Page 4 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
Perliett
Perliett plunged her pale hands into the cleansing water in the basin, rubbing goat’s milk soap on her skin and then holding her flesh under the coolness. Her throat hurt from holding back emotion. Emotion she shouldn’t feel—or should she? That was only one of the conundrums of being the offspring of a devout Christian and a devout spiritualist. Death was eternal, that was agreed upon. But the finality of it, the security in it, or the desperation of it? Her mind always whirled with the unanswered and the mysticism that seemed to coincide with faith. That she was shaken was not something Perliett had any intention of revealing to George Wasziak. Thankfully, there was a distraction from her own empathetic emotion.
“Saints above!” Kenneth Braun gagged again, but this time he was holding his nose, blood seeping through the cracks between his fingers.
“Open my apothecary chest. There.” Perliett tilted her head toward a wooden chair flush against the wall on which rested her dearest possession. “In the top drawer you’ll finda small burlap bag. Open it. Press the moss into your nostril and it will stanch the bleeding.”
Kenneth hurried toward the chest.
A bloody nose. He was terribly worked up, yet she couldn’t blame the farmer who had the misfortune of stumbling upon Eunice’s mutilated body as well as assisting in its retrieval. Perliett related to some of his angst, for she herself would have loved nothing more than to rest her forehead against the strong shoulder of a handsome man—notGeorge Wasziak—instead of tending to Eunice Withers’s dead body, but there were simply none available. So she stiffened her upper lip while Kenneth allowed his own angst to flow forth from his nostril.
“If you’re giving Kenneth skull moss...” George’s growl from the doorway stilled Kenneth’s rummaging through the chest.
Perliett flicked her wrists, letting droplets fly from her wet hands. She lifted the cotton towel beside the basin and dried her skin as she turned. “Itismoss.”
“Scraped from a dead body’s skull? That practice ceased centuries ago. It’s defilement of the deceased.” George pushed between Kenneth the farmer and Perliett’s apothecary chest. He snatched the burlap bag from the man’s hand. “Don’tfollow her instructions. By the time she’s finished, you’ll wind up with leeches crawling all over you in a bloodletting.”
“Why would I blood-let someone already letting their blood?” Perliett finished helplessly. She didn’t bother to correct him that she had inno wayscraped the moss from a dead person, although that was how it once had been done. She simply thought moss was a good application of a natural product versus wasting a perfectly clean white piece of cotton.
George marched across the small examination room and dropped her bag of moss into a garbage receptacle. He retrieved a clean white bandage, pressed it against Kenneth’s nose, and encouraged him to tip his head back.
“He’ll choke on his blood,” Perliett warned. “It will run down the back of his throat and—”
George silenced her with a look.
With George preoccupied with Kenneth, Perliett returned her attention to the indecently naked body of Eunice Withers, now covered with a sheet. They had held a tentative truce as they attempted to dissuade Kenneth Braun from hovering as they cleaned Eunice. It was unseemly and wrong that he remained. Still, he had been insistent, and to George’s chagrin, Perliett had no patience for arguing with a man who had obviously not only discovered the dead woman’s body, but likely was more familiar with it when she was alive too. That was obvious if George had even a lick of deductive reasoning, which apparently he did not. He didn’t seem to notice the way Kenneth bit at his fingernails, blinked back tears, and trembled like a man who’d just lost his dearest possession.
That Kenneth and Eunice had been having an illicit affair was more than likely the reason Kenneth hovered. That she had announced earlier her conclusion that Eunice hadnotbeen with child also explained the drop of weight from Kenneth’s shoulders and then the nosebleed.
Perliett bent over Eunice, studying her small nose, her ghostly pale skin, her thick lashes and dark hair. She was brunette—like Perliett herself—that dark German brunette with the deep skin tone and a delicate chin that hinted of obstinacy. Eunice Withers was known in Kilbourn as one of the most eligible women of marriageable age. An affair with a farmer would have surely infuriated her father, but then it would have made more sense for Mr. Withers to take a knife and gut Kenneth Braun rather than his own daughter. So the affair, assuming Perliett’s theory was correct, did not answer for why Eunice had been brutally murdered, and—Perliett dared a look at Kenneth, whose nosebleed was coming under control now—no one could fake a nosebleed to appear innocent of murder.
“Keep pressure on your nose,” George directed. “Head home. There is no reason for you to linger here. I’m certain the police will inquire of you this evening, and the circumstances in which you found Eunice will need to be recounted more than once.”
“A stiff drink may calm your nerves,” Perliett offered.
“Ora warm cup of peppermint tea,” George added sternly.
“That too,” she nodded. Fine. George couldn’t argue that brandy would be far more valuable in calming one’s nerves than peppermint, but then he had the unspoken point that it might inhibit Kenneth’s ability to relay facts of the day to the police, who were still scouring the cornfield for any clues. Not to mention, word was spreading fast, and Kenneth had stated the police were spending as much time investigating the crime scene as they were trying to keep curious onlookers from engaging in their own amateur investigations. Murder in Kilbourn was entertaining, if also horrible. Many wouldn’t sleep well in their beds tonight, and Kilbourn was now minus one of their prettiest young ladies.
The door closed behind the farmer, leaving Perliett alone with George, who continued to glower at her as she gently ran a comb through Eunice’s snarled hair. She didn’t bother to look at him, instead noting the threads of corn silk that fell from Eunice’s hair down onto her shoe and then slid off to the wood floor.
“I would assume she was killed in the cornfield and her body wasn’t just left there,” she ventured.
“Why is that?” George growled. He was a bear. No. No, a bear was too coarse and rough. He was a ... lion. A proud lion with absolutely no sense of imagination whatsoever.
“Because there is corn silk in her hair.” Perliett lifted a strand and held it toward George. “And there were some silks encrusted in her wounds. If she had been left in the cornfield but not killed there, any silks would merely be on top of the wound, not intermingled. It’s as if her assailant’sknife had silks sticking to it as he—stabbed her.” She choked a little on the ending of her observation.
George took the offered corn silk, eyed it, then flicked it away. “This is farmland. It could have been stuck to the knife long before they used the weapon on Miss Withers.”
“She died in the cornfield,” Perliett muttered under her breath.
“Pardon?” George was quick to respond.
“I said, ‘You’re the master of your field.’” She met his eyes. His narrowed. God had made a few errors when He’d created George Wasziak. One, He’d forgotten to give the man a smile, and two, why the last name of Wasziak? No woman in her right mind would want to adopt that surname as her own.
Her random thoughts, however insulting to the sovereignty of God, were of no help when George cleared his throat.
Perliett ceased combing Eunice’s hair.
