Relatively Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  Well, not yet—that much she was sure of. What did she want to know? Well, for a start, where William Flagg had come from. Who was he? If she looked at censuses, she could figure out where he had been born, and where Elizabeth had been born as well.

  She found William and his family listed in Waltham in 1910 and 1900. The 1900 census yielded a prize: a notation next to baby Isabel’s name that she was adopted. Abigail smiled to herself. She had been right in guessing that the tension in that room had had something to do with the baby.

  The 1890 census did not exist, except for a Civil War special pension list, but there she struck gold: not only was William listed, but the record gave his address, and it wasn’t the house she had seen. So he had bought the place after 1890, or at least he hadn’t occupied it yet. Abby wondered how long the remodeling of the building would have taken in those days. Unfortunately, the members of William’s household were not given in the limited 1890 record, so she turned back to 1880. No William in Waltham, but she found him in Lynn: age thirty-three, with wife Elizabeth, also thirty-three, and daughter Olivia, age thirteen. So by 1890, he would have been all of forty-three, and not yet fifty when he bought his “mansion.” In 1880 William had been a retail bookseller. How on earth had he parlayed that modest occupation into something that enabled him to buy the handsome Hawley place just over ten years later? Abby shook her head. There was too much she didn’t know about . . . well, lots of things. Housing costs in the late nineteenth century. Relative salaries or income for various professions. The demographic mix of Waltham at that time. What the neighbors would say about a rather late baby. Would tongues have wagged if that baby had been born “on the wrong side of the blanket”?

  Then Abby stopped herself. What did it matter? What was her stake in this? She really wasn’t sure. She’d had this dream, or vision, or something, and it had turned out to be about real people, who had lived and died within a mile of her current home. She’d never heard of them before. She’d never been to Massachusetts before, much less Waltham. They weren’t famous, so she couldn’t have read about them somewhere and then forgotten about it. Then why did she know their faces, know what their dining room had looked like in eighteen-ninety-something?

  So these unknown and long-dead people had popped into her head when she’d walked into their house, and kind of taken over. What did it all mean? For a terrifying moment, she felt as though she was standing on the edge of a vast black roaring space, someplace that terrified her. And then it passed, and she was back staring at her scrawled notes. She was not ready to think about what it all meant. She would take her little pile of information to Ned tomorrow and maybe he could explain it for her. That was all she could do for now.

  * * *

  On Saturday morning Brad aimed a haphazard peck at Abby’s cheek as she lay cocooned in the bedsheets, after he’d woken her by bumbling around the bedroom getting himself outfitted for his golf excursion. Abby would have welcomed an extra hour of sleep, but at least Brad seemed cheerful, whistling as he filled his pockets.

  “Bye, babe—gotta go. We’ve got an early tee time. And we may hang around after—I don’t know yet. I’ll give you a call later when I know what the plan is.”

  Abby thought briefly about reminding him that she had research plans today but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. She lay in bed, following the sounds of his noisy exit process. Finally she heard the door slam, and he was gone. She gave a small sigh of relief and sat up. Maybe Brad’s plans didn’t include her, but today she didn’t mind—for once she had plans of her own. She was looking forward to meeting Ned and showing him what she’d found. Not a bad haul for a novice, she thought.

  She showered, dressed, and made her way to the kitchen, where she brewed a pot of coffee, heated up some cinnamon rolls, and laid her notes out on the table. As she went through them, trying to keep cinnamon sugar off them, she made a list of key dates, until she had a pretty fair outline of William Flagg’s life in Waltham and before. She sat back, sipping her coffee, and studied the list. William had been born, raised, prospered, and died in Massachusetts. That had nothing to do with her: she had never seen Massachusetts before this year. The decision she and Brad had made to move to Waltham had been prompted by economic factors more than anything else, not some vague historical attraction. She shook her head; her little episode, whatever it was, made no sense.

