“Ah. Well, I’d like that too. We just need to plan better. Wait—do you mean you don’t want any ghosts either? Because that’s harder to plan.”
“Maybe we should take a cruise. Or visit Machu Picchu or Antarctica. Unless you had an ancestor who was an explorer?”
“Not that I know of. But I never say never anymore.”
Chapter 19
Back at their house, Abby carried Kitten’s—no, Olivia’s box into the house, set it on the floor, and opened it. Olivia climbed out and looked around, as if trying to find Ellie, and it broke Abby’s heart. She really was a sweet cat, and Olivia and Ellie had bonded instantly. Couldn’t Leslie have at least given her a chance?
After a long stare at Abby, Olivia turned and started exploring the hallway slowly. “Ned,” Abby said, “did we bring back any cat food? Or litter?”
“There’s some left, but obviously we’ll have to stock up. Or there’s frozen chicken, which we could cook. Poor little thing. She’s been through a lot of changes lately.”
“Well, we’ll try to make it up to her. Is there people food?”
“Check the fridge. I think so. This vacation stuff is kind of unsettling, isn’t it?”
“It is—maybe we should practice more often. Are you going back to work tomorrow?”
“Yes. I left a lot of stuff on my desk unfinished.”
“And I appreciate it, believe me. I’ll go shopping tomorrow. For now we can scavenge, once we’ve fed Olivia.” She looked down at the cat, now sitting on its haunches by her feet and looking up at her expectantly. “I hope Ellie doesn’t think this kitten is the reincarnation of the real Olivia, or something like that.”
“I doubt it. But maybe Olivia’s spirit summoned her from wherever she came from. Which we still haven’t figured out.”
“Don’t ask,” Abby told him. “We have enough puzzles without trying to track down where kittens come from.”
“Well, first you find two cats . . .” Ned began. Abby swatted him.
The rest of the day passed quickly. Abby did laundry, marveling at the amount of sand they had somehow managed to bring back. She found a cache of shells that Ellie had collected, which had ended up in Abby’s tote bag, and arranged them on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. She set up a provisional litter pan in the pantry off the kitchen, and Olivia figured it out quickly. She rummaged through the refrigerator and freezer, finding enough food to make something edible, while promising herself that the next day she would go find an open farmers’ market and get fresh veggies. And the few times she sat down, somehow Olivia found her lap and curled up there.
After dinner, Abby and Ned went to bed early. Privacy at the beach house had been in short supply.
• • •
The next morning, Ned disappeared early, after one last, lingering kiss. “I fed Olivia,” he whispered romantically just before he left. A few minutes later Olivia came trotting in, looking for company. She settled herself on Abby’s chest and started purring, her eyes half closed with contentment. “You’re easy to please, kitty,” Abby told her. “A full tummy and a warm body to sit on, and you’re happy.” Olivia did not comment. Abby wondered briefly if she could use her cell phone to text Ellie pictures of Olivia, but decided that Leslie might be annoyed at that. Just give it time, Abby told herself.
She got out of bed, showered, and wandered down to the kitchen, where she threw together a makeshift breakfast. As she had told Ned, she needed to shop, but that wasn’t what she wanted to do first. She needed to know more about Olivia, and about her husband, and how Olivia had ended up alone on the Cape, crying in a storm.
Why did she care? She still wasn’t sure. Mostly because some unseen force had taken her to that house, and Olivia had appeared. Either that was a huge cosmic coincidence—heck, she’d never even met Ned’s friend Daniel, who owned the house—or there was some reason behind it that she couldn’t fathom. Either way, there was some basic research she could do from her laptop. If she found a really hot trail, she could easily return to the Cape and look at the original documents.
She sat down at the dining room table and turned on her laptop. What did she know? She had the barest outline on her family tree program, mainly with dates—birth, marriage, death. It was a framework to hang things on, but she wanted more personal information. Which of course was the kind of stuff nobody recorded. Well, she was smart, wasn’t she? She should be able to figure something out.
