Page 1 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
1
Perliett Van Hilton
AUGUST 1910
When death came to visit, no one ever prepared tea and cookies. Still, Perliett Van Hilton sipped her tea and eyed the good doctor over the rim of the white china cup. She could read distaste for her in his eyes, but more than that, she could see that death had already begun its mission to etch lines into the corners of his eyes. Age lines. Though he couldn’t yet be forty. Surely not. Still, Perliett had a personal theory that if one wasn’t death’s friend, then for certain they were its enemy. In which case, it aged them faster because they went to war against it rather than falling into death’s inevitability, as one might fall onto a feather mattress.
“Did you hear me?” George Wasziak—Dr.George Wasziak—inquired of her, decidedly aggravated. Wasziak. He was also decidedly Polish, which meant her decidedly German roots would pit them against each other naturally merely because of their stubborn ancestral tendencies. And that didn’t even consider that Dr. Wasziak was convinced she practiced quackery and her mother practiced—
“MissVan Hilton.” He demanded her attention.
She took another sip of lavender tea instead.
His eyes were charcoal black. Remarkable. She could barely make out any brown, which meant he looked just shy of possessed. Which also meant George Wasziak was absolutely fascinating to her.
“You say she’s dead?” Perliett finally responded, to which George—she preferred to irritate him and so addressed him by his Christian name—raised a very dark eyebrow.
“Deceased,” he corrected.
“Departed,” Perliett countered, using terminology destined to get under his skin. And for certain it had, as she watched his chest lift in an almost imperceptible sigh. She bit the inside of her bottom lip. It was remarkably inappropriate to laugh considering the topic of conversation at hand.
“How?” Perliett managed to maintain her serious composure.
“How did she die?” George clarified.
“No, how did she brew her tea in the morning?” Perliett thinned her lips, masking a smile. “Of course I meant how did she die.”
George’s eyes narrowed. “She was...” He hesitated.
“Out with it, George.” Perliett held her teacup just below her chin to emphasize how casually one could face death if they really wanted to. Though it probably wasn’t the wisest or most sensitive of approaches. Were it anyone other than George bringing her this news, Perliett knew her reaction would have been far more weighted down by the gratuitousness of death.
“She received eight stab wounds to the abdomen, one of which severed the abdominal aorta.”
“She bled out?” Perliett lowered her cup a tad. She tempered her expression so as not to reveal the horror that raced through her, stilling her morbid sense of humor. To this point, George had not indicated murder. He had—well, hehad simply said the woman was deceased. A murder? Here? In this quiet farming community? The impact of such a thing was monumental.
George jerked his head in a nod. “Yes. She bled out.”
“I see.” Another sip, this time to disguise the emotion that welled in her throat. She didn’t need George Wasziak to see her weakness. He was already on the hunt for her vulnerabilities to discredit her medical services further. Contrary to George’s belief, Perliett was very empathetic toward those affiliated with death. Even if her view of the afterlife differed from his dramatically.
George stood on the front porch of her farmhouse that was nestled at the edge of the neighboring farm’s cornfield, across the road from a large barn that once held three stories’ worth of hay but now was empty. The floorboards beneath George’s feet were painted gray, the porch railing behind him white, and a massive willow tree rustled feathery yellow-green branches in the yard behind him. The remnants of her father’s work. All of it. Now the farm was ghostly in its quietness and yet welcoming all the same. It was beautifully barren of busy work, and home to Perliett and her mother.
Perliett stepped toward George.
George took a quick step backward.
Perliett motioned toward a wooden rocking chair. “Please, have a seat.”
“I prefer to stand.”
“Very well.” Her father had never been so stubborn. Perliett eyed George as she edged around him, still clutching her teacup, and settled herself into the chair. She preferred her father, who had also passed on. His gentleness. His kindness. His everything that George Wasziak didn’t seem to possess.
Perliett absolutely refused to be intimidated by the doctor’s six-foot-two frame, or by his skepticism of her and her mother’s trades, or by his Presbyterian upbringing, which was juxtaposed to her Methodist one. Did he pray the Rosaryor was that something only Catholics did? Perliett shook the thought from her head. It wasn’t applicable to the moment. None of her thoughts were. They were simply a toy box of thoughts to distract her from the awfulness George had brought to her front porch.
George tipped his head to the left and stared down his nose. Anaquilinenose. She’d read that description of a man’s nose in a book once and had absolutely no clue what it meant. But Perliett assumed his was just that. Because it was straight and perfect.
“Miss Van Hilton—”
“Perliett,” she corrected, then sipped her now-cold tea.
