Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4) (22 page)

Ned didn’t seem to notice that her mind was elsewhere. She promised herself that she’d wrap up this hunt for Olivia as soon as she could, so she could get back to paying attention to her ordinary life in the present, which meant Ned.

• • •

The next morning she woke up refreshed and ready to hunt down the Heirs of Isabel. Since they were relatively recent, it should be simple enough to find names online for the people involved, and then to work out whether there were still any in the area. And keep her fingers crossed that they would have some information that she could use. Well, it was a nice theory: information about long-dead generations was spread all over the Internet, but information about living people was harder to come by, unless you had a legal reason. Abby supported the idea of protecting people’s privacy—if that was even possible anymore, when even the federal government could be hacked—but it didn’t make her job any easier.

What did she know about Isabel? Not much, save that she’d been adopted sometime around or after 1885, because Abby had seen Olivia as a young woman at that point, and Isabel had been a babe in arms. But even now it was hard to get hold of adoption records, and she had no standing in this case. Still, Isabel should appear in the censuses, starting with 1900.

As she had expected, Abby quickly found William and his wife in 1900, in the big house on the hill in Waltham that she had seen with Ned. Isabel was there, listed as “adopted daughter,” age eleven, and both of Isabel’s parents were said to have been born in Massachusetts. So what she had “seen” must have taken place around a decade earlier, but there were no 1890 censuses to check. By 1910, William had come down a bit in the world. He’d moved out of the big house, into a smaller one closer to town, and he was working at a different company. Isabel was still listed as living there, although she was twenty-one—and now defined as a “daughter” without qualification. By 1920 Abby knew William had passed on, but his wife continued to live in the house, with two men described in the census as “lodger.” Did that make it a boardinghouse? How far had the Flaggs come down in the world? Elizabeth Flagg was in her seventies by then. Isabel had married, and appeared on the same census page; when Abby checked the map, it turned out that the house was right around the corner from her mother’s. She’d been a good and faithful daughter, adopted or not. At that point Isabel had four children: two boys first, and then two girls. Her husband worked for a bank in the town.

By 1930, Elizabeth had just died, Abby knew, although she was surprised to see that the Flagg house already had new occupants. Maybe having a banker for a son-in-law facilitated probate and other legal matters. Isabel and her husband seemed to have stopped at four children, the youngest now eleven. And by 1940, the most recent census released by the government, Isabel too was gone, and one of the children was no longer listed in the house, although a servant had been added. Overall Abby was pleased: she had the names of the four children. One she knew from the cemetery—the older boy, named for his father, had been killed in World War Two, and hadn’t married before his death. That left one boy and two girls to track down. Time to do more digging.

Abby knew that modern records were harder to come by than the older ones, unless of course you were a hacker, which she was not. She could prove that the second son was born and that he married—and that he’d apparently taken a cruise to Jamaica in 1938, on the same ship as the DuPonts of Wilmington, which was irrelevant but amusing. Or was it irrelevant? The family must have been reasonably well-off if they could afford a cruise in such nice company. But to pin down any of
his
children, she’d have to try other sources, like city directories and newspaper articles and obituaries. It was slow going, but it usually worked.

After another couple of hours, Abby knew that the surviving son had had two children, who appeared to have stayed in Massachusetts; the elder daughter had married and had one child, and the younger daughter four. Tracking them all down now was a different question. Her best bet was to look at local papers, for weddings and funerals, and hope that other family members had been mentioned, ideally with their married names. She spent a couple of hours trying that approach and was disappointed at how little she found, after her earlier successes. On the plus side, originally the family had been of high enough social standing to merit mentions in the
Boston Globe,
and its archives were online. On the minus side, there were few new names for her, and none for the next generation. She came away with a few surnames, plus the information that some of that generation had scattered to other states.

