Page 7 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
There was a flicker of a twist at the corner of his mouth. “Very well ... Perliett.”
It was bold. Offensive. And too familiar. Yet he used her name anyway, though they’d never been properly introduced. He used it as if he knew her better than she knew herself. Only he didn’t.
Hedidn’t.
Perliett assured herself of this as the man descended the porch steps without another word and disappeared into the moonlight.
4
Molly
The gravity in Trent’s voice negated the hurt Molly was already drinking away with her morning coffee. Their first night in the farmhouse had been unromantic. She’d allowed herself the teensiest smidgeon of hope, which dissolved when she crawled into a sleeping bag on top of their bare mattress at midnight. She’d even waited to take her bedtime prescription. The one that helped her sleep. But Trent had stayed in the shed outside long past midnight, cutting a sheet of drywall to patch the downstairs bathroom wall. A pipe had leaked eons before they bought the place. It’d been fixed. The wall hadn’t.
Now Molly sucked down one more gulp of coffee and her morning prescription—an antidepressant—and muttered “I’m on my way” into the phone before hanging up. Trent had called her from a neighboring farm where he was, out of the goodness of his heart, helping with chores while their neighbors were out of town. This before he continued on his way to his job at Clapton Bros. Farms, the monopoly of farmer families in Kilbourn, Michigan. There were Claptons everywhere in Kilbourn. The first farming Clapton had arrivedthere in the 1940s, and since then it seemed a mass migration of them had descended on Kilbourn so that anyone who was anyone was related to or bore the name of Clapton.
Molly snatched a stocking cap from the table where she’d thrown it last night and tugged it over her hair. It wasn’t cold out. Her hair was just awful. Half curly, half straight, half frizz. If a troll and a princess had a child, Molly would be it. She was reminded of this when the screen door scraped against her backside as she crossed the threshold to hurry outside. Her rear had inherited the genetics of the troll—unfortunately.
She rammed her feet into rain boots with bumblebees in plastic print all over them and pushed open the exterior screen door. Humid August heat slammed into her face—Florida had nothing on Michigan—along with the familiar but pungent scent of manure from the neighboring farm’s field. Corn stretched in rows across the road. Their own white barn heralded nothing but the omen of future chores.
The neighboring farm wasn’t that far away, and Trent hadn’t gotten their ATV up and running since it needed a new spark plug. She’d have to use her legs. Curse exercise. It was hard enough to rise and get going in the morning, let alone trudge down a country road. Gravel crunched under her rubber boots as Molly hiked down the road, careful to stay on the side in case of oncoming traffic. Traffic? It was six-thirty in the morning. The only traffic out there would be local. She neared the driveway of the farm. Trent’s truck was idling at the end. He stood at the culvert, hands on his hips.
Ten years ago, Molly’s heart would have stopped at the sight of Trent Wasziak. Tall, muscled, wearing beat-up jeans with a navy-blue T-shirt hanging on his hips and barely skimming his biceps. Tan arms. Brown hair streaked with blond, with a baseball cap boasting the brand of farm machinery preferred by his employer. But now? She knew what it was like to have his body wrapped around hers, to be held byhim, to have him kiss her just behind her left earlobe where it both tickled and entranced. It was heart-stopping ... she missed him. Did he miss her?
“There’s a body in the ditch.” Trent held his palm out toward her to slow her, his phone held to his ear.
He said it so matter-of-factly that it took a few seconds to register. A body in the ditch. Not roadkill like a dead deer or possum, but he’d saidbody, implying it was a human. Molly froze, not so much out of respect for his outstretched hand, but because the impact of what he said cleared her mind of anything related to them.
“A body?” Molly heard her voice squeak.
Trent waved her off as he spoke into the phone. 911. Body in the ditch. No, he just found it. Sparrowtail Road.
Trent was giving the fire number to the farm.
Molly inched closer.
A culvert skirted the driveway on both sides. Anyone driving off the edge would have their vehicle tilting dangerously and their tire lodged in such a way they wouldn’t have any traction to drive out of the predicament. Tall grasses, including dandelions, thistle, and some wild parsnip grew waist-high. Weeds tangled around an old beer can, and a receipt someone had tossed from their vehicle was muddy and pressed around the stem of a thistle.
There it was. Death.
And she hadn’t sensed it.
Molly drew her hand over her mouth as she leaned over the culvert to stare into the ditch. The wild plants were matted down, then bent around the body as if to create some sort of barely there shelter against the elements. Sirens in the distance met Molly’s ears, but she had difficulty compartmentalizing them as she stared into the gray face of a young woman.
“Yeah, I can hear them coming,” Trent responded to the 911 operator.
Molly took a step toward the culvert.
Trent’s hand grasped her elbow to hold Molly back. “Correct,” he said to the operator. “I can tell that she’s dead.”
She.
Molly’s gaze grazed the snarled long hair that fanned over the face with the open eyes, a now-milky blue. Staring into the sky with a startling blankness, the corpse was spattered with mud, both arms at odd angles where her body had fallen. The woman was dressed in blue shorts. Her shirt was a button-up oxford now pulled halfway up and revealing her midriff. There was no purse beside her. She did have one flip-flop on her left foot, but it was missing from her right, and Molly couldn’t spot it in the weeds.
“Someone dumped her here,” Molly muttered. She squatted at the culvert’s edge. The dead gaze of the girl didn’t waver, didn’t move.
“Don’t touch anything,” Trent warned.
Molly nodded without looking at him. Of course she wouldn’t. Not a thing. She fixated on the dead woman’s eyes. Eyes that seemed to be frozen with their last vision burned into them. Nausea coiled in Molly’s stomach. This was someone’s daughter. Someone’s sister. Somewhere someone was looking for her.
