Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead (23 page)

Ned was staring at her. “Abigail, you are an amazing woman. You’ve made more sense out of this in six months than I have in twenty-five years. All right! We do our homework, and then we confer and come up with the best explanation we can.”

“I know where I can look, but what will you be doing?”

“I’ll come at it from a different direction,” he said. “With science.” He didn’t elaborate. But Abby was tired, after a long and stressful day, and she didn’t feel like pursuing it at that moment.

“So we have until the weekend to sort things out,” she said. “I know the Littleton Historical Society will be open on Saturday, so I’ll go through the other resources before that so I can use my time there wisely. You’re sure Leslie doesn’t share some ancestors with you back up the line?”

“It never occurred to me to ask. If I give you her maiden surname and date of birth, can you work with that?”

“Did she always live around here?”

“I think so.”

“Then I can put together something basic, I think. But that’s not the top priority. What we really want is a clear line from your past family through your mother and you to Ellie, showing that this sort of thing has popped up before, and that may not be easy to demonstrate.”

Ned stood up. “I have boundless faith in your abilities. Uh, am I staying? Or would you rather have some time to yourself?”

“Idiot—you have to ask? Besides, I can sleep in tomorrow—I don’t have to be anywhere.”

The one plus she’d found so far with her suspension, but it was a good one.

23

Ned left early the next morning, and Abby lay in bed, listening to the birds wake up outside. What should she do next? Funny—she’d gotten used to having the structure of a daily job to shape her days. She’d been uncomfortable when she and Brad had been together and all she’d had to do was unpack boxes and hang pictures. It had made her feel like a leech, or a servant. Brad had taken her frustration at not having a job as an insult, a statement that his income wasn’t good enough. He hadn’t recognized that she needed to feel useful and productive, as much as he did. And he had thought that what she cared about—teaching children—was beneath her (or his?) dignity. Coming back to it at the museum had made her happy, although by then Brad hadn’t been around to see that.

All right, she knew she didn’t have a job for the next few days, at least, and maybe longer, depending on whether or when Leslie cooled off. Abby had to admit that even if she and Leslie managed to work things out with each other, it might not be a good idea for Abby to keep working at the museum—too uncomfortable for everyone involved.

Or maybe not; maybe Leslie would prefer to keep her around as a psychic consultant of sorts, to help her manage Ellie’s abilities as she grew up. And on the side, Abby could shake hands with every schoolchild who passed through the museum and see if she could identify any others. She could create her own psychic children’s army for—what?

This was getting ridiculous. She flung back the rumpled covers, jumped out of bed, and headed for the shower.

Upstairs in the kitchen she made coffee, toasted a bagel, and sat down at the table to think. But soon she found herself staring out the window, her mind drifting. She’d felt depressed yesterday, after all that had happened, and things had looked bleak. But maybe Ned had been right. Maybe this time off—even if it was open-ended—was a blessing in disguise. She could finally dig in and fill in some of the blanks on her family tree, and start new ones for some other lines that Ned either didn’t have or hadn’t shared with her. And definitely one for Leslie. She didn’t know what the rules were for this ability. She was now pretty sure that some part of it was hereditary, but put two people with that ability together, related or not, and it was somehow reinforced or magnified. Maybe Ellie’s gift had suddenly blossomed merely because she’d met and spent some time with Abby (something she wasn’t about to suggest to Leslie).

But Abby had doubts about that last part. Ellie had seemed to expect to “see” the man in the first cemetery—which hinted that she’d seen him, or others like him, before?—and Abby couldn’t even see him. And that story Ellie had written showed that she had already given it some thought. Abby had always found that there was something wonderful about children in general: they accepted the world they knew without judgment. If you started “seeing” people, you thought that was normal until other people started telling you that they
couldn’t
see them and that you were weird. Abby had no idea how many children might possess this ability, only to have it trampled on by peers or parental pressure. Hadn’t there been something like that in
Mary Poppins
? Or
The Once and Future King
? Of course, she hadn’t ever noticed anything like that in herself when she was growing up, and it had only emerged because she was under a lot of emotional stress—trying her best to deny that Brad was not the right man for her, living in a new place, with no job or friends—and because she had simultaneously encountered Ned, who both had the ability and the same ancestors as she did. The combined influences had been inescapable—assuming the underlying ability was there. Other, more normal people might just have had a nervous breakdown.

