Relatively Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  She turned to look at Ned. “Now what?”

  “We look for William. Do you feel anything?”

  She shook her head, feeling foolish. “No. Am I supposed to feel some magnetic attraction to him or something?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get out and see what happens.” He opened the door, then came around to her side. She was out of the car by the time he reached her side, and for a moment they stood side by side, looking at the stones.

  Abby felt foolish, looking for something she couldn’t begin to identify. Would she know it if she saw it? “For the moment I’ll settle for reading the names on the tombstones. I know how to do that.” She started toward the gate.

  Net laid a hand on her sleeve to stop her. “Wait a minute. Seriously. Give yourself a chance. Just stand here for a minute. Close your eyes, if it helps. Or not. But try it.”

  Dutifully Abby closed her eyes and tried to relax, empty her mind. She was conscious of the steady stream of passing cars on the busy road behind her, and of the wind whistling through the maple trees in the cemetery and the crisp leaves that had already fallen. She could still hear the young voices somewhere in the distance, and a dog barking.

  Finally she shook her head. “Sorry. Nothing.”

  Ned was quick to reassure her. “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. We can do it the usual way.” He led the way deeper into the cemetery.

  “That way.” Abby pointed off to the left.

  “Why? You feel something?” he said eagerly.

  “No, but those stones look like the right time period—they’re bigger, and they’re mostly granite. The slate ones that direction are too old.”

  “Oh. Right.” He veered off to the left. Abby followed more slowly, scanning the stones. She passed a few rows of respectable family markers and suddenly found herself standing in front of a handsome granite stone with the single name Flagg inscribed on one side. Ned was still hunting a few rows over. Before calling out to him, she walked around to the other side. Yes, this was the right one. William Flagg, his dates, and his military rank—that Civil War service must have mattered to him. Below him, Elizabeth Flagg, with her dates.

  “Ned? Over here.”

  He looked up from his aimless rambling and joined her. He stopped beside her, reading the stone. “Right. And look.” He pointed to the next stone. Abby looked at it and saw the name: Isabel Flagg Whitman. The stones, side by side, were nearly identical.

  “So they stayed close. Interesting.” Abby stared at the two stones, wondering what she was supposed to make of them. Before her—or maybe beneath her—were the mortal remains of the man who had owned that lovely house up the hill, at least for a time. And the child he—no, they—had taken in. Was it his child? Abby wondered. Was that why there was so much pain in that room? How had Elizabeth felt, taking in her husband’s little mistake? In 1890-something, in their social circle, it would have mattered. And yet they had done it, and seen her well educated, and apparently Elizabeth had stayed on good terms with the adopted daughter even after William’s death.

  She looked around her, her hand on the Flagg stone. Ned had wandered off again, probably to leave her to her own musings, and was up the hill reading inscriptions on the older stones. In the opposite direction, she noticed a bench some twenty feet away. There was an old woman sitting there. Abby looked away quickly, to give her the privacy to mourn her own dead, and then, troubled by something, looked back again. The woman was wearing a long black dress, shapeless and fusty, and as Abby studied it, she realized that the style was far from current, even among old ladies. Nearly against her will, Abby looked at the woman’s face, and then couldn’t turn away. Elizabeth Flagg. Older, but unmistakably the same woman Abby had seen at the house.

  Elizabeth didn’t appear to see her, although she was looking directly at the headstone. Abby was afraid to look away, afraid that Elizabeth would disappear or turn into something else. She wondered whether, if she looked at the tombstone under her hand, she would find that Elizabeth’s inscription on it would have disappeared, or if Isabel’s stone would not be there at all. Standing stock-still, Abby studied the woman, who sat, oblivious, hands folded neatly in her lap, back straight despite her age, hat firmly set on her head. Abby tried to remember when William had died—1914? So what she was seeing—if she was really seeing it—came from a different era than what she had seen in the house.

