Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead (22 page)

Leslie stood up abruptly. “You really have the nerve to sit there and tell me how to raise my child?” There was a red flush creeping up her neck. “Get out. Both of you. Abby, I don’t know what to do in the long run, but I don’t want to see you for the next few days. Stay away from the museum. Ned, I can’t begin to tell you how angry I am with you. I thought you were a friend, and you come to my house and dump this on me. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to Ellie. So get out. Stay out of my way. I don’t want to hear from you or talk to you. Go, now.”

Ned and Abby exchanged glances, but there seemed to be nothing to say. “I’m sorry, Leslie,” Ned said softly. He took Abby’s arm and walked her to the front door. Leslie still hadn’t moved from the table.

22

After Abby and Ned had reached the car and settled inside, they couldn’t seem to move.

“Well, I suppose that went about as well as it could have, all things considered,” Abby said dully. “And Leslie acted about the way I expected. I can’t say that I blame her. What happens now?”

Ned stared straight ahead, through the windshield, into the dark. “I don’t know.”

“How long will it take her to cool down?”

“Maybe a year or two? Seriously, you’ve seen more of her recently than I have. What do you think?”

Abby pondered. “I think it’s a good thing that she threw us out so she could think this through. At least she didn’t say anything irretrievable. Or fire me. Exactly.”

“Yet. She still might.” Ned rubbed his face, then turned to face her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. She’s a fair woman, and once she calms down she’ll know she can’t take this out on you. But she might not want to see your face for a while.”

“I know. I can understand that.” Abby tried to remember what the balance in her checking account was, and how long it might last in this rather pricey area. Or maybe she should clear out of town, find someplace cheaper to live and a new job to pay the rent, and not even try to deal with Ned or Leslie or Ellie. But that would be the coward’s way out.

“You’re not thinking of bailing out, are you?” Ned asked anxiously.

Once again he seemed to be reading her mind. “How do you do that? Know what I’m thinking? It’s spooky.”

“It’s a logical question. You have every right to pack up your bags and go.”

She turned to face him. “Go where? I don’t have a home. I may not have a job. I guess I could crawl back to Maine and live with Mom and Dad for a while—that’d be
real
fun. I don’t think there are many jobs available up there, but at least they don’t know about this seeing spirits stuff. My mother lives entirely in the present, or the near future, like when to buy new curtains for the living room or what to fix for dinner. In a way that’s reassuring, but at the same time, I couldn’t begin to explain to her what’s happened and why I ended up back on their doorstep. Remember, she liked Brad.”

“And your father?” Ned asked.

Abby paused to figure out the best way to describe him. “He’s quiet. Thoughtful. Surprisingly observant, particularly when you think he wasn’t paying attention. He loves my mother, and still thinks she’s wonderful after all these years. They have a good balance between them. And of course they both love me, but like I said, I don’t think they’d understand this psychic stuff.”

“Maybe you underestimate them.”

“You haven’t met them,” Abby said. Abby had gone to Maine for Christmas, but Ned hadn’t gone with her. She hadn’t seen her parents since. “With Mom, what you see is what you get. She’s a good person—warm, practical, supportive, kind—but she has no patience for things she can’t see—and fix. Dad, on the other hand …”

She stopped, wondering why she had never given much thought to her father’s family tree. She knew he came from old New England roots, as did her mother, but Abby had come upon her mother’s ancestors first, and had only begun taking genealogy seriously a few months ago. Her father’s lines were still blank, but maybe she should check them out too. She might just have the time to do that now, at least until her money ran out. She refused to contemplate what it would mean if
everybody
in the family proved to have this peculiar ability.

But if she’d inherited this from her mother’s side of the family, which looked likely, it had clearly skipped her mother. Maybe it was a recessive trait? Maybe it was erratic? Maybe there was no scientific logic to any of this?

It was only then that Ned said softly, “Are you bailing out on me?”

Abby was slammed with a wave of guilt. How—or why?—had she put anyone, everyone, ahead of Ned? She loved him, didn’t she? She needed him, especially now, if they were ever going to sort out this maybe-hereditary, maybe-paranormal thing she had fallen into. “Oh, Ned, no! Of course not. I’m being selfish, worrying only about what affects me. But we’re in this together.”