  She was early for her rendezvous with Ned. She waited on the front steps of the library, hugging her notes to her chest, turning from side to side to watch in both directions along the main street. On Saturday morning it bustled with both auto and foot traffic. She’d heard there was a farmer’s market somewhere in town and made a mental note to check it out, if it was still open this late in September. She checked her watch nervously, but that didn’t make the minute hand move any more quickly.

  Finally she spied Ned half a block away, walking toward her. She studied him before he spotted her: middle height, middle coloring. No one who would stand out in a crowd. He walked purposefully toward where she stood waiting. She found herself comparing him to Brad, who always walked in public with a bit of a swagger, as if he was announcing to the world “see how important I am.” Apparently Ned didn’t feel any need to do that.

  When he was in earshot, he called out to her, “Hey, you made it.” He bounded up the shallow stairs two at a time until he stood next to her. “You look better than the last time I saw you. What luck did you have?” He eyed the stack of papers she was still clutching.

  “A lot, I think. I want to show you—”

  He interrupted her. “You look cold. I said we could meet in the library, but we’d have to be quiet there, and there’re probably a lot of high school kids in there today. There’s a place we can get coffee just down the block, and we can snag a booth and get comfortable. Sound good?”

  Abby realized that hot coffee was an appealing idea. “Sure. Lead the way.”

  He went down the stairs and waited for her to follow. They chatted until they reached an unprepossessing diner a block away. Ned opened the door and held it for her, letting her pass. Inside, he raised a hand to the man behind the counter, then made a beeline for a booth at the back. At mid-morning, the place was not crowded. As Abby slid into the booth, the proprietor deposited two steaming mugs of coffee on the table.

  “Thanks, Tom,” Ned threw after his retreating form.

  “You must come here often,” Abby commented, struggling out of her jacket. Ned reached over to hold a sleeve, helping her disentangle herself.

  “On and off. It’s convenient to the library, and the coffee’s good.”

  Abby took a cautious sip and was pleasantly surprised. “You’re right—it is.” She sat back and relaxed her shoulders.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No, I’m fine. I’d really like to start looking at the stuff on William Flagg. If that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure. You go first.” Ned sat back on his side of the booth and watched as Abby pulled out her materials and laid them out on the table. “You’ve been busy,” he said approvingly.

  “Well, I had the time, and it was sort of interesting. I haven’t done any kind of research for a while, and I’ve rarely used original documents, so it was fun.” She surveyed the piles in front of her, organizing her thoughts. “All right. First of all, I think I was right, that the younger daughter was adopted. She’s listed that way in the censuses.” She saw for a moment the scene in the house that she had somehow called up; was the argument about the baby? Was the man—William—trying to convince his wife that they should adopt her? Was the baby William’s child from an illicit relationship? Evidence for those would be hard to come by.

  “Good call,” Ned said. “What else?”

  Abby pulled out her timeline. “As near as I can tell, William was living in Waltham by 1890, but not in that house. He had moved there by 1895, according to the city directories. But by 1903 he was living at another address in town. He stayed there
until he died, and his widow lived there until she died fifteen years later. The older daughter, Olivia, when she married, lived a few blocks away, but then she and her husband disappear from the local directories after a couple of years—I’m not sure where they went yet. The other daughter—the younger one—stayed around, and married a local man. In fact, once I looked at a street map, I realized that after she married, she and the Flaggs lived at adjoining properties. And when Elizabeth Flagg died, it was in her adopted daughter’s house. So they must have gotten along, at least.”

  Ned nodded. “Interesting. Maybe Dad bought the house for her—might be interesting to check local property records. But the rest fits with what I know. I talked to the person at the school who keeps the archives there. They have a great map of the property, and it looks like William owned the house and land by 1893, although he might not have moved in right away if he was busy remodeling the place. And the younger daughter went to school there. Did you look at the obituaries in the library?”

