Search for the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  Cover

  Search for the Dead

  Still looking for answers to explain her uncanny ability to see her dead ancestors, Abby shifts her focus to spiritualists, seers, and psychics of all kind. Meeting them with an open mind—and a healthy dose of skepticism—she wants to know if any of them genuinely share her strange experiences or if they’re simply conning gullible people. When she ventures into a series of “readings” given by area psychics, she makes a startling connection that defies even her wildest expectations.

  Unsure what to make of the encounter, Abby turns to her boyfriend, Ned, and the two enlist the help of a scientist friend with equipment that can map the mind. Hoping to pinpoint where the source of their ability lies, they agree to be subjects in a one-of-a-kind experiment. But when Abby is strapped into the machine, the readings—and their implications—are more shocking than either of them could have anticipated.

  Faced with the new, improbable connection and the possibility that the experiment has changed her life irrevocably, Abby will be forced to reevaluate everything she thought she knew about her ability—and herself—and answer the daunting question of what she wants next.

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Search for the Dead

  Sheila Connolly

  Copyright © 2016 by Sheila Connolly

  Material excerpted from Seeds of Deception copyright © 2016 by Sheila Connolly

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  Published by Beyond the Page at Smashwords

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-946069-04-7

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Excerpt from Seeds of Deception

  Books by Sheila Connolly

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Abby Kimball rolled over and pulled the quilt up to her neck. Fall had arrived quickly: the October nights were getting cold in Lexington, and the trees had already begun to burst into color. Plus, the double-hung windows in the Victorian house weren’t exactly airtight, although fixing that was on her to-do list. But right now, from her cozy vantage point, she had an excellent view of Ned Newhall, standing in front of the bathroom sink, a towel wrapped loosely around his waist, staring intently at the mirror as he shaved. He took shaving as seriously as any of his occupations, and he was unaware of her admiring gaze. Abby was determined to enjoy this moment of peace before they both jumped into their usually hectic days.

  Ned finished shaving and splashed water on his face to remove the last of the shaving soap. He dried his face with a towel, then turned to the bedroom and finally noticed that Abby was awake. “Hey, you’re up early.”

  “The sun came up. Besides, I was enjoying the view.”

  “What . . . ? Oh, I see. Glad to be of service. So, what’s on your calendar today?”

  “Nothing. That’s the problem. I need something to do.”

  Ned sat down on the bed. “Abby, you’ve been flat-out busy for the last couple of months, working on this place.”

  “Yes, I have, and I do enjoy it. But in case you hadn’t noticed, I have a mind too.”

  “I know that. So what’s the problem?”

  Abby wondered briefly if now was the right time to get into this discussion, but there never seemed to be a better time. Ned worked long hours—his choice, because he ran his own company. She knew that was because he loved his work and he didn’t spend time clock-watching—although maybe she felt a small twinge of resentment that he stuck to those long hours even though he knew she was waiting for him at home. Still, he came home hungry and tired, and those evening hours weren’t ideal for discussing anything important. So she plunged ahead.

  “For a start, I miss having a job.” Before Ned could protest, Abby held up one hand. “Yes, I know, you’ve got plenty of money to pay for everything, and I’ve been able to overcome my feminist scruples and I’ve accepted being a kept woman, But I need more. We both know our current situation is kind of temporary. We discussed my finding a job a while back, but then I got caught up in making this house livable and that distracted me. For a while.”

  “Hey, I’ve been living here for years and I haven’t had any problems with the place,” Ned said. “I never told you that you had to fix everything.”

  “You’re a man. You have different standards. Just accept that.” Abby softened her comment with a smile. “Look, I wanted to do it. But now I’ve taken care of most of the downstairs projects, fixing the windows, papering the front rooms, scraping paint off of everything. I needed to do that while the days were long and I had the light. But it’s fall now. I’ve always felt that September was the start of the year—I was a geek who actually liked school. So now I’m getting itchy.”

  “Do you want to look for a job?”

  Actually she would love to do just that, but circumstances that she couldn’t control had made that kind of impossible, or difficult at best. Her former boss Leslie had approved when Abby had started seeing Ned, who Leslie had once been engaged to, but that was before Abby had discovered that she could see dead people—or at least those who were related to her—and that Ned shared that ability, something he hadn’t told Leslie when he’d agreed to be a sperm donor for Leslie and her husband. And things had gone from bad to worse when they discovered that Ned and Leslie’s daughter Ellie had inherited Ned’s ability, and her imaginary playmates had once been living people. Leslie had understandably freaked and fired Abby, but since Ellie was going to need help handling her inherited gift, Abby was trying to mend fences with Leslie. Which did not extend to getting her job back.

