Page 5 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
“You are not here to sleuth out the reasoning behind Miss Withers’s passing,” George corrected. He was so lofty and pompous, Perliett wanted to stick a pin in him and watch him deflate. “Finish cleaning her hair and then I will send someone to contact her family. They will want to dress her for their parlor and prepare for the wake.”
“If they dress her, they will see the wounds. I cleaned them, but they’re still there.” Perliett couldn’t imagine being Eunice’s mother and wrapping your child’s body in a dress meant for Sunday church and now clothes she would take with her to the grave. They would decompose there. Become worm-eaten rags. And then—
“Perliett.” George stated her name with an unfamiliar tempering of his tone.
She snapped from her thoughts, noting that her hand rested on Eunice’s forehead, and her eyes were blinking rapidly. Empathy. Empathy was the emotion that warred with the brutality of death.
“Are you all right?” His voice was doctoral.
Perliett coughed gently to clear away unwanted tears. “Yes. Yes, I’m—merely worried about the wounds to her abdomen and her mother seeing them.”
“They are small, as stab wounds typically are,” George observed, but he appeared to be pondering a solution.
“Small on the outside, vicious on the inside.” Perliett stroked some hair from Eunice’s face. “Perhaps a wrap around her abdomen? We could advise the family that it must stay there to ... well, to preserve the body for burial? A form of mummification?”
George was expressionless as he stared at her without blinking. One minute. Perhaps another. Then, “Mummification? Are we Egyptian now?”
“I merely suggested it to offer an excuse for why they shouldn’t remove a wrapping.” Perliett could feel the hot blush creep up her neck. George Wasziak thought she was a quack, and sometimes her impulsive suggestions certainly reinforced that idea.
“Perhaps we merely state that the wrap is to be kept on to avoid shock and potential trauma to the family?”
“Yes. Yes. That,” Perliett said with a nod.
The house was dark when Perliett arrived home. She was accustomed to this, in the evenings, after the sun had dipped below the horizon. The screen door squeaked as Perliett opened it. She hefted her apothecary chest onto a shelf just inside the entryway. It had been a gift from her beloved father. She’d wanted to attend medical school one day. Father hadn’t been fond of the idea, instead encouraging her to dabble in medicine. Perliett would do anything for her father, including deny her own dreams. So she dabbled. She studied old medical journals, and since the age of nineteen she had begun to help others who simply couldn’t affordDr. Wasziak’s fees. Which had helped to form the Grand Canyon in their five years since acquaintanceship. George didn’t trust she could learn from books alone. Truth be told, sometimes Perliett questioned whether he was right. But it wasn’t as if she had attempted to perform surgery on anyone.
“Mother?” Calling softly so as not to startle her, Perliett unbuttoned her light overcoat and hung it on a coat-tree. She unpinned the hat from her hair, setting it atop the same shelf as the apothecary chest.
Perliett tiptoed quietly through the front entry of their house, her shoes making tapping noises on the wood floor. She peeked into the sitting room. It was empty. The study then. PaPa’s study. It was inevitable really. She shouldn’t have bothered to check anywhere else.
The door was slightly ajar. Candlelight flickered and created shadows across the floor, and as Perliett pushed the door open, more shadows danced on the dark wood-paneled walls. The curtains hanging over the window that overlooked the front garden were a heavy green velvet. They were closed, a funeral-like shroud over the room. Perliett heard the clink of crystal, as though someone’s ringed hand had bumped into a decanter. A round table sat in the middle of the room, having replaced PaPa’s desk over a year ago.
Four people sat around the table. One, Perliett did not recognize. Two, it surprised her to note due to their religious affiliations, were Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt from the First Baptist Church. The fourth was Mother—Mrs. Van Hilton to most—Maribeth to those who knew her closest. Even Perliett thought of her mother as Maribeth more often than not. Her mother was more of a peer. A mixture of a friend, a mother, an equal, and a mystery. She could be the proper wife of a Christian church elder, and she could rival any turbaned seer for the ability to speak with the dead. Perliett loved her mother, admired her mother, and was also—if she was beinghonest—a bit afraid of her mother. Especially now that PaPa was no longer there to temper Maribeth’s behavior.