Ned didn’t look at her. “It seems to me that all I’ve done from the beginning is complicate your life.”

Abby rushed to reassure him. “You can’t say that. Maybe it was a huge coincidence that I started seeing my relatives at the same time I first met you, but it could have happened any time. And I would have been scared and confused, and I wouldn’t have known what to do, and you know Brad wouldn’t have been any help … Ned, I can’t do this without you. Face it, we’re linked forever. It sounds sappy, but we’re connected in ways most people can’t even imagine. Please don’t think I’m pushing you away.”

She reached out a hand to him, and he took it, and Abby felt the tingle of connection immediately. Ellie had said holding Abby’s hand tickled, and maybe that was the best way for a child to describe it. But it could be so much more! And Ellie would have to come to understand that, somehow, going forward. “Okay?”

Finally Ned smiled, relief in his eyes. “Yes. Abby, we should eat. It’s getting late.”

Reluctantly Abby released his hand. “I don’t think I can face a restaurant. I can probably throw together something at home.” Home—that was laughable. She was a passing visitor in someone else’s house, where she kept her clothes and some food, period. Not hers. She didn’t belong anywhere.

“Then let’s do that. I’ll stop at the museum so you can pick up your car.”

“Oh, right. Thank you.” She was so upset she’d forgotten that they’d arrived together and her car was still waiting in the parking lot.

Ned pulled up at the museum a few minutes later and let Abby out next to her car, promising to meet her at “her” house. She stood for a moment, watching him pull away, then looking at the museum, all its windows dark. She enjoyed working here. She liked teaching kids, especially when she was talking about history—and she certainly had some rather unique perspectives about colonial history to offer, only she couldn’t talk about those. But if Leslie was angry with her, a state that might go on for a while, it would be difficult to work with her. Abby was sure that Leslie would be fair and would go by the book, but there would be a tension between them that might interfere with Abby’s effectiveness. She should volunteer to quit, to save everyone the trouble, even though she really liked the place. She’d have to make up a good excuse to give to the people she knew best. Maybe a sick mother would do. Something to think about.

Abby started her car, pulled out of the driveway, and followed Ned’s path to her temporary home. He was already there, leaning against his parked car, waiting for her. She parked alongside his car, got out, and walked into his arms.

“Don’t worry, Abby. We’ll figure something out,” he murmured into her hair.

“Yeah, we probably will. I just wish I knew what. Come on, I’m getting cold.” She pulled away from him and walked to the door and slid the key in. Opening it, she disarmed the alarm, then let Ned in and turned on some lights. “I think I’ve got eggs and bacon and bread, unless you can find inspiration in my cupboards.” How lame was she? Apparently she could barely feed herself.

“Let me take a look.” Ned started rummaging in the few cabinets that held foodstuffs and came up with several cans Abby couldn’t remember buying. Maybe they’d come with the place. Leaving Ned to his search, Abby pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge, found a pair of glasses, and poured. Then she sat at the small table in the kitchen and watched Ned move competently around the kitchen.

This was not the life she had planned. Camping out in a stranger’s house, afraid to stray beyond her own arbitrary, self-imposed boundaries. Feeling like an intruder. She was past twenty-five; she’d always assumed she’d have a “real” job and a home, or at least a place with her name on the lease, and a guy somewhere in the picture. Maybe not marriage, but commitment to someone steady. Love.

Well, there was Ned. Did she love him? She thought so, but their relationship was so entangled in this whole ghost thing that it was hard to separate the two. If neither one of them, or only one of them, had had this ability, he would have made a likely choice: intelligent, educated, responsible, skilled, good-looking and great in bed. Abby almost smiled at the order in which she’d arranged those adjectives. Funny, Brad had shared a lot of those, at least on paper, but what he’d lacked was simple empathy. He never really “saw” her, or anyone else, for that matter. In her he’d seen a nice-looking appropriate mate who fit well in his career path, and that was as far as he’d looked. The minute she had come to him with a real problem, something that had her tied up in knots, he had bailed. Or maybe he had bailed before that, since by the time Abby reached out to him he was already sleeping with the significant other of a colleague. What a jerk!