What were the second-level resources at her disposal, online? Newspapers, more and more of which were being scanned and were now available digitally. City directories, at least for the larger communities, but as she remembered it, Westfield had been pretty suburban around 1900, so there should be directories. She’d already checked wills for Olivia, but had her husband, Samuel, left one? Would it be any more helpful than Olivia’s? Of course, there was always Google: she’d had some important hits just entering a name there and crossing her fingers. Abby was beginning to subscribe to the illogical theory that if these ancestors of hers wanted to be found, somehow they’d pop up through this very modern electronic medium. It was worth trying.
Naturally the next time she looked at her watch it was well past lunchtime. The day was rapidly slipping away but she was no nearer to a solution. She’d started by looking at references for Samuel Ellinwood, since it was far more likely she’d find public notices about the husband than about the wife back at the beginning of the twentieth century. What she uncovered was vaguely interesting but didn’t lead her forward. Samuel had been born and lived in Lynn and had actually worked for his father-in-law, William Flagg, for a time, but there had been some sort of split, and Samuel had moved to New Jersey because he’d taken another job in New York, with an unrelated but prestigious company that still existed. That had been just before 1900. That explained why they ended up in Westfield—it was an early bedroom community for the city, with a convenient train line. Samuel could have walked to the train station, according to the map she looked at. Apparently Samuel and Olivia had built the house where Ruth had been born—and where Samuel had been locked in the bedroom.
When she looked him up in directories online, Abby noted that Samuel had not only a Westfield listing but also had professional listings in New York City, where he was described as an “agent,” whatever that was. She noodled around for a while, coming up with a few New York Times citations, including Samuel’s very brief obituary: he had apparently been a principal of his own company, acting as the Eastern representative of Allegheny Steel Company, at the time of his untimely death at fifty-two. It was no surprise that Olivia’s death received even less notice in the Times, a terse half inch under “Deaths.” Abby did the math: Olivia had died in 1940, so she had been in her seventies. She had died just after Christmas—it must have been a sad holiday. There were a few earlier mentions of good works in the local papers, and Abby had already located the Daughters of the American Revolution record.
So what did she know? Olivia had inherited money from her father, who had been involved in founding a major company in the 1890s and then gone on to manage a smaller one in Waltham—which hadn’t produced anywhere near the same amount of money. Olivia had married a hometown boy from an earlier residence, and she had been barely twenty. She’d kept at least some control over her own finances—didn’t she trust Samuel? The house had been registered in her name. Samuel had nominally commuted to a job in the City—but how often had he shown up? He had played golf, and he drank. He’d taken up local politics, even though he drank. Great role model, Samuel was. A brief search of “Ellinwood” coupled with “Westfield” had produced a mention of Samuel’s contributing money to build a new fire station in Westfield—a smart move to ensure good service, since it was only a couple of blocks from his house. There was a picture of the plaque on the building, still in use, but Abby wondered whose money had gone into it—Samuel’s or Olivia’s?
Abby went to the town library’s website and was relieved to find that the loc
al paper had been digitized. Samuel’s obituary appeared on the same day he had passed away, and apparently the funeral services were held at his home. No church affiliation? Abby noted irreverently that juxtaposed to the obituary was a large announcement that Mary Pickford would be appearing in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at the local playhouse the following week. Abby looked at the next week’s paper to see if there was any further information about Samuel and found none; however, she was startled to see a short mention that his daughter Ruth had been sent back to her boarding school in Pennsylvania less than a week after her father’s death. What a warm and wonderful family!
Ruth had married in the mid-1920s—before the Crash, Abby noted. Apparently her wedding had not been mentioned in the New York Times.
