Page 42 of The Women of Wild Hill
Handwritten on the page was a formula for face cream. Ivy had been working on it for many months, making sure the recipe was perfect.
Lilith looked up, utterly perplexed. “You think we should make cosmetics?” she asked her aunt.
Levi was the first to see its potential. “It’s a brilliant cover story,” he said. “No one will question why a woman works at a company that makes face cream. And the profits can fund our other endeavors.”
At the mention of their scheme, Lilith sighed with frustration. “We’re still working on the formula,” she told her aunt. “The chemical is proving difficult to synthesize. I wish we could find a more plentiful natural source—”
It seemed a fourth was coming to join their party. Dressed in a glossy black cloak, it strutted across the dance floor.
“Hello,” Lilith said.
The raven bowed its head and placed a key at her feet. Then it bowed once more, flapped its wings and took flight, blending into the darkness of the night.
Lilith picked up the key and twirled it between her fingers. “How odd.”
“It’s a wedding gift from Bessie,” Ivy said.
“What does it open?” Lilith wondered.
All eyes turned toward the vine-covered mansion that sat dark and empty at the top of Wild Hill.
THERE WAS NO HONEYMOON. LILITHand Levi weren’t interested in sunbathing or sightseeing. Their two passions were work and each other. They didn’t need to leave town for either. So the next morning, Lilith returned to Wild Hill with the key in her pocket.
After searching the exterior of the mansion in vain, she sat on the crest of the hill. In the distance, she spotted a figure in a long white dress walking along Culling Pointe. Closer and closer the woman came, her hair flowing in the morning breeze. When she reached the rock where Lilith sat, she stopped. The ghost didn’t say a word. When the witch set off up the slope, she turned back.
“Do you need me to send a formal invitation?” she asked in her musical accent. Then she giggled at her own joke and continued up the hill.
Lilith followed the witch all the way to the mansion. When they reached it, the bushes parted and the thorns pulled away, revealing a long-hidden entrance to the basement. The raven’s key fit the lock, and the door creaked open. For the first time in fifty years, a living person entered the Wild Hill mansion.
It was dark down below and the air felt thick as it flowed into Lilith’s nose. The heels of her shoes made no sound against the floor. She didn’t hear a match strike, but a candle lit the room. She and the witch were in the kitchen, preserved exactly as it had looked the day her great-grandparents had fled. An enormous cast-iron cooking range dominated an entire wall. A long wooden table ran halfthe length of the room. The shelves were still lined with filled jars that had never been opened. But the thing that captured Lilith’s attention hung from a hook inside an old-fashioned fireplace. A large black cauldron.
Lilith took the candle as the witch guided her through the kitchen and down a set of stairs that led to the old root cellar. The dirt floor appeared black in the gloom. It wasn’t until Lilith reached the bottom of the stairs that the candlelight finally pushed back the darkness, and she realized she was looking down at a vast field of mushrooms.
IN THE DECADES THAT FOLLOWED,few of Lilith and Levi Vildkeit’s neighbors ever guessed that the family in the split-level ranch down the street was phenomenally wealthy. Aside from the fact that they let their lawn grow wild, Levi and Lilith seemed exceptionally ordinary. No one at the company they founded knew the nature of the research that Lilith performed in her private lab. Most of the men who worked for the Vildkeits assumed the lab was merely a way Levi humored his wife, who had always fancied herself a chemist. None of them had any idea what role Lilith and her husband played in killing off Nazis.
For the next thirty years, they dedicated themselves to dealing with those who’d slipped through justice’s fingers and started new lives in other parts of the world. When a business mogul in Buenos Aires died of a heart attack after a dinner party at which Lilith was a guest, no one in their right mind would have suspected she might be involved. Most wouldn’t even have recalled she was there. When an aneurysm took a nuclear scientist long before his time, his death was attributed to natural causes. The authorities didn’t even investigate. Even Lilith and Levi’s daughter, Flora, never suspected that her parents had a body count just south of five hundred.
When the pair was lost in a plane crash, their obits didn’t even make theNew York Times. The authorities never suspected that their twin-engine Cessna had been sabotaged, so no investigation was ordered. Flora thought her parents were on their way home from Boca when their plane went down in the Everglades. (They’d spent their “vacation” a bit farther south, in Uruguay.) No one outside the family inquired about a funeral—which is just as Lilith would have wanted it. She was buried between her mother and grandmother on the brow of Wild Hill. In accordance with his will, Levi Vildkeit’s remains were donated to Columbia University, where his skeleton would help thousands of medical students master anatomy.
Flora missed them both terribly, but most people forgot Levi and Lilith as soon as they were gone. The few who ever mentioned the Vildkeits agreed that their daughter was very lively, indeed. And they all wondered how such dull people could have produced her.
Flora
Sibyl knew she’d returned to this world when she felt the ground beneath her and a light ocean breeze sweeping across her skin. Her eyes remained closed while she tried to make sense of what she’d seen. They weren’t dreams, exactly. They’d felt more like time travel. She’d smelled the worlds she’d been in. She’d learned things no dream could have told her. It was as though each of her ancestors had welcomed Sibyl into their lives. Sibyl might have questioned the truth of what she’d seen if it hadn’t been for the last visit. Sadie, Rose, and Ivy were all new to her. But Sibyl realized she had known Lilith all her life. She laughed out loud at the thought. Then a whiff of orange blossom and patchouli pulled her out of her thoughts, and she opened her eyes.
Sitting beside her was the loveliest woman she’d ever seen. Though she appeared to be Sibyl’s age, her style belonged to another era. She wore her long, strawberry-blond hair in a ponytail that ran along her bare spine. Her crocheted top left several inches of flesh exposed above the top of her denim skirt. A band of freckles covered her nose and stretched from cheek to cheek. She wore a crown of clover in her hair.
“Do you know who I am?” the woman asked. The way she was smiling made Sibyl think that she should.
“No,” Sibyl admitted as she slowly transitioned to sitting.
“My name is Flora. I’m your grandmother. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
Sibyl studied the woman’s face. She could see the resemblancenow. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. My mother never told me much about her family. I’m just learning about most of them now.”
“They’reyourfamily, too,” Flora reminded her. “Phoebe never spoke about us because she loves you and she’s been trying to spare you. You’ve seen a little of what our lives were like. They were often full of death.”
“So that all really happened?” Sibyl asked. “Those men really died?”