What now? She’d already determined that information on Thomas Clarkson’s family was patchy at best. He seemed to have stayed in or around Lynn for most of his life, but apart from that one early census listing, Abby couldn’t find any evidence of other family members. The
Globe
didn’t cough up an obituary in 1892, although the paper did show that Clarkson was holding a Special Art Sale in Boston in 1876—relatively early in his career—offering “A Collection of Good Pictures.” He was also briefly mentioned in a review in 1877, and he was part of another auction later that year. And there the trail went cold.

Abby pushed her chair back and stared into space. She already missed having Olivia the kitten to talk to—at least she had been a diversion. After her morning of research, she hadn’t been able to add much new information. Olivia had owned that house on the Cape, but Abby had no way of knowing
why
she had bought it—why then? Why there? Olivia had been sad in that house, to the point of tears. Why? There were so many possibilities. Olivia was depressed. She had lost her husband years earlier, her daughter was having major problems with her own husband, and the money was running out. Who wouldn’t cry, given the chance? She was only a couple of years from her own death—had she known she was ill? Olivia was sick, lonely and broke. All worth crying about. Maybe she kept the painting as the last remnant of happier, earlier days.

Abby wished there was someone she could ask. Ellie understood, in her own way, but Abby couldn’t consult an eight-year-old. And Ellie was busy with a new school year and a kitten and a recuperating father, and might not want to be dragged back into this thing. Abby didn’t have the right to ask her to stay involved. Leslie certainly wouldn’t approve, and Abby wanted to stay on Leslie’s good side as a way of keeping in contact with her daughter.

She looked at the scribbled notes spread around the table. She had collected a few more names, but no way was she going to go chasing all of them all over the country. She had to narrow the field somehow. All right: Isabel Flagg had married a local banker named Bailey Whitman. They had had four children, and the eldest one, Bailey Junior, had died in the war. That left three: a son and two daughters. From what she had found, Abby thought the daughters, Eleanore and Victoria, had married and moved out of state, with different surnames, and it would be a lot of work to track them down. That left the second son, Franklin, who had remained in Massachusetts. The last piece of information she had found from local newspapers was that he had had at least one son, and in Franklin Whitman’s local obituary, a couple of sons were listed, living in the same area. Therefore she should follow the Whitman name in eastern Massachusetts.

Yet even Abby had to recognize that anyone living and breathing now was unlikely to know anything about a person, relative or not, that they had never known, three or four generations back. Unless she was lucky enough to run into another manic genealogist, but she couldn’t count on that. Otherwise, they were unlikely to welcome a crazy woman asking about those long-gone relatives.
Give it up, Abby,
she told herself.
It’s a wild-goose chase.

No.
Something inside her wouldn’t let her, not yet. All right, she was going to make one last stab at this. She even had the perfect cover story: she had a painting by a local artist who had been moderately famous in his day, and whose paintings were still selling, even online. She had reason to believe that her family had had some connection to the artist, and she wanted to know more about it. The painting had come down through her family, and she wondered if maybe her great-great-whatever had actually known the artist? That kind of question would be nonthreatening, wouldn’t it? And luckily the surname Whitman was uncommon enough that the list wouldn’t be too long. She would leave it up to the gods—or Olivia?—to help her in finding whatever it was she was looking for. Or hinder her. Maybe there were some secrets that should die with their owners. But in any case, if there were no Whitmans within a reasonable distance from where she sat, she would put the problem to bed once and for all.

Abby started searching for Whitmans in Massachusetts, starting with Lynn and Waltham and Cape Cod. She decided, rather arbitrarily, that she should cut off her research at the midpoint of the state, the Connecticut River Valley. Anywhere east of there was fair game. In a couple of hours she had collected a list of maybe twenty-five names. With a sigh she started calling. For those where a human voice answered, it took longer with each call than she had hoped, although she shouldn’t have been surprised: with each caller she had to identify herself and explain why she was calling, and as she had feared, there were many people who couldn’t even give specifics about their grandparents, never mind someone who had died in the late nineteenth century. Some people were interested, and a percentage of them asked if there was any money in it for them. When Abby told them no, they quickly lost interest. Others hung up on her.

