed encouraged. “Absolutely, and our marriage bond is unbreakable inside the state of Arkansas. But this here’s the godless state of New York.”

“Well, in that case . . .”

Brigid had draped her dress over a driftwood log. Now she stripped out of her bra and underwear and left them on the sand beside it. Under the light of the moon, her skin glowed like the will-o’-the-wisp.

Jacobs turned his eyes to heaven. “Thank you, Lord,” he said.

“I promise, your god had nothing to do with this,” Brigid informed him. “You next.”

She watched as he disrobed down to his pale blue boxers with creases down the side where his maid must have ironed them.

“Those, too,” she ordered.

Once he was naked, he started for her. Staying out of reach, Brigid laughed and ran for the ocean. When the water was waist-high, she turned and beckoned for him to join her.

He wasn’t certain. “You sure about that?” he called. “Don’t the sharks come out at night?”

“You’re not going to get eaten by a shark, sweetie,” Brigid told him. “I promise.”

The Old One had something much worse in store for Josh Jacobs.

SHE WAS UP TO HER shoulders when he finally joined her. Beneath the surface, she could feel long, thin tendrils brushing against her skin like a mermaid’s hair.

When Jacobs reached out to touch her, he found them first. “Shit!” he yelped, pulling his hand back. “Something just stung the fuck out of me!”

“Probably a Portuguese man-of-war,” Brigid told him.

“Jellyfish?” He splashed as he circled around, searching for the culprit.

Brigid’s limbs leisurely tread the water around her. “That’s a common misconception. They’re not actually jellyfish. They’re siphonophores—colonies of thousands of tiny creatures working together to take down big prey.”

“What the fuck!” he exclaimed as a second tentacle wrapped around his forearm.

“No, for real!” Brigid continued. “They’re one of nature’s miracles.

When I was a kid, we rarely saw any this far north.

But thanks to corrupt politicians and the polluters who fund them, the water here in the sound is much warmer now than it used to be.

Everything else is dying off—the lobsters, the scallops, the menhaden fish—but the Portuguese men-of-war seem to love it. ”

“I’m getting out!” He was panicking.

“I don’t blame you for trying. I hear their stings are quite painful. Fortunately, they’ve never bothered me very much,” Brigid said. “I actually find them quite lovely. They light up like pretty lanterns when they’re hunting.”

As if a switch had been flipped, the water around Jacobs turned electric blue.

“Oh my god!” Jacobs screeched, lifting an arm out of the water. A thick fringe of tentacles dangled beneath it. “Get them off me!”

“Here, let me help.” With a hand on the top of his head, Brigid dunked him.

The water lit up as his head briefly sank beneath the waves.

When Jacobs resurfaced, his face had disappeared behind dripping tentacles that glowed like a party wig.

A particularly large man-of-war had clamped onto his mouth, muffling his screams.

He splashed around blindly, furiously trying to rip it off. Then his hands fell away as his body spasmed. Within seconds he’d gone limp. The water turned dark and the senator vanished.

Feeling refreshed, Brigid waded back to shore, wiggled into her dress, and returned to the party.

HOURS LATER, SHE WAS AT Liam’s side, nursing a Dark ’n’ Stormy, when they heard shouts from the beach.

A naked body had been washed ashore by the waves.

No one could identify the corpse, which appeared strangely mummified.

Translucent tentacles wrapped around its head, torso, and limbs.

What little could be seen of the skin beneath was raw and blistered.

When investigators arrived, they asked to see the security camera footage. Calum Geddes had been paranoid about assassination, and every inch of the property was covered. Brigid, still there to offer her support, felt a fear she’d seldom known.

“I turned off the system before the party,” Liam informed the police.

“My guests tend to be camera shy, and most come with their own security. We had a small army of private guards here tonight. As far as I knew, this was the safest place in New York. I’m afraid I never anticipated an assault from the sea. ”

“Natural causes are taking down a lot of big shots lately,” the head detective said. “There was that billionaire in Manhattan got attacked by birds. The spider bites out in the Hamptons. And some guy in Texas was just eaten by feral hogs.”

“Mother Nature’s gone serial killer,” his colleague quipped.

It sounded to Brigid like nature had finally gotten around to addressing a parasite problem. But for once, she held her tongue.

The investigation ended shortly after. Someone at the morgue leaked a picture, and it quickly made its way around the internet, where it was often posted side by side with images of the burned Arkansas children. It wasn’t lost on anyone how similar the injuries appeared.