She skipped ahead to the 1940 newspaper and found a much longer and fuller obituary for Olivia. Maybe it was a sign of the times—or maybe Olivia had been better liked than her late husband within the local community. Olivia’s name also cropped up regularly in the social listings in the papers. She wondered if it would be worthwhile to scan those for any hint of when Olivia might have bought the Cape Cod house, such as a mention that “Mrs. Ellinwood has left for her summer house in Massachusetts.” Then she laughed to herself: what was the point? That would cover close to twenty years of tiny, blurry print, and what did she hope to gain? She might come away with some idea of how often Olivia had made the trek to Massachusetts in those years. Then she realized she had no idea how she would have done it. Did Olivia know how to drive? Did she own a car? Or would she have hired both car and driver to make the trip? A couple of the censuses had shown that there was a housekeeper who lived in the house in 1910, 1920, 1930 and 1940. Had that woman—Nora Ryan—accompanied Olivia in the summer? Or had she stayed behind, or taken her own holiday?
Too many questions. No doubt it would be possible to answer them all, with time and persistence, but was it worth it? What was she trying to prove?
Why did it matter so much to her that Olivia had been so sad?
When Olivia had bought the Cape house, her husband was dead. Had she loved him? Did she miss him? How on earth could Abby tell? Olivia had kept active at home, doing what was expected of a woman of her social class and wealth. She still probably had plenty of money in the mid-1920s—had she taken out a mortgage on the Cape house or paid cash? Her daughter had married at about the same time: Had Ruth and her husband spent time at the summer house? Their child, Abby’s grandmother Patience, had been born while Olivia still owned the house: Had she seen it? Had she played on Old Silver Beach, and thrown baited lines in the water to troll for crabs? Would she have remembered it at all?
Toward the end, did Olivia feel guilty that she—or perhaps her late husband—had run through most of the family money, and there was nothing left for Ruth and her family? Had Olivia already seen that her son-in-law, Samuel, lacked backbone, and had she not been surprised when he had vanished in the early 1930s, leaving behind his wife and daughter? Did she, could she, help them financially by then?
And then Olivia got sick. The newspaper obituary said it had been a lengthy illness, without specifying what, although Abby guessed that it could have been some form of cancer. When had she known how ill she was? And had she held on to the Cape house hoping that she would recover, however unlikely it seemed?
Abby stood up and stretched. She’d collected a lot of bits of information, but that was a rather self-indulgent pursuit, good for nothing but satisfying her own curiosity. She had better things to do than dig through musty—if digitized—archives looking for details of the life of an ancestor who had died over half a century before. Funny how it was the legal and financial transactions that were deemed worthy of saving, but the whys and wherefores were never recorded. She gave herself a shake and realized she hadn’t been to the market yet. If she didn’t go, they wouldn’t eat that night. She and Ned could eat out, but they couldn’t exactly take Olivia along with them—she needed cat food. And litter.
Abby dashed around the house, shutting windows and retrieving her purse, than headed out for the market. By the time she returned, Ned had just pulled into the driveway.
He helped her unload the car, grabbing several of her bags, including a large one of cat litter. “You’re expecting Olivia to stay around this long?” he asked.
Abby had to remind herself that Ned meant the kitten, not Olivia Ellinwood. “I’m just being prepared,” she told him. “It won’t go to waste—if Olivia doesn’t need it, we can use it when it snows this winter.”
“I’m impressed. Although I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we don’t get more than a dusting of snow this year—New England deserves a break after last year.”
“Let’s hope so. What do you want for dinner?”
“Whatever’s easy. If you’re going to cook, I can hang around and chop things and entertain you.”
“Deal,” Abby said, leading the way to the kitchen.
After putting away the staples, Abby decided on a quick and spicy pork dish, served over rice. She handed a package of boneless pork chops to Ned. “Here, make nice one-inch cubes.”
“Yes, ma’am!” he said, selecting a sharp knife and a cutting board. “So, what did you do today?”
“I went hunting online for more information about Olivia—the human one—as if you couldn’t guess. Not the basic documents—I assembled those a while ago. More like newspaper articles and secondary sources. I’m trying to get a feel for what kind of people they were. It’s an interesting process, although it would be hard to prove any single assumption. But the more I read, the more I get a kind of overall sense of them—and their relationship.”
