Page 104 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
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Perliett
The incessant knocking at the door made Perliett gather her strength, nerves, and gumption in order to answer it. She wasn’t particularly keen on how jumpy she had become. One could put forth the argument that she had every reason to be. But Perliett didn’t appreciate weakness in herself. It diminished her capabilities, and heaven knew she needed to keep her self-confidence, or at least the appearance of it.
Still, the knocking persisted, and the door needed to be answered.
Perliett opened the door finally, eyeing the person on the other side of the screen door, her stomach suddenly flipping with a terrible sensation of omen.
“Mrs. Withers?”
“Open the door.” Mrs. Withers’s command came out in a panicked hiss as she shot suspicious glances over both shoulders. She banged on the wood frame with the ball of her fist. “Open it. Open it. Open it.”
As if she wanted to let an insane woman into her house.
Perliett subtly hooked the lock into place, eyeing Mrs.Withers through the screen. “How may I help you?” Of course, thiswouldbe the one afternoon since the attack that Mr. Bridgersandher mother had left her alone at the house to go for an errand run into Kilbourn. A parcel had arrived for Mr. Bridgers, whose dedication to their oversight and guardianship had been both noble and suffocating. Her mother? Perliett didn’t know why her mother wished to ride along, except the two had scarcely stopped discussing the elements of the dissertations in a New York newsprint by an investigator of the Fox sisters—now deceased but known for their interaction with the dead—and the fallacies in the investigators’ attempt to debunk the various individuals like Maribeth, who now openly practiced sittings to satisfy the public’s need to connect with the afterlife.
“Let me in!” Mrs. Withers pulled on the screen door, her countenance darkening as she met with the hindrance of the lock.
“Does your husband or daughter know where you are?” Perliett tugged her sleeves down over her wrists to hide the yellowing bruises from her attack. She didn’t know what might set Mrs. Withers off into a worse tizzy than she already was.
“Let me in before he comes and slays us both.” Mrs. Withers’s demeanor changed from frantic demand to utter petrified terror. Her eyes widened, not blinking. Her face had the pallor of a dead woman, yet she breathed and gasped and almost choked in her panic.
Against her better judgment, Perliett fumbled with the hook lock. Slaying them both was not an outcome she wished to come up against. When weighing the consequences of inviting a woman in who was insane with grief or coming face-to-face with the Cornfield Ripper...
Perliett stumbled to the side as Mrs. Withers shoved into the entryway. She yanked the door shut, its solid wood providing a small bit of relief. She eyed the open windowsin the parlor. “Close those windows.” Her demand was met with her own action to push past Perliett and reach for the windows herself, tugging them down and locking them.
“Mrs. Withers!” Perliett braced herself against the doorway to the parlor. Dizziness had not completely dissipated from her assault, and she certainly wasn’t up to her typical strength yet.
Mrs. Withers was wearing a black mourning dress, its collar buttoned high to her chin. Its long sleeves were stained beneath her armpits from sweat—goodness knows it was almost ninety degrees today!—and her forehead had little streams of perspiration trailing down her temples.
“You think he’s gone, but he isn’t.” Mrs. Withers bustled to the other window she’d already closed. Staring out as if the menace had chased her here.
“Who?” Perliett harbored little hope that Mrs. Withers knew who their nemesis was, let alone that if she even claimed a name, it would be credible enough. The woman was crazed. Lost her mind. Addlepated. And could one blame her? Her two unmarried daughters, slain by the hand of a vicious killer?
“You barely escaped alive!” Mrs. Withers spun, crossed the room, and jabbed her finger into Perliett’s chest. “Barely. The robin is dead, you know. Dead. I saw its grave. All the little graves. Mounds of dirt.”
“Whatareyou speaking of?” Perliett reached for Mrs. Withers, who was growing more agitated and making less sense by the minute. She glanced around the room. Where had George stuffed her apothecary chest? Doubtful her mother noticed, and so George had seen fit to hobble her medical practice by secreting away her options.
Brandy would be good. A better cure than tying a loaf of bread stuffed with ox brain to the woman’s head, which had been done in days of old to cure the ailments of the mind.
Perliett almost laughed at that thought as she picturedGeorge walking in as she tied said brain-stuffed bread to Mrs. Withers’s head.
Mrs. Withers collapsed onto the sofa, wringing her hands. She rocked back and forth, even as her wild eyes fell on Perliett. “You haven’t seen them, have you? All the little animals. All the little mounds. Dirt upon dirt. A nursery rhyme turned into a nightmare, I tell you.”
Sensing there was some truth woven through the elements of psychological distress, Perliett forced herself to sit next to the woman on the sofa. She reached out, folding her hands over Mrs. Withers’s hands, who startled, then froze, staring at Perliett.
“How did you live?Whydid they let you live?”
Perliett didn’t answer.
Mrs. Withers dropped her gaze only to begin a quiet sobbing. “My girls. Ohhh, my girls! I should have seen. I should have known. Nothing good comes from sin. It is wickedness. All wickedness.” She surged to her feet and, without warning, fled from the room, turning down the hallway toward the study.
Perliett raced after her, nearly sending a decorative vase flying as her hip bumped into a table. “Mrs. Withers!” she called.
The woman planted herself at Maribeth’s round table. She sat in Maribeth’s chair, spreading her arms out, palms on the table, lifting her face to the ceiling.
“Eunice! Millie!” she cried.
