Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead (10 page)

“Aha,” Abby said. “So you think that means Henry was here?”

“Maybe. The records are kind of patchy. But it’s very possible. Anyway, the monument you see before you was begun in 1825, so as you say, Henry wouldn’t have seen it. But the Marquis de Lafayette was at the official laying of the cornerstone. It took them until 1842 to finish it, and it was dedicated the next year, with an oration from Daniel Webster. Here endeth the lecture.”

“I am not related to Lafayette,” Abby protested. “But thank you anyway. Can I go look around now?”

“Without me, you mean? No problem.”

Her head stuffed with historical information, Abby strolled off over the grass. There were other—living—people around, but they ignored her. She had no method and no goal; she was just wandering around, trying to picture the chaos of battle, with thousands of men clashing on what was actually a rather small hill. How had they all fit? It occurred to her that it might be a good teaching excursion to make schoolkids walk through a real battle—not with live ammunition, of course, but carrying the equivalent weight of a musket and shot and gunpowder, while wearing multiple layers of woolen clothing on a hot June day. And then trying to push or pull a cannon along, not to mention the shot for the cannon. And once the battle started up, there would be a lot of people running around, and a lot of smoke, obscuring who was where. How had anybody managed to communicate under those conditions?

Abby wondered how parents would feel about staging a mock battle. And what would the girls do? Knit socks for the soldiers? Or maybe clean up their bloody wounds and stitch them up. Feed them. Mourn them.

Abby spied an empty bench and sat down, facing the city. It must easily be a mile to the waterfront across the water. How far would a cannonball fly? At least that far, if this was a good strategic site. How many other useful military facts was she totally unaware of? And she called herself a teacher?

The April sun felt warm on her face. It was quiet. She shut her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them she could see … shadows of movement. Not faces or bodies, but the sense of a crowd, coming in and out of focus—or maybe disappearing in the clouds of smoke from the firing of hundreds of guns and some number of cannons. No sound, though. Why was it her seeings didn’t come with audio, or at least, not all of them?

Wait, Abby—are you really seeing something here? Not just dozing in the sun? And through who? It could be Henry,
she thought, but then again, it could be a lot of people, their perceptions blended. Maybe that’s why things were so blurry: she was catching fragments from different directions simultaneously. How many ancestors did she have running around here? And how many years would it take her to sort them all out?

She watched until the half-seen images faded, and all she saw was the modern, well-mown world. Ned wandered up and stopped next to her bench. He raised an eyebrow, without speaking. She nodded, likewise silent. Then she tilted her head at him, soundlessly asking, “And you?” He nodded too. They smiled in unison, and then Ned sat down next to her.

Without thinking, Abby reached out and took his hand—and things exploded. Suddenly the green was filled with figures, running, falling, firing. Plugging into whatever Ned was seeing had ramped up her response by an order of magnitude, and it was frightening. She leapt to her feet, but Ned, startled, didn’t let go. In a panic, Abby tried to wrestle her hand from his, but now he was trying to calm her. It wasn’t working.

Their odd struggle was interrupted by a voice. “Is there a problem here?”

Abby shook her head and focused on the speaker: apparently one of the park guards, wearing a tan uniform. He was no reedy bureaucrat: he looked as though he could rip the two of them apart easily.

Abby took a breath and tried to smile. “No, everything is fine. I just got, uh, flustered.”

The man looked like he didn’t believe her. “Was this man bothering you?”

“No, not at all. It’s okay, really. But thank you for checking. I know it must have seemed as though I needed help. But we’re fine.”

The guard still looked skeptical, and he studied Ned, who still looked bewildered by the whole episode. “Listen, you two got problems, I can’t exactly arrest you. But why don’t you take it somewhere else?”

“I apologize. We’ll just go now,” Ned said, and turned to Abby. “You ready?”

“Sure. Thank you, uh, Ranger. You’re doing a good job.” Abby turned and started walking toward the car, conscious of the ranger’s eyes on the two of them.

“I assume it would be dangerous to touch you?” Ned said as soon as they were out of the ranger’s hearing.

“I think we can agree on that. I can’t imagine what that poor man thought. But he was only doing his job.”