  Abby shuffled through her pile of papers. “Yes, I’ve got William’s and his wife’s here somewhere. Mostly I was looking at city histories, directories, maps. And then I found the census stuff at the archives. Oh, and William had a military record, in the Civil War. He was from the western part of the state then, not around here. But Elizabeth collected a widow’s pension when she was living here.”

  A plate of Danish pastry materialized on the table, and Tom refilled their coffee mugs and disappeared. Ned helped himself to a pastry and chewed contemplatively, lost in thought. Abby felt deflated: she was not sure if all her findings got her any nearer to understanding why she had “seen” these people. Maybe “seen” wasn’t the right word, but she wasn’t sure what to call her experience. In fact, she wasn’t sure what to do next. Finally she decided she might as well get things out in the open, right now. Then Ned could tell her she was barmy and walk away.

  Not that she wanted that to happen, but better sooner than later. “All right, we now know a lot more about William’s family history. But we still don’t know why I . . . saw him. And it was him, because I found a picture of him in an old newspaper at the library. Before you ask, I had never seen him before, until that thing in the dining room.”

  Ned looked at her speculatively. “You’re sure about what you saw?”

  Abby felt a stab of dismay—was he going to doubt her now? But she knew what she knew. She took a breath. “Yes. I know it sounds absurd, but it was incredibly clear, like I was standing there. And I could hear them arguing. I could . . . feel the baby I was holding. It was like I was inside Olivia, watching.” She glared at him, challenging him to contradict her.

  Ned was silent for several beats, looking at her face, assessing her. Finally he nodded. “All right. What do you want to do next?”

  Abby stared at him as a surge of relief flooded her. “You believe me? Really? This whole thing seems so weird—I’m not like that, not usually.”

  “Like what?” Ned looked amused.

  “Woo-woo. Fey. Call it whatever you want. I don’t see things. So I’m kind of lost here. What do you think I should do?”

  Ned took his time answering, idly swirling his spoon around his coffee, not looking at Abby. At last he said, “It seems to me you have two choices. One, you say Gee, what an interesting thing that was, and then forget about it. Two, you decide you want to know why William Flagg, who’s been dead for a century, and his family have suddenly shown up in your head.”

  Abby’s mouth twitched. “And if I go for door number two, what would I do?”

  Ned sighed and selected his words with great care. “Abby, I don’t know you very well, so I’m not sure how you’re going to react to what I’m about to say. And you have every right to decide I’m the nutcase here and walk out. But let me lay out this idea: maybe what you saw was a true vision of something that really happened, and somehow you picked up on it. And that may mean that you have some sort of, uh, psychic sensitivity—maybe just for William and his family, or maybe it goes beyond that. You said you’ve never had anything like this happen before? Maybe a sense of déjà vu, someplace you’ve visited? A feeling that you knew what was going to happen, or what had happened?”

  Abby shook her head. “No, nothing like that. My mother always said I had no imagination at all. Maybe no empathy either—I don’t even cry at sad movies, they just seem silly and predictable. So I’m the last person I’d expect to be having visions of the dead. Is that what you think is going on?”

  Ned smiled, more to himself than to her. “I wouldn’t go that far. Heck, maybe you’re growing an imagination, just a little later than most people. Maybe you were imagining that room with people in it.”

  “And the guy just happened to look exactly like William Flagg?” Abby demanded.

  “There is that. The question is, do you want to forget about it, pretend it never happened, or do you want to explore this and see where it takes you?”

  “I don’t know.” If she allowed herself to stop and think, she knew this whole thing would appear strange. Maybe she was just adrift in a new place where she knew no one. Maybe William Flagg was her new imaginary friend. Yeah, right. Then she was struck by an awful thought. “Ned, you’re not some sort of weird cultist or something? Or a sci-fi nut? Is that why you’re encouraging me?”