Abby smiled at herself. All things considered, she had managed to cheer herself up, and she felt pretty good right now. She had better get started on sorting things out, so she pulled out a pad of lined paper and started making a list. First bullet point: she needed to find out as much as she could about the Perrys of Littleton, since that seemed to be the nexus here, or maybe she meant the catalyst. But she’d already combed through the online resources pretty well, and she suspected that the best bet for additional information would be the historical society, which wasn’t open until Saturday. She might be able to call and set up an appointment sooner, but she’d keep that idea in reserve. Bullet point two: fill in Ned’s family tree. He’d long since given her a printout of what he had, which is how they’d determined they shared ancestors, but she needed to enter the data into her program and see where they intersected with her own. Which led to bullet point three: sort out her own father’s tree, which she had ignored so far—there might be more connections there that she didn’t know about. Bullet point four: put together a basic tree for Leslie. Maybe her family lines intersected too, but Leslie, like Abby’s mother, hadn’t received the right combination of genes, or had managed to erase the ability years ago, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a recessive psychic gene lurking somewhere. Abby wouldn’t know unless she looked.

And for a change of pace, Abby could roam through any local cemeteries and “call” for relatives and see who showed up. Or she could visit wherever the property records for Middlesex County were kept and see where Henry Perry and his family might have lived, and then check out those sites. Abby could picture herself laying hands on trees and rocks, or even a building if the earlier ones survived, and waiting for someone to appear. She’d probably get arrested. She smiled again, imagining how she could try to explain what she was doing to a local police officer. Not a good idea, although checking locations wasn’t a bad one. She’d keep that on the list.

While she had been sitting at the table, the sky had darkened and was now dumping rain on her view. April showers, or more likely, April downpours. That made her decision for her: online research today. She cleared off her scant breakfast dishes, retrieved her laptop and her research folders, and spread everything out on the table.

A few hours later she took a break for lunch and to refill her coffee mug. The rain continued, spattering against the window. Starting from scratch to build—plant?—anyone’s family tree was painstaking and tedious. Sometimes that didn’t bother her, because it was like embarking on a hunt, weeding out the false trails, spotting errors. But now there was a greater urgency, and as she was well aware, when she got tired it was all too easy to make mistakes or overlook something, which only made things worse.

After a quick lunch Abby dug into her research again. When she was bored with trying to sort out tangled family relationships, she took a stab at finding land records, but for the areas she was interested in, only the last quarter century or so was available online. To view the real earlier records she’d have to go to Cambridge, another idea she filed away to think about. Right now she had to decide what route would pay off most quickly, because she wanted to give Leslie as much information as possible when they met again, which could be as early as the weekend.

What Abby found online convinced her that going back to the Littleton Historical Society was the best solution. While their holdings might be small, they were the most relevant, and most of their records had not been published so weren’t available anywhere else. How did it happen that Leslie and her husband had settled there? Was there a family connection, or had the choice been driven by proximity to their respective work places and/or affordability? Had they bought their home before or after Ellie had been born? (Abby shuddered to think that Ellie might have directed them to that location while
in utero
because that’s what her ancestors wanted.)