“Charlestown isn’t always a safe place to be. That’s probably why he carries a gun. You want to stop for coffee or something? You still look a little shaky.”

“Let’s get away from the park first.”

They wandered down the hill, away from the park, lost in their own thoughts. They found a table in a small coffee shop, sat, ordered coffee, and sat some more. Finally Abby shook herself. “We’ve got a problem here.”

“Let’s go over what just happened up there first. You said you picked up something—what was it?”

“Kind of a blur at first—a lot of people moving around, out of focus. I was thinking I probably had a lot of ancestors somewhere in the crowd, but there was no way to pick them out in the middle of what I guess was the battle. You didn’t see anything?”

Ned shrugged. “Not really. Of course, I’ve been there plenty of times before, so maybe it’s worn off.”

“Did you ever? See anything?”

He considered. “The first times I visited there, I hadn’t figured out this whole thing, so if I did feel or see something, I would have denied it. And after that it was probably too late.” He reached out a hand to take hers—and then decided against it. “So what happened when we touched?”

“It was kind of like somebody turned the volume up, except it wasn’t sound. The people got sort of more solid, more real. Closer. It was scary, maybe because I wasn’t expecting it. Ned, what do we do?”

“You mean, about this thing we’ve got between us?”

“Yes, that. It’s ridiculous. When I’m with you, I want to touch you, like any normal person. I shouldn’t have to worry that if I take your hand, my whole world is going to blow up. I mean, it was really embarrassing up there, wasn’t it? That poor guard probably thought you were hassling me. Heck, it would have looked like that to me too. We were lucky today, but what’s to say that it won’t get us in trouble if it happens again?”

“You’ll get used to it?” Ned asked, hopefully.

“Maybe,” Abby responded. “But if I do get used to it, does that mean I’ll lose something too? That I won’t be able to ‘see’ things or people?”

“Do you want to keep that?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if I can control it. I don’t know why it’s happening, or what’s going to happen. That’s why I wanted some space. Well, obviously that didn’t help. We get together and we nearly get arrested.”

“Abby, I don’t have any answers. I want to help, but I’m not sure how to.”

Abby sipped some cooling coffee, trying to get a grip on herself. “Have you ever talked to your mother about this?”

“My mother? No, not really.”

“She shares this, doesn’t she?”

“I guess so. She’s never brought it up. Even when I was young and I saw Johnnie. She’s always been called ‘sensitive’ or ‘intuitive.’ She’s good at reading other people—living ones, that is. But I don’t know how it works with dead people.” He laughed, without humor. “You’d think there would be crowds of Revolutionary War soldiers marching by our place all the time, since we live so close to the Battle Road. But she’s never mentioned it.”

“Can I talk with her?”

Ned hesitated a long time before answering. “I, uh … Is this something we should do together?”

“The two of you have never discussed this weird phenomenon?” Abby asked.

“No.”

“Well, I think that conversation has to come first. You’re on good terms, aren’t you?”

“Of course we are.”

“Well, I don’t feel right talking to her unless she knows about you. Half of my problem is
because
of you. If it weren’t for you, I never would have discovered I have this, much less that we share it. And then we kind of connected—which I’m pretty sure she’s figured out, unless she’s stupid, and I don’t think she is—which is what’s creating a much bigger problem, at least for me. So you two have got to talk about this. What about your father?”

“Does he have this too? Not that I know of. I can ask Mom—she must know by now.”

“You think?” Abby said sarcastically. “Are you working on being clueless, or does it come naturally to you?”

Ned held up his hands in surrender. “All right, all right, I’ll talk with her. Soon.”

“Very soon,” Abby insisted. “Like before Patriots’ Day, when we’ll all be overrun. Unless, of course, you never want to hold hands with me in public.”

“Got it. I will talk to my mother, I promise. Feeling better now?”

“I think so.”

“Then let’s go home.”

10

On Monday, one week before Patriots’ Day, everybody on the staff was scurrying around the museum like ants in an anthill, each with their own task. Abby wasn’t sure whether there was that much to be done, but everyone appeared to want to be part of the process. It was almost like Christmas, Abby reflected—and it was a good thing that it happened only once a year. Of course, the week following Patriots’ Day coincided with the local schools’ spring break, so the museum, and Abby in particular, had to be ready—not, for once, for the tour groups, but for parents desperate to find something to do with their liberated offspring. Spring madness!

