Page 78 of The Premonition at Withers Farm

A whistle pierced the night air, colliding with the crickets’song and stilling their tune. Perliett froze, standing on her right foot as she tendered her left, touching only its toes to the ground.

She recognized the tune. Its haunting melody shifted through the cornfield.

“London Bridge.”

A lonely, mournful song with an edge of trauma and an aura of mocking fun.

No.No. Awareness spread through Perliett. She had run straight to the cornfields. Straight into the blackness of the night. She had done precisely what they had warned her against. Only—her mother needed her.

Panic chilled the blood coursing through her veins. She needed to run. To sprint. Safety.

A chuckle followed her stumbling steps down the road.

Then the whistle filtered over the breeze.

A cloud drifted in front of the moon.

The light went out.

25

Molly

She wrestled from the sleep that made her thoughts foggy. Molly opened her eyes, rubbing them. The afternoon light splayed through the bedroom window, and it all came back like a brick being thrown through the glass.

Gemma’s call.

The Wasziak family secrets.

Oh yes. A bit of internet searching and it wasn’t hard to uncover the history of the Wasziak men. But none of it was as shocking as Gemma had made it out to be. Molly had known that Trent’s dad and his brothers were trouble back in the day. Uncle Roger had a few misdemeanors on his record. Before that, Trent’s grandfather had been arrested back in the sixties for assaulting a man outside a bar. But those were typical Midwestern Friday nights around here. Sure, the Wasziaks had a habit of rabble-rousing. Then Trent’s dad had found God, so had his brother Roger, and while still somewhat estranged, their generation had seemed to reconcile with right-versus-wrong behavior. Regardless, the Wasziaks still had a good reputation in Kilbourn. Gemma’s insinuation that they were hiding dirty secrets didn’t matchwith the county records Molly had seen. Maybe Gemma’s perception ofgoodwas clean slates without any sin.

Molly cringed. She’d done what her body craved. Sleep. It was all so exhausting. So overwhelming. January’s murder made little sense, and Gemma’s accusations toward her own family name and reputation felt exaggerated. Sid was right. So was Trent. The Cornfield Ripper of 1910 made even less sense than everything else.

It was more comforting to succumb to her dead emotions, the sensation that nothing was right, but she couldn’t really feel the grief that was supposed to come with that. Sleep. Sleep would put it all into oblivion. It would knock the mysteries, the deaths, the depression into oblivion.

Molly rolled onto her side and sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. Her knit shorts pulled up high on her thighs. She stared at the cellulite on her hips. She wasn’t obese, but she wasn’t thin. She was a typical curvy Midwestern woman who ate too many carbs and cheese.

“Blech,” she muttered. The awful pit was growing in her stomach again. The one that made her sick. She glanced at the prescription bottle on her nightstand. She’d taken her medicine that morning, right?

A thud downstairs made Molly still. The clock read one o’clock in the afternoon. Too early for Trent to be home. She stood and padded to the window and peeked out. Sid was probably here. She probably let herself in...

Molly frowned. Sid’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. The place was empty of any signs of life other than her chickens that scrounged in the gravel for bugs.

“Who killed Cock Robin?

I, said the Sparrow,

with my bow and arrow,

I killed Cock Robin.”

The nursery rhyme that had haunted her in the basement coursed through her memory. Molly wrapped her armsaround herself. Curse that poem. Where had it come from anyway? Molly questioned whether she’d really heard the whispered words. It had been subliminal, hadn’t it? In her mind?

A shiver ran through her. Molly reached for one of Trent’s sweatshirts hanging over the back of a chair. She shrugged it on.

She was alone.

Here in the Withers house.