She had saved the likeliest for last. After a few more calls where nobody human answered the phone, she tried a number in Osterville. A woman answered, sounding peeved even before Abby started her spiel. “Yeah, right, I’m Brenda Whitman. You calling about the yard sale? Because it doesn’t start until tomorrow. No early birds.”

“Can you give me directions?”

The woman spat out a couple of street names, and finally said, exasperated, “Look it up, lady. I’m busy.” She hung up.

Well, okay, that was rude, Abby thought. But if the woman was getting ready for a yard sale, she was probably harried. It was the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, and there should be a lot of traffic. Didn’t people always show up at yard sales looking for bargains? Abby looked down at her list: everything was crossed off. All right, she’d go to the yard sale at the Whitman residence tomorrow. And maybe she’d swing by the house in West Falmouth and say good-bye to Olivia one more time, and then leave in time to beat the rotary traffic. She started to gather up her papers into neat stacks. But before she shut down her computer, she checked to see where Osterville was: only a few miles beyond West Falmouth, along the coast. All she would have to do was to follow Route 28.

When Ned arrived home, Abby was happily chopping vegetables. “Looks good—what is it?” he asked.

“I think it’s pasta primavera, although maybe it should be pasta
estate,
since this is summer, not spring. Anyway, I thought I should use the vegetables while they were still fresh. Next year I’ll try to plant herbs, if I remember. I don’t know if I’m ambitious enough to do a vegetable garden.”

“We have plenty of time,” Ned said, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing the back of her neck.

“How soon do you want to eat dinner?” Abby said breathlessly.

“I’m in no hurry.”

“Good.”

An hour later Abby dumped a boiling pot of pasta into a strainer, then poured her improvised sauce over them and mixed the whole mess with a large pair of forks. Then she transferred the result into two broad bowls, and set one at each of their places. “There.
Mangia.”

“Have you been to Italy?”

“Only the high points—Rome, Florence, Venice—right after college. And what I could see from a train. You?”

Ned shook his head. “We should go sometime.”

“Hey, you want to plan vacations, I can give you a long shopping list.”

“What?” he asked, smiling. “In this country? In Europe? Somewhere else?”

She kept forgetting that Ned had money. “London, Paris, Dublin. Hadrian’s Wall. The great cathedrals. How about Australia? The Sydney Opera House?”

“What, no beaches on tropical islands?”

“I like to go places to do things, not to lie in the sun and beg for skin cancer. Do you have a wish list?”

“Pretty much the same as yours. I just haven’t wanted to take that kind of vacation by myself.”

Abby smiled: she understood how he felt. It was much more fun to share experiences like that. “Well, now you’ve got me for companionship. I am a very good tourist: I like everything. The food, the scenery, the art. It’s all good.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” He forked up some spaghetti and chewed. “Any breakthroughs today?”

“Well, I decided when I’m cutting this off. I tried to follow the descendants of the adopted daughter Isabel Flagg to the present day, but it got too complicated, especially for the ones who left the state, and the records aren’t as easily available as the older ones. I found a few people with the right surname who lived in this part of Massachusetts, so I started calling them. It occurred to me that I have a great story in Thomas Clarkson, since he was sort of a public figure as an artist. Plus, I have the picture, and that gives me a great excuse to talk about him and his family, and ask if any of the Whitmans knew anything about him. It’s easier than trying to explain the genealogy over the phone. I got a lot of no answers, and some hang-ups, and a few people who didn’t know anything. I thought I’d hit another dead end, but there’s one Whitman family on the Cape that might be promising. Even if they aren’t related, they’re having a yard sale tomorrow, and I really need to get out of the house.”

“Well, happy hunting on both fronts. Just remember the weekend traffic.”

“I just hope the trip is worth it.”

Chapter 23