Page 110 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
Molly studied the woman in the photograph. She had bobbed hair, curled, dark, with a beret on her head. Her dress was square-cut according to the style of the day, with buttons down the front. She was pretty. High cheekbones, long lashes, eyes that turned up at the corners in an almond shape.
“Who was she? Why did they break up?”
Gladys pursed her lips at the woman. “Well, she’s dead now, thank the Lord. There were whispers about her, back in the day. Rumors, you know?”
Molly didn’t know, so she waited.
Gladys took another sip of coffee. When she lowered the mug, she smiled a little. “They had advised Uncle Mikey not to marry the girl. My mother told me she had quite the reputation around town, and excuse my French, but she was a brazen hussy. Only Uncle Mikey was blind to it. She had a way about her, Mother said, that could fool the wisest of men.”
“She sounds deadly,” Molly teased.
Gladys didn’t laugh. “Oh, you know, that was also a rumor. There’s a look in a person’s eyes when you’re not sure they have feelings?”
Molly grimaced. She had accused Trent of that before.
Gladys waved her hand. “Not in a normal husband-and-wife argument—I’m talking the stone-cold sort of person who hasn’t the ability to feel wrong.”
“A psychopath?” Molly suggested.
Gladys nodded. “Yes. Yes, that’s it.”
“She was a psychopath?”
“From what I’ve been told, I would say yes. Anyway”—Gladys tapped the picture again, directly on the woman’s image—“my grandfather confronted Uncle Mikey. Told Mikey that the Hannity name would not be tarnished by her and her reputation whispered by all. Mikey defended her, swearing none of the rumors were true. My grandfather vowed he would disown Mikey from the farm if he married the girl.”
“Mikey broke off the engagement, then.” Molly leaned forward, her interest in the story growing.
Gladys nodded. “And he was happier for it. Until the war, of course.”
“And the rumors? What happened to her?” At some point, this had to wrap back around and apply, didn’t it? Gladys had stated the photograph made her think of Molly, but so far there was no connection.
Gladys lifted the picture, studying it with her rheumy eyes. “She lived a long life and then died in the late seventies. She had a family, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It wasn’t fair really that she lived and Mikey died.”
Molly eyed Gladys. It was a harsh verdict to wish death on a person, no matter how unfeeling or sinful they might be.
Gladys flipped the photograph over and laid it on the table. Then she locked eyes with Molly. “She was Jacqueline Withers. The younger sister to Eunice and Millie Withers, who were murdered by the Cornfield Ripper in 1910.”
The nursery rhyme book! Molly stared at Gladys. “I didn’t know they had a younger sister.”
Gladys raised an eyebrow. “Neither did they, my dear, neither did they.”
“Jacqueline Withers.” Molly slapped the photograph that Gladys had willingly lent her onto the seat next to her in her car. Unfortunately, Sid was still in appointments and Gemma wasn’t answering her phone. “Jacqueline Withers was the younger sister. How did theynotknow she existed?” The idea was ludicrous, and yet the pieces seemed to be dropping into place.
Molly steered her car out of Gladys’s drive and headed toward town. If the killer’s journal was originally Jacqueline Withers’s childhood nursery-rhyme book, how did he ever get ahold of it?
More questions piled in Molly’s mind as she drove. She should’ve stayed to ask Gladys more, but the adrenaline that had pumped through her on hearing Jacqueline’s name was only just now wearing off.
She saw the outline of her half-burned farmhouse rising on the road ahead. The white barn standing guard over it. Her chickens needed feeding, but Trent said he would stop to feed them on the way to Clapton Bros. Farms. He didn’t want her near the house alone.
But as Molly neared their shell of a home, her breathing came shorter and more rapidly as she considered its history. The Withers farm. This was it. This was where Eunice and Millie Withers had been raised. Where Jacqueline had grown up too? How was that even possible if no one knew of her?
Other questions swirled as if they were on a merry-go-round in Molly’s head. How did this tie in to Tamera Nichols’s disappearance in 1982? What had January Rabine found that had caused the taking of her life?
As Molly’s car neared the house, the foreboding inside her increased in its intensity. Not now. No. She’d gone this long without feeling like she was going to hear voices. See things. But that dark hollowness was flooding through her. She looked at her hands gripping the steering wheel. They were trembling. Her skin felt clammy even while her body shivered.
Ominous. That’s what it was. The Withers house had been built on gravestones. It was a physical premonition of the horrors that would visit them. The horrors of death, creeping in, brutalizing, stealing.
The burned section of the Withers—no,her—farmhouse was a black scar against the blue summer sky. One of the corner studs, charred and crumbling, pointed toward the clouds as if in one last plea for its life. The section of the house on the east side was open, and she could see inside to the remnants of their home. Going through the debris was going to be a chore. Insurance was counting it a total loss.
