Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4)

by Sheila Connolly

  Where did Thomas the artist fit? She could prove that he had known William Flagg. Olivia would have been thirteen years old when Thomas was part of the exhibition at William’s store or gallery or whatever it was. She might have known Thomas, but it seemed unlikely that Thomas would have noticed her, unless his intentions were less than pure—in which case Olivia shouldn’t have treasured his painting. Olivia and Samuel were back from Chicago and living in Massachusetts when Thomas died, but Thomas had remained in Lynn, and Olivia was in Waltham, as was her father. Would she have gone running off to another town—where she must have been known—for a tryst with an elderly artist? Unlikely.

  Which left Abby with little to show for her day of research. The more she learned about William Flagg, the more Abby thought she would like to have known him. She had already realized that she didn’t like Samuel much. How had Olivia ended up with him? From the one photo she had seen of the young Olivia—and her personal encounter, of course—she had been a pleasant-looking young woman. Not a knockout, but attractive. She’d added a few pounds toward the end of her life, but so did a lot of people. And Samuel hadn’t been much of a prize himself: in the only photo of him she had seen, he’d been a solid, stern-looking man. Perhaps a bit pompous. But that was the photographic fashion in those days.

  Maybe it all meant nothing. Maybe it was William who had first bought the painting, and Olivia had inherited it and kept it in memory of her father and his brief fling as an art dealer. William had died a few years before Samuel, and Abby wondered how much money William had left. His wife, Elizabeth Flagg, had outlived him by fifteen years, and from what Abby knew, she hadn’t lived an opulent life. In fact, Abby recalled seeing one letter complaining about not receiving her late husband’s Civil War pension, which amounted to something like twelve dollars a month. How far had that gone in the 1920s?

  Something hit her chin, and Abby jumped before realizing it was Olivia the kitten, now peering up at her with what seemed to be longing. “Are you hungry, little one? I haven’t fed you since breakfast. Heck, I haven’t fed me since breakfast. Let’s go see what there is, shall we?” Olivia jumped off her lap and turned, waiting for Abby to get up. When Abby started toward the kitchen, Olivia trotted forward eagerly.

  In the kitchen, Abby fed Olivia and found a hidden bag of potato chips to snack on. Ned wouldn’t be home for a bit, and he’d promised to make dinner, but she didn’t want to stare at a screen anymore. She went out the door in the back hallway and sat on the steps, looking out at the cemetery. Was there anything more she could do?

  Abby knew that Olivia had had a housekeeper for thirty-some years, according to the censuses, which also said that she had been born in Ireland, but she was long gone. As far as Abby knew, she’d never married, and trying to track down siblings at this late date would be an exercise in futility. But, Abby realized with a start, she hadn’t thought about the adopted child, Isabel, who had been far younger than Olivia, but who had lived with or near her mother until the end, and had stayed in Waltham after that. Had she had children? Abby had never checked, since to the best of her knowledge they weren’t biologically related, and Abby had been focused on the genetic link in the beginning. But Isabel could have heard some of the family stories, couldn’t she? Abby seemed to remember from the cemetery that she had married a local man from Waltham; surely there could be some descendants still in the state? It was worth looking into—tomorrow.

  When Ned arrived home, Abby couldn’t wait to show him what she’d found, starting with the copies of the painting. “And what’s really weird is that all these people more or less knew each other, even hung out together, back then. It can’t be a coincidence that my parents ended up with the painting, just like they ended up with the chair we have now. But why those pieces and so few others? I mean, I can see Olivia, or maybe her daughter Ruth, selling the more valuable stuff like jewelry or silver because they needed the money. And maybe the painting wasn’t worth much back then. But where did everything else go? Some giant yard sale?” Abby couldn’t repress a giggle at the idea of Olivia holding a yard sale.

  “Did it ever occur to you that someone kept the painting because they liked it?” Ned asked.

  “Well, yes—heck, I like it too. But why that one? I mean, William supported a bunch of artists, when they were just starting out—he could have acquired paintings from all of them over the years. Thomas painted our little scene years later, not long before he died. So someone must have gone out and bought it then. William lived until 1914—maybe in hindsight Thomas was his favorite of those artists he helped, and that’s the one work he chose to leave to his daughter? Or maybe Samuel knew Olivia well enough to realize that she would like it, and bought it for her, as a kind of consolation prize when her father died?”

  Ned looked like he was struggling to remain patient. “Abby, I don’t know that there’s any way you can find out. Obviously nobody kept the receipts. There are no photographs of the interior of Olivia’s home, are there?” When Abby shook her head, Ned went on, “We don’t even know who bought it, or when. I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I think it’s a dead end.”

  “Probably,” Abby admitted reluctantly. “But I did come up with one other idea. Remember that there was a younger child, an adopted one, in the family? I never followed up on her because I figured we weren’t biologically related. But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t hear and pass along information about the family, right? She stayed in Waltham to look after her mother, it seems, so she had years to hear the stories. If she had children, maybe they know something. Heck, maybe they inherited a whole lot of stuff—all the other missing stuff, since they were right there on the scene.”

  Ned took Abby by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “Abby, slow down. You’re obsessing about this. I know that genealogy can be addictive, but I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove. What do you want to know?”