Eyes closed, head of full black hair tipped back, Maribeth Van Hilton raised her face toward the ceiling. The candlelight created hollows beneath her eyes and in her cheeks, which made Maribeth appear haggard, even though her natural beauty was still apparent. She had become Perliett’s mother at the age of twenty, so now her forty-four-year-old widowhood made her alluring and mysterious and even a bit sensual—or so Perliett had heard whispers of from others in town. A bit awkward to hear of such, considering it was her own mother, but then Maribeth was Maribeth as much as she was Mother. They were two separate personas in the form of one being.
A circle of smoke spiraled from four candles in the middle of the table. A chain of emerald beads wove in and around them. A tall cabinet stood against the far wall, its doors open. Curtains hung inside, golden tassels holding them back. There was a chair, empty, but Perliett knew what it was for. Closet visitations weren’t uncommon for Maribeth to pursue, though Perliett had never witnessed an apparition actuallyusethe chair—or appear for that matter.
Perliett could hardly subdue her own shudder. She’d never forget the moment she had sequestered herself inside the study at the circular table, shortly after her father had died, as her mother summoned the afterlife. She would never fail to recall that moment in the darkness when a man’s hand gripped her shoulder and squeezed it three times, just like PaPa had always done. To reassure her. In her shock, Perliett had slapped at the hand instinctively as her feet kicked outward, just before the wardrobe doors burst open to reveal nothing at all, and still somehow an energy was released into the room that curled into Perliett like a ghost’s whisper. Her mother had stared at her, skin pale—almost luminescent—and their eyes had met. Perliett had run from the room, thechair toppling over from her sudden movement. Feeling her father’s familiar grip should have been comforting, but somehow it wasn’t—because he’d been dead for six months.
Now she scanned the room again. All the participants seemed to be in some sort of trance. She wondered sometimes if it was simple human fear that put them into such—or perhaps it was intense curiosity? An impulsive desire to utter the most horrific scream she could muster came over Perliett. Merely to see what would happen. More than likely, Mrs. Hoyt would engage in an instant attack of the vapors. Mr. Hoyt’s rotund belly would smash into the table, making a candle knock over, which would set the doily under them aflame. At which point, the stranger at the table would bat at it with his massive hands he already had folded in front of him. The flames would go out. His skin would blister. Perliett would treat burns without George Wasziak glowering over her shoulder, and through it all her mother would be—
“Perliett.” Maribeth’s voice interrupted Perliett’s imaginary circumstances. Her tone was polite but carried a thin cord of stress running through it.
Perliett blinked. She had fallen into her own sort of trance. A thick smell of incense burned her nostrils. She met the eyes of the stranger, who appeared younger than she’d first thought, but also was more likely closer to her mother’s age—or George’s age—than her own. She swallowed back the weirdest sensation that had risen in her throat. A heaviness on her chest ... breathing was a challenge...
“Perliett.” Maribeth pushed off the table, rising to her feet. She held her hands over the table to still her guests and whatever spirits lingering who Perliett had disturbed. “Darling, are you all right?”
What her mother was really asking wasWhy did you disturb my séance?But that was hardly appropriate for the time being.
Perliett cleared her throat, no longer entertaining the ideaof screaming for a lark and intending to startle, but instead realizing her immature thoughts had been selfish and costly to her mother.
She dipped her head in apology. “Forgive me. I was not aware you had guests.”
A candle flickered.
Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt eyed her with a stern expression. Mrs. Hoyt’s lips pinched, sending wrinkles reaching out from the corners of her mouth like minuscule tree branches clawing at the rest of her pudgy face.
“I’m sorry if I have disturbed ... anyone.”