Abby stood up and walked around the kitchen, just to get her blood flowing again. Outside it was growing dark, a damp gloomy dark, and she fought to keep the weather from dragging down her mood. She boiled water for a pot of tea, which might be more soothing than yet another cup of coffee; if she drank much more of that, her fingers would be so jittery that she couldn’t hit the right keys on the keyboard. While she waited for the tea to brew, she reviewed what she’d collected, trying to sort out the critical points. She had a skimpy family tree for Leslie: no genealogical connection that she could find, although it could be hiding further back in history than she had gone. Either way, she thought it was safe to assume that Ellie had inherited her ability from Ned, not Leslie. Abby and Ellie had not seen or felt the same things, so maybe Ellie’s ability had come through a different line of Ned’s, one that Abby did not share. It made a kind of sense, since she had seen Henry Perry several times where Ned hadn’t, and Henry was connected only to her, not to him.

But her ability to “see” people from the past was still growing, leapfrogging over Ned’s. Of course, she was now open to it, mostly, while Ned had been suppressing it for most of his adult life. His might come back, if he wanted it to, or not. She had no idea where she would end up with hers; she would definitely have to learn how to control it if she went much further.

She was so focused on her thoughts that she jumped when she heard her cell phone ring. She retrieved it from her bag and recognized her mother’s number. She felt a moment of panic: how many lies was she going to have to tell her?

She hit the Connect button. “Hi, Mom!” she greeted her, in a cheery voice that sounded false to her.

“Hi, darling,” her mother’s warm voice replied. Abby swallowed a sudden urge to cry. “How is everything? We haven’t heard from you lately.”

“It’s been kind of crazy around here,” Abby said. It was certainly true, but not the way her mother would imagine. “You know, Concord makes a really big thing about Patriots’ Day. Oh, right, you probably don’t pay much attention to that. But it’s a state holiday here, and since Concord is where things started, they have a parade and reenactments and all sorts of things like that.”

“And your museum takes part in that?”

“Of course. We’re right on the path. In fact, we have one of the lanterns from Old North Church that sent Paul Revere off on his famous ride. Half of the ‘two if by sea,’ if you will.”

“Oh, my! Are you still enjoying the job?”

If I still have one
. “Oh, yes. The kids are great—I’m so glad to be working with them again. And of course, there’s so much history to work with around here, it’s easy to put together programs.”

“And didn’t you tell us that you were going to have to move out of the house where you’re staying? When’s that happening? Do you know where you’ll be going?”

“I haven’t really decided yet, I’ve been so busy. But I’ve got until the middle of next month to find something.” With no income—that was going to be fun.

“What about that nice young man you told us about? Are you still seeing him?”

Abby had been careful to limit her comments about Ned, for fear that her parents would insist on driving down to meet him, and she really wasn’t ready to face that. She hadn’t been before this whole mess had exploded, and she was even less so now. “Yes, now and then. But I don’t know yet if it’s serious.” That was a monumental understatement, if not a bald-faced lie.

“I know you took some time off at Christmas, but can you sneak in a short visit with us? You and your young man? We’d love to see you.”

Abby swallowed again.
I’d love to see you too, Mom, and Dad, but not until I’ve sorted out some kind of important things
. “Maybe once the school year is over—I won’t have so many programs to manage. Besides, summer’s nice in Maine.”

“Then we’ll look forward to that!” her mother replied happily, grabbing the suggestion and turning it into fact, but Abby could hear the disappointment she tried to cover, that they wouldn’t be getting together sooner.

“How’s Dad?” Her father never initiated phone calls, and in fact hated talking on the phone.

“He’s well, dear. A little problem with his sciatica, but that’s always better come summer. It’s the winters that are hard for him. But he’s out in his woodshop now, planning all sorts of home repair projects, as usual. I wish he’d finish up the old ones before he starts something new, but that’s your father for you.”

“Mom! You make him sound like an old man! He’s only, what, fifty-something? And you know he does really nice work—he’s very meticulous.”

“Almost sixty, but he won’t admit it most of the time. And yes, his work is lovely, but don’t tell him I said so. He never cleans up his sawdust until it requires a shovel. Don’t you worry about us, sweetie, we’re fine. I just wanted to hear your voice.”