Page 55 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
Perliett
She had boxed the dead bird up and now set it on Detective Poll’s desk at the Kilbourn jail. He rose from his chair to look down into it, his face visibly horrified.
“What is—?”
“A dead robin.” Perliett planted her hands on her hips. “It was left on the top stair of my porch, poor thing, and it doesn’t appear that it died by slamming its head into a window.”
Detective Poll gave her a quick glance, apparently a bit surprised at her blunt description.
Perliett let him live in his surprise. She was a nervous wreck inside, but outside she was determined to maintain her decorum.
“See here?” She snatched a pencil from the detective’s desk and used the lead point to push back some feathers. “Its neck has been wrung, literally wrung. And then here.” She used the pencil again to flip the bird over. “Its innards—” Perliett cleared her throat to avoid gagging—“they’ve been removed.”
“Someone gutted a robin like a deer?” Detective Poll leaneddown, studying it, his surprise turning to morbid interest. “Why a robin?”
“Cock Robin.” Perliett hadn’t forgotten Millie’s story and the idea that Eunice was attempting to save them, nor was she discounting the fact that Mrs. Withers had indeed interacted with her dead daughter and therefore the nursery rhyme truly was a message about the crime itself—and its criminal.
“Pardon?” Detective Poll lifted an eyebrow.
“A nursery rhyme.” The door closed behind Mr. Bridgers as he entered the police station, and both Perliett and Detective Poll jumped, startled by his sudden appearance. Mr. Bridgers’s dark countenance took in the occupants of the room in a swift sweep of his gaze, and it landed on Perliett, whom he continued to observe while addressing the detective. “The rhyme was first penned in 1744. A sort of re-penning, to be truthful, as there was an old English story titled ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’ that had originated back in the fifteen hundreds.”
“You seem to know quite a lot about an obscure poem.” Detective Poll drew back from the dead bird. He leveled an open stare on Mr. Bridgers, who didn’t seem flustered in the slightest.
“Do I? I thought perhaps most knew of the rhyme’s origins. We all know, for example, that ‘London Bridge’ was written because they rebuilt it several times—and it alsohadmost certainly fallen down at one point. And we’re not unclear at all about Jack and Jill, are we?” Mr. Bridgers paused, and at the blank look on the detective’s face and mirrored on Perliett’s, he concluded, “King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Of course, he was beheaded, and she died after the Reign of Terror... Truly,neitherof you knew this?”
“I always found Jack and Jill to be quaint,” Perliett admitted sheepishly.
“There is nothingquaintabout aristocracy, unfortunately.”Mr. Bridgers offered her a forgiving smile. “Or most nursery rhymes, for that matter.”
“Mr. Bridgers, what brings you here?” Detective Poll attempted to regain control of the conversation. “I’m sure you didn’t come to discuss nursery rhymes.”
“I find literary history quite fascinating actually. Especially those limericks with English heritage. There’s brutality behind almost all of it—or tragedy.” His dark eyes twinkled ominously.
Perliett rethought her previous attraction to him for a moment, until a smile split his face, elongating the creases in his cheeks and strengthening the cut of his jaw.
“But I realize we are in the presence of a lady. That being said”—he turned to the detective—“I stopped by to deliver this.” Mr. Bridgers handed the detective a piece of stationery. Average stationery, from what Perliett could see, with a message written in a scrawled handwriting that wasn’t definitively male or female.
“And this is?” The detective took it warily.
“It was left outside my boarding room door. I daresay the person who left it is insane at the very least.”
“Why?” Perliett was curious now as Detective Poll held the mysterious stationery hovering over the dead bird.
“Read it,” Mr. Bridgers said.
Detective Poll cleared his throat and read, “‘She sang as she was tied. She cried. And when she finally said she’d lied, then she truly died.’”The detective’s head shot up. Incredulous, he stared at Mr. Bridgers. “Good glory, man! What is this?”
Mr. Bridgers shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Is it about Eunice?” Perliett interjected.
“One wonders, doesn’t one?” Mr. Bridgers seemed awfully unmoved by the limerick.
“Do you have any idea who left this?” Detective Poll eyed Mr. Bridgers sharply. Perliett noted that the detective’s typicallyfriendly persona had deepened to very distrustful. She couldn’t blame him. Mr. Bridgers popped up at the strangest times, in places most unrelated to him, and yet ... how did one question a man whose innocence seemed protected by a sheer lack of evidence to imply otherwise? One couldn’t accuse a man of a crime or of being suspicious merely because he had questionable timing and interests.
Mr. Bridgers shook his head. “I have absolutely no idea who left it at my door. As you both know, I’m new to the area and so I wouldn’t have expected anyone to know me, let alone single me out to be the recipient of such melodramatic prose. Still, I felt it necessary to report it, seeing as”—he cast a sideways glance at Perliett—“therehasbeen a death recently.”
“And you’re certain the person meant for you to receive this? It hadn’t fallen from someone’s pocket by chance?” the detective pressed.