Ned was not an alpha male. Ned was a loner. Ned was empathetic—but there were hidden reasons for that. Could they make it work? They probably understood each other better than the majority of married couples, but would their shared abilities make living together too difficult?

Ned set a plate in front of her and sat down in the chair next to her. “You’ve been quiet.”

Abby picked up a fork and ate a few bites of excellent scrambled eggs, with some jalapeño peppers and onions added. “Good,” she said, pointing her fork at the eggs.

“Thank you. Do you want to talk about it?”

“The eggs?”

“No, Abby, the whole stinking mess that is our lives, singly or together.”

“We have to.” She stopped herself: that was a mealy-mouthed response. “Yes, I want to talk about it. Don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s not just us anymore.”

“And we’re responsible adults. I know. If it hadn’t been for Ellie, would we have just skated along the way we were? Dabbling in ghost hunting on weekends?”

“We could have, although that wouldn’t have been fair to you. But that’s moot now.”

“It is. So what now?”

“I love you, Abby. I think I did before all this stuff started, although they were kind of simultaneous. But I know that the more I heard about Brad, and then when I met him, the more I wanted to ride in on a white horse and rescue you.”

That made Abby smile. “That’s sweet. Although Brad was a mess of my own making, and I kind of had to get myself out of it on my own. But it was a nice thought on your part.”

“I still feel the same way,” he said. “I feel like it’s my fault that your life has gotten so messed up, but I don’t know what to do about it. I never thought that Ellie would come into it.”

“Maybe one or another of our ancestors or even the whole lot of them conspired to disable the babysitter and forced Leslie to bring Ellie to work and dump her in my lap. Heck, maybe Ellie is the prime mover behind all of this and
she
orchestrated it.”

Now it was Ned’s turn to smile. “I guess we can’t eliminate any possibilities at this point. We could watch a couple of days of ghost movies and see if anything seems relevant. Wouldn’t it be odd if many of them were true, at least in part, and only the right people could see it?”

“Ned, as much fun as it is to joke about it, we have to come up with a plan. Okay, so I’ve probably lost my job, and I have to move out of this place within the month, and I have no money. But those are things that can be fixed. What we need to worry about is Ellie. She’s already aware of her ability, to some extent.”

“Agreed. We—and by that I mean all of us—can choose to ignore it for a while, but that may be harmful to her, and eventually she’s going to ask more questions. So that’s not an option. What we need is more information.” Ned stopped to think. “Maybe you should look on this hiatus that Leslie handed to you as an opportunity.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know it may be only a few days, but use the time to do as much research as you can. We have to have something a little more concrete to take to Leslie, if we want to convince her that we’re not both crazy and that Ellie needs our help. Go back to the libraries, the historical societies. Go through the documents online. Try to frame a coherent theory, one that hangs together. Then we take it to Leslie.”

“You are such a scientist! You want to convince Leslie with facts, all neatly lined up. What you’re missing is that she’s a mother and she’s terrified of something she doesn’t understand, that directly affects her child. I don’t think logic will be enough, not right now.”

“Do you have any suggestions?” Ned asked.

“Well, I agree I can use the time doing research. But somehow we have to humanize this, put a personal face on it, without scaring Leslie even more. And I hope Ellie knows that we’re trying to help her—I don’t know what Leslie’s said about me, and if Ellie asks, what she’ll say about why Ellie can’t see me again.”

“Why don’t we just hold a seance?” Ned said bitterly.

“You know that’s bunk,” Abby told him. “It’s not like these people come when they’re called. They seem to be attached to particular places. And besides, we can’t move objects around with our minds, or conjure up voices from beyond the grave. But buried in there somewhere there’s a valid point: people want to believe in ghosts, or whatever you want to call them. They seek out mediums and mystics, even though they may suspect they’re charlatans, because they want to hold on to some hope. And maybe, just maybe, that wish persists because a small bit of it is true: they
are
out there, and some people
do
see them. And I don’t think the dead want to harm us, or that they linger for any particular reason. They lived, they died, and they left some tiny portion of themselves behind, and that’s all there is.”