Page 93 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
“He’ll come back,” Gemma said. “You know the killer will come back.”
Molly stared at her. She was right. Trent knew it. Sid knew it. Molly knew it. In the depths of her denial, she knew that running from the truth would not be possible. Not from her own depression, not from the truth about her hallucinations or whatever they were, and not from the circumstances that had upended her world and threatened their peace and safety.
She eyed the remains of the farmhouse. It felt as though she were looking at a picture of herself. Half ash and half salvageable.
“Molly?” Sid prompted, sensing Molly’s struggle.
Molly squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath. One truth was glaringly clear to her. Resolution would not comefrom hiding. She just needed the strength to face it. Face her depression, face her struggling marriage, face the unreal events of late, and face, more than anything, the knowledge that faith wasn’t something you achieved, it was something you fostered. Maybe that was the first truth she needed to come to terms with. To have the faith to move forward, she needed to have faith there was stable ground beneath her.
She looked at Sid, then at Gemma. She thought of Trent, working at Clapton Bros. Farms today and worrying about her safety. She considered her parents in Florida, who had offered repeatedly to fly up to help. She thought of blessings. For the first time, Molly thought of the other side of truth. There was loss, yes, and helpless grief and fear. There was also stability and hope, family and friends. It was that fine balance in faith. Trusting that nothing was purposeless while believing that purpose wasn’t always apparent at the beginning. A tangle of threads in a tapestry that when completed and turned around, revealed a beautiful pattern that made sense only at its woven completion.
“We need to finish this,” Molly stated.
Gemma gave a satisfied smile of victory that she’d gained Molly’s cooperation.
“Are you sure?” Sid pressed.
Molly nodded. She took in the shell of what once was, now burned and brutalized by the violence of life, and her eyes lifted above the roofline to the blue sky above, the white clouds, and the swallows that dove through the air. Life was waiting to be discovered from the ashes. It was time to stop burying herself and to live.
They sat at Sid’s dining room table, Gemma’s notebook open, Molly’s laptop, and a big poster board Sid had taken from her kids’ craft supplies. Pens, pencils, highlighters ... Molly felt as if she were in an office-supply store.
“Okay.” Gemma was definitely taking charge. “We need to bullet-point what we know on the timeline since January died and the fire occurred.”
Molly exchanged looks with Sid. There were moments like these when Gemma was so unemotional about her sister’s death that she oddly reminded Molly of Trent. Maybe not showing emotionwasreally a Wasziak family trait. But that didn’t mean they didn’t care, but that they were realists. Fix-its. Doers. Whereas emotion ran through every cell in Molly’s being and made her a feeler. A helper. An empath of sorts.
“January came to Kilbourn at the beginning of this month.” Gemma made a mark on the poster board with a purple Sharpie. “I last talked to her here, and then Trent found her—” Gemma cleared her throat—“Trent found her this day.” Gemma scribbled in the date of January’s death and looked away.
Molly shifted in her seat. “Trent talked to January the afternoon before she died.”
Gemma jerked her head up. “I didn’t know that. What’d they talk about?”
Molly modulated her breath so she wouldn’t succumb to the anxiety that toyed with her. “He told me she was asking questions about your mutual great-grandfather, George Wasziak.”
“Great-great-grandfather,” Gemma corrected.
Molly nodded.
“Okay,” Sid interjected. “So, a common denominator might be George Wasziak of 1910.” She wrote that down with a green Sharpie.
Gemma tapped her capped marker against her cheek. “January’s notes indicate she was building a family tree and got very tied up and interested in 1910 and Kilbourn’s Cornfield Ripper.”
Sid wroteCornfield Ripperon the list of common denominators.
“Trent said she was also asking him about some woman who was killed in 1982,” Molly offered.
Gemma stilled, raising her eyebrows. She grabbed her notebook and flipped through a few pages until she found her own notes. “Okay, sothatmakes a little more sense.” She pointed at her writing. “January had mentioned in one of her journal entries that Kilbourn wasn’t a quiet, innocent town like everyone thought, that the 1910 murders set the stage for future violence. Then she wrote ‘1982’ in the margin along with a name.”
Sid perked up. “What’s the name?”
Gemma curled her lip. “I never heard of this name when I was looking up people here in Kilbourn, but the name was Tamera Nichols.”
Molly and Sid both shook their heads. “Yeah, that’s a new one,” Sid agreed. “There aren’t any Nichols in the area that I know of.”
“Write it down.” Molly sighed, waving toward the list. “Tamera Nichols.”
“Of course,” Gemma added, “January had written the other names involved in the 1910 scenario—Jasper Bridgers and Perliett Van Hilton.”
“Van Hilton. That name sounds familiar,” Sid mused.