  He laughed. “No, I’m a perfectly ordinary science geek who happens to like history. I can give you references, if it would make you feel better. But—” He paused, looking a bit sheepish. “Even though I’m a scientist, I told you I like old houses. And I find I keep running into things in those houses that I can’t explain through any logical processes. So call me curious. I try to keep an open mind. I’m not going to tell you you’re losing your marbles because you are seeing people who aren’t there—at least, not there in the here and now. But we know they were real, and they’ve been there, sometime in the past. So”—he sat up straighter in his seat—“let me propose that we take this a step further and see where it leads us. I believe you saw what you saw, but I can’t explain why you saw it. The question is, will it happen again? Can you make it happen, or at least go looking for it? Or does that idea scare you?”

  Abby thought about that. When William and family had appeared in front of her, she hadn’t felt scared; what she had felt was the anger and sorrow in the room. Theirs, not hers. She did not feel threatened by the people she had seen; they weren’t haunting her. Maybe if she was prepared for it, if she was expecting it, it wouldn’t be a problem.

  Ned had said “we.” So he wanted to help? Could he help? In spite of her misgivings, Abby was intrigued. “If I wanted to do that, what would I do? Or we?”

  He smiled. “We can try some experiments. How about we start with checking out a few other places where we know William has been, see if that triggers anything, if you see him again? Or anyone else from that room? Or maybe even someone you haven’t seen? If you’ve got the time, that is.”

  Abby thought about her bleak apartment, and about Brad out playing golf with his buddies, and about her total lack of purpose. This was clearly the most interesting thing that had happened to her since she had arrived in Massachusetts, and maybe even before. “Sure, I’ve got the time. Where do we start?”

  Ned gave her a true grin this time. “How about the cemetery where William’s buried? It’s only a couple of miles from here.”

  Abby grinned back. “You’re on.”

  4

  Ned tucked a couple of dollars under his coffee cup and stood up. “Ready?”

  Abby was startled. “Now?”

  “Why not? It’s a beautiful day. Did you have other plans? We could do it another day, or you could go when you have the time.”

  Time she had plenty of. And she realized she would like to have a buddy, so to speak, for her foray into seeking the dead. Damn, she was going to have to come up with a good term for this. It wasn’t exactly ghost hunting. She didn’t think she could talk to anyone she was seeing, and they di
dn’t see her. As far as she knew. One episode was pretty slim data to base any conclusions on.

  She realized Ned was still waiting for an answer. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  “One car or two?”

  Abby looked at him critically. This was her last chance to decide that he was a demented serial killer and run away. Standing there in the shabby coffee shop, Ned looked perfectly ordinary, a little rumpled maybe. In fact, he looked like a Boy Scout. Just because he’d invited her to go look for a . . . formerly living person in the local cemetery didn’t mean he was dangerous. Did it? She decided she trusted him. “Why don’t you drive? You can drop me off at my car after. You know where you’re going, and I don’t.”

  “Great.” Once again he led the way, holding the door open for her. His car was parked in front of the coffee shop. It resembled him: sturdy, dependable, a little frayed, and definitely not flashy. Brad would scoff at it. Abby smiled at her thoughts as she climbed in on the passenger side. Ned pulled out carefully, waving cheerily at a mother in an SUV who stopped to let him merge into traffic, and then went around the block. They followed the main street away from the library, out of town. A mile or so beyond the end of the commercial district, they came to a cemetery that covered several acres. Ned pulled his car through the gates and into the narrow road. Luckily there were no other visitors, so he stopped and parked on one of the one-lane roads.

  “This is it.”

  Abby looked up the shallow rise at the varied tombstones. Even to her unpracticed eye, she could tell that the ones on the side near town were earlier—scraggly rows of dark slate, like so many she’d seen while driving through the towns around here. The stones grew newer as the cemetery filled toward the east, and the latest ones looked to be mid-twentieth century. The site was surrounded by an iron fence supported by sturdy stone piers, and the grass and shrubbery were well-tended. There was no living being visible, unless you counted the squirrels, but she could hear voices of children who were playing in adjoining backyards.