The Villa(32)

I fish in my bag, pulling out my copy of Lilith Rising. I don’t know why I’ve been carrying it around with me like some kind of totem, but I like having it close at hand.

Now I page through it, looking for the scene I’m thinking about.

I find it about a third of the way through the book, in Chapter Six.

“There’s a cave in Ireland that reaches down so deep, you can cross into the underworld.”

Colin murmured the words against Victoria’s throat, and she swallowed hard, reaching out to tangle her fingers with his.

“Have you seen it?” she asked. She felt like she was always asking him things, desperate for any hint of the life he’d had before he’d come to the village. She liked imagining it even though it also made something in her stomach twist. A Colin without her. The man he’d been before.

The man he might be again.

That thought terrified her even more than stories about caves and hell, and she pressed herself closer to him in the warm dark of the barn.

“No,” he replied. He had his head propped in his hand, looking down at her. Even in the dim light, his eyes were bright blue. “But I’d go there if I could. I’d take you there.”

“I’d go with you,” she told him, and she meant it more than she’d ever meant anything before.

A kiss, salty with sweat, hot with promise.

“I would,” Victoria insisted. “I’d follow you anywhere.”

“Even into hell?”

Colin was watching her carefully, like her answer really mattered to him, which was funny to Victoria, because what other answer was there?

“Yes.”

I scan the rest of the pages, but there’s nothing more about the cave, no reference to this particular well at all, and I’m more than a little disappointed. I don’t know why I’m enjoying it so much, finding these little hints in Lilith Rising that connect to Orvieto, but there’s something satisfying about it.

Something exciting.

The line has started moving, and the redheaded girl is already inside. But when I turn to Chess, I see that she’s on her phone, turned slightly away from me.

I wait until she’s done with her call, and am about to suggest we check out the well when she gives me an exaggerated frown. “So, I’m the worst, but that was Steven, and, apparently, he needs a couple of sample chapters from the new book for their foreign rights guy, and he needs them, like, ASAP. And of course, they’re only on my computer, so I need to get back to the villa and send them by this evening in New York. But you can stay!” she quickly offers. “Get your well on!”

Steven is Chess’s agent, a man I’ve only met once but who struck me as a terrifying human and probably a fantastic agent. My own agent, Rose, is a much better human, but only an okay agent, a trade-off I’ve mostly been fine with.

For a second I think about staying, and then shake my head.

Weirdly, I want to get back to the villa, too.

And for the first time in months, I want to write.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Don’t Kill Me (New Book?)

Hi, Rose! Greetings from beautiful Italy! Like I’d hoped, this change of scenery is really doing me so much good. How much? Well, I’m actually writing again! You might be the only person MORE excited than I am about that fact.

The only issue is that I’m not working on Petal right now. (I know it’s still due, and thank you so much for getting me the extra time on that!) I don’t know how much you know about Mari Godwick and the murder of Pierce Sheldon, but it turns out the house we’re staying in is the very one where that happened. Now, this is obviously a GOLD MINE for a mystery writer, even one who usually writes cozies, and I’ve gotten really interested in the case. Not only that, I think there are some interesting links to be made between the murder here in 1974 and Mari’s famous horror novel, Lilith Rising, that came out in 1976. I know that would be a VERY big change of pace for me in terms of what I write, but I genuinely feel like there’s something really cool here, something that has the potential to be big, especially with how popular true crime is these days.

Once I have something more concrete, i.e., pages, I’ll send them your way, but I just wanted to loop you in on what I was doing, and also make sure you won’t murder me if I send you a new book that’s not Petal10.

Best,

Emily





MARI, 1974—ORVIETO


“Christ, I’m bored.”

Noel doesn’t say it so much as declare it, flopping back onto the low sofa in the drawing room, his face turned up to the ceiling as though he were addressing the chandelier. It’s a rainy night at the villa after a rainy afternoon, and a rainy morning before that. Which means they’ve all been trapped inside together for too long.

They need the space, Mari quickly realized, in order for the delicate ecosystem they’d built here to thrive. She’d spent most of the day lying listlessly in bed, looking over the pages she’d written, wondering why that voice that had seemed so vibrant just a week ago had suddenly stopped speaking.

Victoria’s story seems to have come to an abrupt halt, stranding her in the scene where she first meets the village reverend she’ll eventually fall in love with, and nothing Mari has done—long walks to think, glasses of wine to lower her inhibitions—has worked. The project has, like so many before it, stalled completely.