Ned called just past noon. “I’m having dinner with Mom tonight—Dad’s out of town. You sure you don’t want to come?” he ended plaintively.

“I told you, I think this is something the two of you have to deal with first. She’ll be hurt if she finds out I knew before she did.”

“I’m pretty sure she could guess that.”

“That may be, but putting it into words makes a difference. Call me tonight, after you get home.”

Abby smiled after she’d hung up. It was still hard for her to believe that these two people had lived in the same house together for eighteen years, had seen each other regularly since, and had never discussed the fact that they both appeared to have some sort of psychic ability. But maybe Sarah Newhall had been as bewildered as she had, and had had far less in the way of a support system to help her deal with it. She’d seen Sarah only in the context of a riotous Thanksgiving dinner, but they’d both sensed a connection between them immediately—and it had been brought on by touch in that case too. Had Ned never noticed? Or maybe he thought that kind of spark was simply the way men and women interacted—or he had stopped hugging her relatively young. If so, that must have hurt Sarah.

But in that case, where had Leslie fit? Leslie was not in the least a sensitive type. Maybe that had been her appeal: she was exactly what she appeared to be. Maybe Ned had found that a relief, if he’d had even an inkling of his own capabilities. There were no hidden currents under the surface, and certainly no surprises. Yet their relationship hadn’t worked out, and they’d both recognized that, even if they hadn’t sorted out why. Leslie had moved on—married, had a couple of kids. Ned … had stalled. Surely there had been other women? He was attractive, gainfully employed, and nice. Why had no woman ever snatched him up? Or had they in their turn sensed something askew under the surface niceness?

Enough thinking! Abby threw herself back into the piles of work on her desk. And tried not to think about Ned and Sarah and whatever they would have to say to each other. Another couple of hours flew by, and then suddenly Leslie was standing in her doorway, holding the hand of a young girl. “Sorry to bother you, Abby, but I’ve got a small crisis. This is Ellie, my daughter—say hello to Abby, Ellie, please—and she’s spending the day with me, since school is out. Some sort of teacher in-service day, although why they had to hold it right before the vacation week I do not know. I thought I had a sitter lined up, but she bailed on me at the last minute. But it turns out that I’ve got an important conference call this afternoon, so would you mind finding something for her to do while I’m tied up? It won’t be for long. I hope.”

“Sure, no problem,” Abby said. “Hi, Ellie. What kind of things do you like to do?”

“This place is boring,” Ellie said, looking at the floor.

“Ellie, be polite,” Leslie snapped. “I’m sorry, but she’s seen just about everything here before,” Leslie told Abby apologetically. She glanced at her watch. “Shoot—I’ve got to go. You two work it out. Abby, I will be eternally in your debt. Bye, sweetie,” she added to Ellie.

Left alone, Abby and Ellie stared at each other, sizing each other up. “So if you’re bored with this place, what kind of things do you like to do, Ellie?” Abby said neutrally.

“Computer games.”

“I’m sorry—this is kind of an old computer, and I don’t have any on it. This is where I work. Do you know how to read?”

“Yeah. I’m not dumb,” Ellie said.

This was not a promising start, Abby thought. “How old are you?”

“Seven. And three months.”

“Then of course you know how to read. You want to go into town, to the bookstore?” Abby wasn’t sure that Leslie’s request included leaving the building, but she could sympathize with Ellie’s boredom, especially if she’d seen all the exhibits before. Besides, they’d only get in the way downstairs.

Ellie shook her head, then looked up. “Can we go to the cemetery? The one up the street?”

Abby certainly hadn’t expected to hear that. “Sure—it’s not far, and it’s a nice day to be outside. Have you been there before?”

“Only once. Mom thinks cemeteries are creepy.”

“Does she? I like them. Then let’s do that. But I’m going to set some rules.” Abby knew next to nothing about the child in front of her—except that she was the daughter of her boss—and had no idea whether she was docile or rebellious. “First of all, you stay where I can see you, all right? No running off, no hiding. Second, you hold my hand crossing the street. Third, when I say it’s time to come back, you don’t argue.”