Page 95 of The Women of Wild Hill
“I like to swim in the buff. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Brigid said. Harriett’s nudity seemed so natural that Brigid had barely taken note. She looked back out at the sound. “I saw a whale out there a few nights ago.”
“I saw one this morning,” Harriett told her. “She’s a friend of mine. I’ve known her for years.”
Brigid stared off across the endless expanse and imagined the whale out there, keeping watch beneath the waves.
“So I’m guessing you just got your marching orders?”
“I did,” Brigid told her.
“And you don’t like where you’re going.”
“We’re supposed to poison a few dozen people tonight.”
Harriett lifted an eyebrow. “How dramatic. The Old One, as you call her, is finally kicking things into gear.”
“One of the people we’re supposed to kill is the man I’ve been seeing.”
Harriett sat up as though the subject had become far too exciting to discuss lying down. “Ah. You’ve been screwing a bad guy, have you?”
“Yes, to put it bluntly.”
“What other way is there to put it?” Harriett said. “Do you love him?”
Brigid didn’t even need to think about it. “I do,” she confessed.
“And you’re out here because you don’t want to kill him.”
“I’m out here because I should not have been asked,” Brigid said. “The Old One took my mother when I was seventeen. Now she wants the man I love. My sister and niece will likely end up on death row for serving toxic hors d’oeuvres to a bunch of billionaires. I don’t give a damn what happens to me. I understand that I have a duty. I am willing to sacrifice. But this is torture. It’s beyond fucking cruel.”
Harriett let the information settle in. “When we spoke last you told me your mother made the decision to take her own life. Do you remember her final words to you?”
“She wrote a note. She said,Your faith in me will see you through.”
“So you don’t trust the Old One. That’s fine. She doesn’t demand blind obedience like men’s gods do. Your mother died so that you would arrive at this very moment. She saw something in the future that she wanted to give you. Do you think it was sorrow?”
“No,” Brigid said.
“Then trust your mother. And trust your sister, your niece, and yourself. There is a reason you are the ones who have reached this moment—and no one else. You weren’t picked to act as pawns in a game. You were chosen to lead. Tonight, you’ll find out why.”
The choice, then, was hers. Just as it had been her mother’s. Brigid made her decision that very moment. Liam Geddes was not going to die.
PHOEBE AND SIBYL LEFT FIRSTfor the party. No one wanted to involve any innocents, so it was determined that they would be serving the food themselves. Fortunately, the only person aside from Liam who knew about their relationship to Brigid had choked on his own tongue and died. The connection would be revealed eventually, but the guests were unlikely to guess it. As a boy on a beach had pointed out decades earlier, to the untrained eye, Brigid and her sister looked nothing alike.
Brigid chose an understated black dress fashioned with a silver outline of a tree. She didn’t expect it to cause a stir. And yet from the moment she stepped through the door of Liam’s house, all eyes were on her.
Brigid was accustomed to attention. But the people to whom she smiled and nodded didn’t nod back. The house seemed unusually full. Though she’d shown up fairly early, she seemed to be the last to arrive. All of the guests appeared to be men, and Phoebe and Sibyl were nowhere in sight. No one she passed held a glass or a plate. The crowd ahead of her parted as she approached. Against the glass doors on the opposite side stood Liam, engaged in a conference with four other men.
The crowd, which seemed unusually subdued when she arrived, had now fallen completely silent. Liam looked up and caught Brigid’s eye. A split second later, the other four men followed his cue. They stared at her as she approached. Only Liam was smiling.
“You look lovely,” he said, leaning in for a kiss.
When she closed her eyes to receive it, the world turned dark. She felt her dress billowing up all around her. There was no groundbeneath her kicking feet, no air around her flailing arms. At least three sets of hands held her head and shoulders underwater. There was no point in fighting. There was no point in surviving. She sucked the water into her lungs.
When Liam pulled back, Brigid returned to the world. The eyes she looked into were as dark as the water in which she had drowned.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