  “Ned, we talked
about that, and you know all the problems there. After what happened at the museum, and my kind of patchy employment record over the past couple of years, that may be difficult. Leslie might be willing to give me a decent recommendation now, particularly since we’ve spent so much time with Ellie over the summer, but . . . well, I’ve been thinking about something else.”

  Ned lay back and stuffed a couple of pillows behind his head. “Which is?”

  Abby had to make an effort not to reach out and touch him, because that usually led to complications, of more than one kind. Right now she needed to talk. “After we spent that time on the Cape, you promised we could look into this—shoot, I still don’t know what to call it. This psychic thing that keeps happening, that we share. You told me you were at a point at work where you could take some time to focus on the science side of it—the DNA connection.”

  “I figured you’d remember that. I was taking advantage of your slave labor until you brought it up.”

  She checked his expression to see if he was joking. “Ned, I’m serious. Did you mean it?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “Yes, with reservations. Look, this weird ability to ‘see’ our dead relatives—I’m still trying to get a handle on it. On one hand, I’ve been experiencing it far longer than you have. On the other hand, I tried consciously to suppress it for a long time, to not think about it, until you kicked it all out into the open. Maybe you could say I’m hiding in my work to avoid dealing with it, but I guess that’s not fair to you. It doesn’t help you figure anything out.”

  “Do you not want to look at this seriously?” she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral. “If it was just us, that might be possible, but you’ve got Ellie to think of.”

  “I know, and she seems to have inherited whatever this is from me. Certainly not from Leslie.”

  “And she’s young. She needs to understand it sooner rather than later, before the rest of society tells her she’s crazy and to forget about it. She needs our help to do that.”

  “Abby, my daughter is not a guinea pig.”

  “I never said she was! She smart, and she’s observant, and she already knows she has some kind of gift or curse or whatever that makes her different from other kids. We all want her to have a normal life, but we don’t want her to shut down a part of who she is. Right?”

  “Of course,” Ned said reluctantly. “I know I’m being selfish, avoiding the whole problem. Do I assume you have a plan?”

  “Only a rough outline. You’re the scientist—you do the science stuff. Me, I want to look into the history of this thing. I want to figure out what other psychic manifestations are out there, and which ones are pure hooey. Why some are taken more seriously than others.”

  Ned raised one eyebrow. “Hooey?”

  “You know what I mean. Which have been proven to be false. Even what little I’ve read suggests that communicating with the dead was a big thing in the later nineteenth century, and no doubt some percentage of that must have been to con the gullible, who were willing to pay cash to talk to their late great-uncle Elwood and ask him where he hid the treasury bonds. But at the same time, will you agree that another percentage—possibly a smaller one—was real? I mean, we know it is. I want to do the library research, if you want to call it that, sort of across the board, and then figure out what lines to follow up on. Does that make sense?”

  “Of course it does. But what do you hope to find?”

  “You mean, am I looking for a sympathetic group of people to sit around with on Tuesday nights and compare mystical experiences? No. But I do want to understand this, as best I can. I see my dead ancestors, or at least some of them. Most people don’t. I don’t see strangers, except through the eyes of those ancestors. I don’t channel famous people, or witness significant historical events. But we’ve agreed that I’m connected to them in a particular way, and I want to know how and why.”

  “So you can find more?”

  “No, not really. I’m not planning to hunt them down. But I want to know how to handle them when the suddenly appear in front of me without warning, when I’m not expecting it. Given what a big family tree I seem to have in this state, that can happen a lot. It’s not that I’m scared of any of them—I don’t believe they can hurt me. And I’m not sure if we can communicate, or even if they see me. But we know they see some of us—Ellie’s already found that out. Just like you did with Johnnie. I don’t want to sit down to tea and hold conversations with them. I just want to understand. And to help guide Ellie. And to help explain Ellie to her mother.”

  “You have been thinking about this,” Ned said. “I’m sorry if I’ve let you down on my end. Let me get to work and check my calendar. How long do you think we should set aside for this?”