  “Abby?” Ned’s voice startled her. She had been so focused on the woman that she hadn’t heard him approach. Involuntarily she turned to look at him, and when she turned back, Elizabeth was gone. As if she had never been there. Which in fact she hadn’t for most of the last century.

  “What’s up?” As Ned drew closer, his expression shifted to concern. “You okay? You look kind of pale.”

  “She was here—or there, over on that bench.”

  “Who?”

  “Elizabeth Flagg.” She found she was trembling.

  “Hey, maybe you should sit down.”

  “All right. But not that bench.”

  Ned nodded and led her to another, more distant bench. They sat. Abby blessed his silence—at least he wasn’t peppering her with questions. She needed to get her head on straight. Had she been hallucinating? Was it just wishful thinking, wanting to please Ned by finding something new to entertain him? But everything else around her had seemed normal, real, tangible. Ned had seen the bench, so presumably that was really there. But he hadn’t seen the woman. And if she had really been an eighty-year-old woman, she couldn’t have moved fast enough to disappear completely in the time it had taken Abby to turn her head away and back. So she couldn’t have been real—or at least, corporeal.

  Was it really Elizabeth? Somehow Abby had no doubt of that. Was she losing her mind? She took her emotional temperature. No, she didn’t feel like she was crazy—she was just seeing things that weren’t there. Great.

  Ned sat patiently, watching her, waiting for her to speak. She turned back to him.

  “I did see her.”

  “I believe you,” Ned replied.

  “Why?” Abby burst out. “I wouldn’t, in your shoes. Why are you even here? This loopy woman comes in to that house and practically faints on you, and starts telling you all these weird stories, and you buy it? Maybe you’re nuts too!” She stopped, trembling, shocked at her own outburst.

  Ned took his time in replying. He pulled one leg up on the bench and laced his hands around his knee, looking off across the cemetery. Even when he began to speak, he kept his eyes on the cityscape in front of him.

  “You know, Abby, you really are trusting. You don’t know me from Adam’s off ox, and I could be the type of person who preys on helpless women. But I think you’ve got good instincts, and you trust them, whether you know it or not. Maybe you need to listen to them more closely.” He sighed. “But that doesn’t answer your question, does it? I told you I was a scientist, and that’s true. I like science. It’s quantifiable, precise. But sometimes I wonder if there’s more. No, I don’t belong to any group of peculiar people looking for alien invaders. Heck, I don’t even go to church, unless my mom makes me at Christmas. I just . . .” He struggled to find the right phrase. “I guess I try to keep my mind open to other possibilities.”

  Abby, watching his face, could tell that he was troubled. She decided to cut to the chase. “Have you ever seen anything, anyone?”

  He looked at her briefly, then turned away. He didn’t answer immediately, and then he launched into what she thought at first was a tangent. “When I was little, my folks moved into a new house. Well, a different house—the house itself was old, but I was a kid, maybe five, and I didn’t know the difference—I just knew it was new to me. It was probably close to two hundred years old when we moved in, and it sounded like it—creaked all the time. You’d think I would have been scared, a kid like me in a strange place, but it never bothered me.”

  Ned glanced at Abby, to be sure he had her attention. “I started kindergarten in the loc
al school that year, and I’d come home and tell my mother all about what I’d done every day, who I’d played with. One day after a couple of months she asked me, ‘Who’s this Johnnie you keep telling me about? I don’t remember any Johnnie on the class list.’ And I said, ‘Oh, he’s not in my class. I play with him here, at the house.’ And she looked blankly at me. ‘He lives on this street?’ And I said, ‘No, he lives here.’ And she just stared at me. And then she changed the subject, and we never talked about Johnnie again. Much later, I figured that she must have assumed that Johnnie was an imaginary friend I had made up to keep me company, in a new place—lots of kids do that, I know.”

  He smiled at the memory. “But she was wrong. Johnnie was very real. He was a couple of years older than I was, and he wore funny clothes, and he never said anything. He used to just pop up now and then—I’d look up, and there he’d be. After a while, I noticed he never showed up when anybody else was around, but I figured he was just shy around adults.”