“Really?” Ned said, looking skeptical. “Give me an example. And a bowl for the pork.”
Abby handed him a plastic bowl. “Well, for a start, I don’t think I like my great-great-grandfather Samuel.”
Ned raised one eyebrow. “Why do you say that?”
“Based on bits and pieces that I found. Olivia kept the title to the house, which suggests that she didn’t trust him and/or paid for the house with her money. Samuel kept a New York office, and was a partner in his own firm in New York, but directories describe him as an agent, which may have been something like a salesman. Which might also have meant that he set his own hours, and went to work—or didn’t go to work—when he felt like it. He belonged to a few clubs, including two golf clubs—he had his fatal stroke on a golf course. But one of the odder things that I found was that his obituaries, in both the New York Times and the local paper, were short—shorter than Olivia’s, although hers were published nearly twenty years later, and styles might have changed. Still, you would think that if he was a big shot in town, the paper would have found something nice to say about him, or at least a little more detail.”
Ned handed her the bowl of pork he had chopped. “I see what you’re getting at, but it’s not the sort of thing that would hold up in a court of law.”
“Well, I’m not taking him to court. I’m just trying to understand him. He died in 1917. Olivia stayed in Westfield for the rest of her life. But she bought that house on Cape Cod after 1925. Why then?”
“Did she and her husband have any earlier summer homes?” Ned asked.
“Not that I’ve found, but I’ve only just started looking. I did notice that they took several trips to Havana, and I think Olivia took Ruth there after Samuel died, once or twice. That’s from ships’ records.”
“So maybe they preferred foreign travel to one fixed place?”
“It’s possible. Or maybe she got lonesome for Massachusetts—after all, she was raised there. And her mother was still there, until 1929. And by 1930 she had a grandchild in Waltham, and she might have thought that child would enjoy a stable place to visit in the summer.”
“All possible,” Ned agreed amiably, “but not provable.”
Abby grinned at him. “Not unless Olivia tells me herself.”
Chapter 20
Once they were settled a
t the table, with food and a glass of wine, Ned asked, “Any word from Leslie? Or Ellie?”
“No, not that I expected any. With Leslie it seems like two steps forward, one step back. I was happy to help her out by looking after Ellie while she took care of George, but now I’m worried that she’s angry because of the kitten.”
“You had nothing to do with bringing that into the house. What were you supposed to do—leave it out in the rain? And there was no way you could know that Ellie would fall in love with it.”
“I know that, and you know that, but I don’t think Leslie is in the mood to be logical. Although I’ll admit the last thing she needs right now is a pet to take care of.”
As if she’d been listening, Olivia appeared from somewhere and jumped onto Abby’s lap, where she curled up and started purring.
“Do we?” Ned asked. “I mean, if Leslie refuses to take her in, are we keeping the kitten?”
“What, you don’t like cats?” Abby said in mock dismay. “That just might be a deal breaker.”
“I didn’t say that,” Ned responded, smiling. “I’m just asking if you have a plan.”
“Day by day—that’s the best I can do.”
“You know, you had kind of a glazed look in your eyes when I got home, the one you get when you’re working on your family history. I’m sure you’ve looked at most of the obvious places. Anything in military records?” Ned asked.
“Samuel Ellinwood was born just after the Civil War, and he was too old for World War One, and he died before it was over, so no luck there. But what I really want to know is why Olivia decided to buy a beach house, after several years of widowhood. And why there, in West Falmouth?”
“She liked the place? She could afford it? Why not? Didn’t a lot of wealthy people in those days have more than one house?”
“Yes, or so I’m told—I have no personal knowledge of such things. But why Cape Cod? Why not the Jersey Shore, which had plenty of nice houses on the sea, and would have been easier for her to get to?”
Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4) Page 15