  “Ned, I have no clue how you’re going to approach this using science, much less how long it will take. You’ve told me more than once that you can’t start with an answer and work backward to prove it. You’ve got to go where your findings lead you. So what aspects can you test? DNA, of course.”

  “Yes, but I’d need a bigger sample than you and me and Ellie. I need other people who have this trait and who have passed it on through at least one generation. That may not be easy to find. I can’t just put an ad in the paper saying ‘Looking for psychics. Call this number if you see dead people.’”

  Abby swallowed a laugh. “Of course not, but maybe I can find out more on the human side of things. Aren’t there still spiritualist churches here and there? They believe—or at least some members do—that they can communicate with the dead. I can go talk to people there, if I can find some. And then find out if they’re willing to look more closely.”

  “If you do that, tread carefully, will you? They call these places spiritualist churches or even temples, so it’s kind of a quasi-religion. You don’t want to offend anyone.”

  “Ned, I do know how to be tactful. And maybe I can learn from them. What you need to do is to define some experiments for them, in the event I actually find someone who’s willing to go along with it.”

  “Try the Rhine Institute,” Ned said suddenly.

  “What—those people with the cards and ESP?”

  “That’s where they started, or how they became well known, but they’ve grown from there.”

  “But aren’t they in North Carolina?”

  “Yes, but we can travel, can’t we? The thing is, you—we would have to convince them we’re sincere. We’re not just fishing for a mailing list to sell people something.”

  “Fair enough,” Abby agreed. “I’ll put that on my list, and find out what they’re offering these days. And you can start with blood work and DNA. How do you identify a psychic gene?”

  “I have no idea, but I guess I’m going to find out,” Ned said.

  “Great. Listen, is there anything else on the home repair list that needs to be done before the snow flies?”

  “I’d put sealing up the windows at the top of the list.”

  “Do we have storm windows?”

  “Some, but I’m not sure what shape they’re in. But I want them to look authentic—no plastic or aluminum. If you can track down someone who can make wooden sashes for storms, I’d love to talk to him.”

  And Ned has the money to pay for them, no matter what they cost, Abby reflected.

  “Okay, I’ll look into that. Maybe someone at Sturbridge Village knows someone who can do it.” She paused for a moment and grinned at him. “There are other ways to keep warm, you know.”

  He returned her smile. “That is an option I had not taken advantage of until you moved into this house. Care to experiment?”

  “Are you sure you have time?” Abby batted her eyelashes at him.

  “I’ll make time.”

  Chapter 2

  Over their somewhat delayed breakfast, Abby said, “You know, as we keep demonstrating, there’s a physical component as well as a mental one to this psychic thing. Darn, we really need to find something to call it.”

 
“Arthur?” Ned said, grinding coffee beans.

  “No, that’s a Beatle haircut, you twit. I can’t believe no one else has ever experienced this thing, and they must have come up with some kind of name. I’ll keep my eyes open when I start serious reading. But what I was trying to say was that not only do we see and hear people, but there’s also something that happens through touch, and I don’t mean just when I touch you. I can touch something one of my ancestors has touched, and then I see them, but it’s the physical connection that triggers it most often. Or at least that was true for me in the beginning. And those ancestors must have touched lots of things, but I haven’t encountered any more of those things.”

  Ned poured boiling water over the coffee grounds. “It all comes back to the brain, Abby. We all have multiple senses—sight, smell, hearing and touch—but it’s the brain that translates them into something you can understand and process. There are receptors for all of these sensory capabilities, which are the same but different, if that makes sense. The receptors pick up neural impulses and transmit them. You just happen to pick up past experiences from your ancestors, but it’s still a neural impulse of some kind. And I seem to have the same kind of receptor.” He poured coffee into two mugs and sat down across from her at the kitchen table, pushing one mug toward her.

  “But why do we see some past events and not others?” Abby asked. “And how the heck do those electrical signals just hang around for centuries?”

  “We’ve guessed before that there has to be some strong emotion from the ancestor to leave a trace—you know, grief over a death, or extreme anger. Only the really strong experiences come through—to you, at least. You aren’t seeing people sitting around the fire knitting. My Johnnie, on the other hand, just kind of hung around, and we played together, so there was an interaction in the present. I found out later that he died young, but that doesn’t explain why he showed up to me and only me. If you’d been in my shoes, you might have seen his mother or father mourning him.”