  He stopped, apparently lost in his memories. Abby had a funny feeling that she knew what was coming, but she had to ask. “What happened with Johnnie?”

  Ned turned to look at her. “He just sort of stopped coming around. I didn’t really notice, at least not for a while. I got busy, made new friends, and didn’t think much about it. I just forgot about him, over time. Until high school, I guess. We were studying the Revolution, and I looked at a picture in our textbook and I recognized the clothes Johnnie had worn. No wonder they looked odd to me—they were two hundred years out of date.” He smiled ruefully.

  “So what did you think?” Abby asked carefully.

  “I tried not to think about it at all. You know high school kids—they don’t want to appear different, you know? A couple of years later I decided that maybe I should do a little homework. I was writing a paper for an American history class, something about daily life in the colonies, so I had an excuse to do some research on our house. And I found Johnnie. He lived before the government started keeping censuses and such, but there was a mention in the town records of a death by drowning—a kid named John Phillips. The Phillips family built our house.” He fell silent.

  “Wow,” Abby said softly. She studied her hands, clasped together in her lap. She didn’t know what to say.

  After a couple of minutes, Ned came back to the present. He shifted on the bench, turning toward her, and he gave her a bigger smile. “So you can see why I don’t write you off as a crazy lady. Welcome to the club.”

  Abby shook her head. “Now I just have more questions.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Did you ever feel, I don’t know, frightened by Johnnie, or uncomfortable around him?”

  “No. He was just another kid. There was never anything scary about him.”

  “Did he ever come back, once you knew who he was?”

  “No, I’m sorry to say. I would like to have seen him again, when I was older, and I did look for him, but he was never there. But I figured that seeing him was a product of that, I don’t know—openness?—that kids sometimes have and then lose when they grow up.”

  Abby was warming to the subject. “Have you ever seen anyone else?”

  “Not really. Oh, now and then, in some houses or places, I get this odd feeling that there’s someone there, but I’ve never seen anyone. But that’s one reason I got involved in some of the local historical societies—it gives me the opportunity to spend time in old houses, where I can find out the history of the places, and then wait and see.”

  “Until somebody like me wanders in.” Abby smiled. “You mean you’ve never seen the Flaggs? Are you jealous? I mean, here you’ve had these places staked out for, what, years? And I waltz in and hit a ghost on the first try. And I wasn’t even looking.”

  “‘Ghost’ is kind of a loaded word. From what you told me, you were seeing what you called a mini-movie from one person’s point of view, right?”

  Abby searched her memory, then said slowly, “I think so—Olivia’s. She was the one watching. So you think I was seeing through her when I saw Elizabeth today? Even though it was years later?”

  “I can’t tell you. You think you’re channeling Olivia? Or you’ve been possessed by her?”

  Abby shook her head vehemently. “It’s not like that. I mean, it, or she, is not inside me—I think I’ve been seeing whatever it is from inside her. It’s not like I’ve been taken over. If I had been, wouldn’t I be seeing a lot more? I mean, if Olivia lived here in Waltham all of her life, wouldn’t there be lots of memories here?”

  “Maybe she’s having trouble getting you to focus? Or there’s a loose connection or something. Look, Abby, I’m no expert. I can’t tell you what’s happening to you. But you’ve told me that it doesn’t scare you. Maybe this is just the beginning of something, and maybe it will get scarier later. Are you willing to keep looking, to try to understand what’s happening?”

  “I think so,” Abby said tentatively. Then in a stronger voice she said, “No, I want to.” Nothing like this had ever happened to her, and she was tired of being dependable, predictable, boring Abby. Maybe there was something inside her begging to be let out, and there was only one way to find out. She looked at the rows of headstones, and then back at Ned. “Now what?”

  “Got me, lady.” He flashed her a grin, then turned serious. “Depends on what you want. Do you want to hang out in Waltham and see if any of the Flaggs come back to visit you? Or do you want to be a bit more, uh, proactive—reach out to them?”