  It was so hard to explain, even to Ned. “I want to know why Olivia was crying on the porch in the rain in that house on the Cape. I want to know if that painting of a boat at sea had anything to do with it. I know that it may be impossible to connect the two, but I have to try. I can’t explain it, but it matters. Look, let me see if I can track down any of Isabel’s descendants, assuming there were any, and get in touch with them and ask if they have anything that came down through the family—objects, letters, or stories. And if that doesn’t pan out, I’ll put the whole thing on a shelf and we can get back to our normal lives, I promise. Or at least as normal as they get.”

  “That works for me. I’d better get started on dinner. Keep me company?”

  “Sure.”

  They were on their way to the kitchen when Abby’s phone rang. She was surprised to see Leslie’s number. “Hi, Leslie. What can I do for you?”

  “My daughter wants to visit the kitten. She can be very persuasive. Or stubborn.”

  “She’s welcome to see her any time. Unless you’d like to take her home with you?”

  Leslie sighed. “I suppose that’s the best thing to do. I never wanted a cat, but Ellie seems to have fallen in love with this one. I’m hoping she gets tired of it quickly.”

  “When did you want to come?”

  “Now? I told George I’d pick up Chinese for dinner, so I can swing by with Ellie first, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure, no problem. We’ll be here.”

  When she walked into the kitchen, Ned was chopping vegetables. “What was that about?”

  Abby had mixed feelings about losing custody of Olivia the kitten, but she managed to smile. “It seems that Ellie is winning the battle of the kitten. She and Leslie are coming over now and will probably take her home with them.”

  “I’m glad that’s resolved,” Ned said. “Will you miss her?”

  “Maybe. I’m sure there are plenty more kittens out there who need good homes. We can think about getting one of our own. Unless you’d rather have a dog? But I warn you—I’m pretty sure I’
m a cat person,” Abby said firmly.

  Leslie and Ellie arrived fifteen minutes later. Ellie was ringing the doorbell eagerly when Abby opened the door. “HiAbbyHiNedWhere’sOlivia?” she said in a furious rush.

  “Right there,” Abby said unnecessarily, since Olivia had taken a running leap at Ellie, who gathered her up in her arms and was already talking to her. Abby turned to her mother. “Hello, Leslie—nice to see you. How’s George doing?”

  “He’s on the mend. He wants to go back to work next week. We’ll see. Ellie hasn’t stopped talking about the cat since she got home. I guess she wore me down.”

  “She really is a very nice cat—I’m sure it will work out fine. Can you stay a few minutes?”

  “No, I’d better get back and feed the family. Ellie? Let’s go.”

  “Let me get the litter box and the food,” Ned volunteered. “I’ll take them out to your car.”

  “Thanks, Ned,” Leslie said. “Ellie? Where are you?”

  “In here,” Ellie’s voice came from the dining room. When Leslie and Abby walked in, Ellie was still clutching the kitten, who didn’t seem to mind. Ellie was looking at the pictures of the painting that Abby had left strewn across the table. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a picture that my parents have now, but I’m guessing that it belonged to the original Olivia—the one from the house we stayed at. It turns out she owned the house and the painting for a while. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Uh-huh,” Ellie said, her eyes still on the printouts. “This picture—it made her happy and sad at the same time.”

  Abby’s glance darted toward Leslie, but she was busy helping Ned with the cat accessories and didn’t notice. “So it was Olivia’s picture?” Abby asked Ellie in a low voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Come on, sweetie,” Leslie called out from the hallway. “We’ve got to pick up the food.”

  “Thank you for taking care of Olivia for me, Abby,” Ellie said politely. “I’ll take good care of her.”

  “I’m sure you will, Ellie. Have a good time at school.” Abby gave Olivia’s head one last rub, then watched Leslie and Ellie go. When Ned had shut the door behind them, Abby said, “Ellie confirms that the picture was Olivia’s. And it made her happy and sad. So I can’t give up yet.”

  “You’re right, you can’t. Happy hunting. Now, can we think about eating?”

  Chapter 22

  Abby’s mind was far too muddled to even think about genealogy for the rest of the evening, so she focused on Ned. He looked tired, despite his vacation. She really knew relatively little about his company, much less what he did each day. She had never been very interested in the sciences, or at least not beyond knowing enough to teach it at the elementary school level. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand the principles—she simply didn’t want to. But she knew enough that she could listen to what Ned had to say and make the occasional intelligent comment. His work was a big part of his life, and she wanted to understand it.

  Still, her mind wandered as they ate dinner together. Abby kept one ear open to what Ned was saying, but some other part of her brain was busy with different thoughts. The summer had flown by so quickly. She’d made some progress in working on the house since she’d moved in three months earlier, like scraping off a lot of paint layers and even doing some wallpapering, but there was still a lot to be done—projects that Ned, preoccupied with work, hadn’t even started or had ignored entirely. She’d tried to create order in the gardens, figuring that she should save the inside work for winter, when she couldn’t work outside. But it was a long, slow process, inside and out. Then she’d had Ellie’s company for a day each week, which she had welcomed, and they’d found some interesting things to do. She hoped that Leslie didn’t hold it against her that she had the opportunity to do the fun things with Ellie, while Leslie worked. Leslie liked her job, and Abby had liked working with her. She did love history, and loved explaining it to school groups, helping them to see the past as more than just a list of names and dates that they had to memorize to pass a test. The past was so present locally, if you looked—more so for her than for most people. She would have to get serious about finding another job soon, if only those ancestors of hers would stop knocking on her door and distracting her.

  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 anot
her 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.