Page 8 of The Premonition at Withers Farm
She heard a snap beside her, like a light footstep. She felt the brush of a breeze on the back of her neck, and Trent’s voice waned into a distant echo. Still fixated on the body, Molly’s breathing became a cadence,one-two-three-fourin,four-three-two-oneout.
Find her.
Molly heard the voice of the dead girl. Like a whisper, a breath in her ear, she heard the woman’s voice.
Find her.
Molly’s heartbeat pounded, thrumming against the words. The dead don’t speak. They don’t talk. They don’t interact with the living.
She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out the vacant stare of the young woman who hadn’t really just blinked. She hadn’t. Molly was certain of it.
Find her.
This time the voice was clear. Molly’s eyes snapped open. “Findwho?” she answered.
“Molly?” Trent interrupted.
The moment broke. The breeze dissipated.
“Molly!” Trent hauled her to her feet as she rocked forward on her tiptoes, her squatting form losing its balance and falling forward toward the corpse twisted in the grass.
Molly fought against black shutters that were closing over her eyes. She clung to Trent’s arm as he pulled her up.
“I shouldn’t have called you.” His blue eyes burrowed into hers, concerned and asking so many unspoken questions. But all he said was “We can’t disturb the body.”
“I have to find her,” Molly whispered. She reached up and fingered Trent’s chin, rough with whisker stubble, her thumb and forefingers moving together. “I have to,” she repeated.
“What are you talking about?” Trent’s brows furrowed in concern and confusion. His fingers on her arm squeezed until they pinched her skin just enough to startle Molly from her stupor. She blinked rapidly, pulling away from her husband. His touch was like fire on her skin. He had no idea how he awakened her, sharpened her nerves. The good ones and the bad ones. The ones that revived the fantastic memories of puppy love and sweet, sexy romance, and the bad ones that brought back the memories of dark nights curled on the bathroom floor, Trent’s agonizing silence, and the endless calls to the doctor.
“Please don’t touch me,” she said, squirming away from him. From all Trent represented. Happiness she didn’t deserve to have. Sadness she was cursed to live in.
He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Not what it was like to see their faces every day. Hear their cries. Yet they weren’tthere. The dead.Theirdead. Hers and Trent’s. Their babies had left them forever.
Trent had moved on.
She would never.
Molly stared into their past with the filmy-eyed gaze of the corpse in the ditch. Unblinking, unmoving, unwilling to close her eyes to rest.
Hours drifted by. Molly watched from the window of Trent’s truck as the forensics team lifted a black body bag from the ditch, its midsection lower as they hoisted it onto a cart. Yellow tape cordoned off the area. Three different news teams were half blocking the road, their cameras held by eager operators. A reporter stood under the maple tree that bordered the lawn and the road. She hadn’t asked if she could stand on private property, but apparently was opting to ask for forgiveness later if reprimanded.
Molly glanced at her phone, which she’d laid on the passenger seat. She’d just gotten off a call with the Bensons, who owned this small hobby farm. They were away on vacation, and boy, they had not expected their travel to be so overturned. Yes, they would continue to feed the animals until the Bensons returned home. Yes, she and Trent were okay. Yes, they’d given the police the Bensons’ contact information. That they were away on vacation instantly cleared them of suspicion. It’d been an awkward call nonetheless, but with Trent preoccupied with the police, Molly had been the one available to take their call.
Molly knew she’d learn nothing from the investigation. She chewed on the end of a stick of beef jerky she’d found in Trent’s lunch box, her other arm hugging her middle. The window was like a television, and the scene outside some sort of wreckage she couldn’t peel her eyes from. She’d never forget the young woman in the ditch. Never forget the staring eyes void of soul and life. A story violently cut short—
A knock on the driver’s side window startled Molly from her stupor. She rolled it down—that was how old Trent’s truck was. No bells or whistles at all.
“Hi.” She met her husband’s squinted gaze.
“You doing okay?”
“I’m fine.” She was better than the girl in the body bag.
Trent mustered a smile. He patted the truck door. “They’ve released me to get back to work.” That was the pitfall of farming, and even local law enforcement understood. You couldn’t just not show up at the farm. The cows would suffer, crops, chores ... they all had to be done. Rain or shine. Sick or well. Alive or dead. It was like a marriage—only better in some ways. The animals appreciated you. The land—well, the land took more often than not.
“I need to get the horses fed here and then head to the farm.”Thefarm. The big farm. His employers, the Clapton brothers, had a massive farm—three actually. It was a multimillion-dollar family estate, and it made every other family farm in the region seem paltry by comparison.
“Okay.” Molly nodded.“I talked to the Bensons,” she added.