  Abby thought, then said slowly, “What I really want is to understand this. I want to know why I see them at all, what it means. They don’t scare me—it’s not like they’re threatening me or anything. But I have to think it means something, that dead people are suddenly appearing in my life, here and now. And I don’t like them just popping up randomly. It’s kind of hard to live if you’re worried that someone dead is likely to appear at any moment.”

  Ned sat up straighter. “I may be wrong, but I’m guessing that it’s more specific than that. Anyway, we need a plan. First of all, have you found out if there’s any connection between you and William Flagg? What do you know about your family’s history?”

  “Not a lot, actually. I think my mother’s parents came from New Jersey, but nobody ever talked about it much.”

  “What, deep dark family secrets? Skeletons in the closet?”

  Abby laughed briefly. “No, everybody was perfectly respectable, thank you. They just weren’t very interested in the whole roots thing, I guess.”

  “So ask. See what you can find out. At least get a starting point. Do you have family documents—birth certificates, wedding licenses, that kind of thing?”

  “My mother would, I suppose,” Abby said dubiously. “Why?”

  “So we can start working backward.”

  “Oh. Um . . .”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘we.’ We’re doing this together?”

  Ned looked taken aback. “Well, yes, unless you’d rather not. Is that a problem?”

  She was going to have to tell him about Brad. “I, uh, have a boyfriend, fiancé really—that’s why I moved up here, because he did. I don’t know what he’d think . . .” If he even noticed I was gone, Abby thought before she could stop herself.

  Ned looked faintly amused. “I’m talking about helping you with some research, in my spare time. I’m not hitting on you.”

  “I know.” Abby was annoyed at herself. “I just wanted to make it clear . . .” She was just getting herself in deeper. “Okay, sure, let’s do some more research. But don’t you have to work?”

  “Yes, of course. But you can do the grunt work, and we can get together and confer on weekends, now and then. Your boyfriend won’t object to that, will he?”

  “No,” Abby replied, more firmly than she felt. “That’s fine. He plays golf and does other stuff most weekends.”

  Ned looked at her speculatively, then said, “Look, from what you’ve said, you h
aven’t seen a whole lot of this area yet. How about I give you the quick tour? You know, the obvious stuff like the Lexington-Concord road, some of the other towns around here? You need to know the lay of the land. And I can at least point you toward where the documents are stored. Tomorrow good for you?” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to take a shift at the Flagg house this afternoon.”

  “Yes.” Brad could think whatever he wanted. After all, he had left her on her own today, hadn’t he? And wasn’t there a football game on tomorrow? Abigail, it’s not like you have to ask his permission to do something. “Could you come by and pick me up? Then you can meet Brad.” That would keep things out in the open.

  “No problem.” He stood up. “Let me take you back to your car.”

  As they left the cemetery by the front gate, Abby turned for one last look. Nothing had changed—there were no ladies in black lurking behind the trees. Yet in a way, everything had changed.

  5

  After Ned dropped Abby off at her car, she stood on the sidewalk watching as he pulled away, raising a cheery hand to her. Back at her car she sat for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. She still had a lot of the day left, and Brad wouldn’t be back for hours, but she didn’t feel like going back into the library. And she was torn between wanting to sort out just what had happened in the cemetery today and avoiding thinking about it at all. For all her brave talk to Ned, this whole seeing thing had really rocked her boat.

  Get a grip, Abigail! she ordered herself sternly. Maybe she was just stressed out. Maybe this move thing had been more difficult than she had admitted to herself. Brad had so much to keep him busy—work, and now a group of buddies to hang out with. She was happy for him, really. But what did she have? She had been just sort of drifting along, and then this weirdness had started. Swooning, visions in cemeteries? She had gone on a simple house tour and ended up seeing things. Abigail, you have far too much time on your hands! Feeling more resolute, she put the car in gear and pulled into traffic.