Page 2 of The Women of Wild Hill
“You’re about two feet wider than the trunk,” Brigid pointed out, leaving theyou fucking moronpart unsaid. “I was just about to make myself a drink. Do you want one?”
Brigid winced as she stepped out of a shadow and into the sunshine. She really did need that drink. When her eyes adjusted to thelight, she could see the intruder peeking out from behind the trunk again. Tall and pale with dyed black hair, just like every one of her stalkers for the last thirty years. He didn’t look very dangerous. None of them ever did. Even the ones with arrest records as long as her arm. Though this one did seem much younger than most. She was almost sorry he was going to die.
“Suit yourself,” she said when he didn’t budge. “But you might as well come say hello. There’s nobody around here but me.”
Brigid made her way to the wet bar on the other side of the pool. She could hear the crunch of his sneakers on the parched ground, followed by silence when he reached the patio. Brigid had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on walls, cameras, and razor wire to avoid moments like this. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t prepared for those defenses to fail. She opened the wet bar, mixed herself a Dark ’n’ Stormy, and drank half of it down in one gulp.
“Now. What can I make for you?” she asked the man, who was standing nearby.
“Your eyes really are icy.”
Same thing they all said. “Yep. Always have been.”
“And your figure is gorgeous. You haven’t aged a day.”
That was new. “Thanks,” she managed to muster.
As foul as it was, she was glad he’d said it. This way she wouldn’t feel an ounce of pity when it was over. His dirty black jeans were ripped at the knees and his T-shirt bore the title of Brigid’s first horror flick—a movie she’d shot before he was born. In those thirty years since the release, she had climbed ladders that had long been off-limits to anyone with two X chromosomes. Now she was a Tony short of an EGOT. Yet this motherfucker felt free to trespass on her private property, snap pictures of her in the nude, and comment on the state of her body.
“You look like a whiskey man to me.” Brigid dropped some ice in a tumbler and filled the glass with amber liquid from a special bottleno one else was allowed to touch. The powerful sleeping solution she’d mixed in was undetectable to the eye or tongue.
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 THEsun 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 motherof 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.”
