The first box Abby had opened seemed to contain material on the earliest members of the Whitman family, going back to before 1700. Abby fought the urge to shut the box immediately and go hunting for something closer to 1900, which was what interested her, but she felt that would be cheating. And besides, she needed to be sure that the decades or even centuries hadn’t gotten jumbled together. She didn’t trust Edna’s daughter-in-law not to have meddled with the boxes at some point. Still, once Abby reached the bottom of the box, she had to admit that Edna had been careful and thorough. And for once, Abby couldn’t find any connection among the earlier families on that side to those of her own—that she knew about. But she’d hardly scratched the surface with her own family, so she couldn’t dismiss the information just yet. Something to deal with later.
She labeled each of the piles from Box 1 with sticky notes, then stacked them carefully in their original box to clear the tabletop. The second box turned out to be much more recent, probably starting in the mid-twentieth century up to the time that Edna had moved to the retirement community. There were newspaper clippings of birth, marriage and death announcements. Society columns—there was something that had more or less disappeared, at least as far as Abby knew. School events, with various Whitman youths on sports teams or in honor societies. A few diplomas and certificates of achievement. A couple of paper packages of photographs, first black and white, then later color, now sadly faded. None were early enough to satisfy Abby. Weren’t there places that would scan photographs to digital formats? Even the negatives? Maybe Edna would appreciate that. She should ask at that nice camera store in Newton, Abby thought. They would probably do it in-house, or would know someone trustworthy who could handle it.
She finally struck gold in the third box she looked at, after she’d put away what had come out of Box 2. A few faded postcards on top gave Abby the first clue: sepia or hand-tinted postcards showing beach scenes and some buildings that Abby recognized from Falmouth. She was poised to jump in when there came an insistent rapping at the front screen door. “Abby? Are you home?”
Ellie. And since Ellie didn’t drive, Leslie must have brought her. Abby could hear Ned opening the door, and she joined the group in the hallway. “Hello, Leslie. Hi, Ellie. How’s Olivia?”
“That’s why we’re here!” Ellie proclaimed. “I wanted to show you the pictures of her. Come see!”
“Just a minute, sweetie,” Leslie said. “Abby, I don’t know if I ever thanked you for getting Ellie that camera. I’d be happy to reimburse you for it.”
“No need, Leslie—it’s a gift. I hope she’s been handling it well?”
“She’s been very careful with it, I have to say. Also very busy. I don’t know what capacity the storage card in it has, but she may have already filled it up.”
“That’s what it’s for. Having that card makes it a lot easier than film, not to mention cheaper. Would you like something to drink? Are you in a hurry?”
Ellie tugged on her mother’s arm. “Mom, I want to show Abby. And you said maybe we could put the pictures on the computer?”
“You mean upload them?” Abby asked. “I’d be happy to help. You took pictures when we were on the Cape, right?”
“Yup, lots. And Mom hasn’t seen them yet, because the camera screen is too tiny to see much, and I didn’t know how to do it on Daddy’s computer. Can we upload them now?”
Leslie and Abby exchanged a glance; Leslie looked resigned. “Go ahead.”
“Leslie, why don’t we go into the kitchen and get some coffee or iced tea?” Ned suggested.
“Yeah, sure, fine,” Leslie said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Abby was pretty sure that Leslie had hoped to be in and out quickly, but Ellie had different ideas.
When they had disappeared down the hall, Abby led Ellie to the dining room table. Ellie looked at the collection of boxes. “What’s this stuff?”
“It’s records from Olivia’s sister Isabel and her family, almost up to the present. From what I’ve seen, it’s mostly about her children, and about the family of her husband, but I’m not done yet. I was hoping maybe she might have saved some stuff that could tell us more about Olivia, around the time she owned the house we stayed in.”
“Cool,” Ellie said, then turned her attention quickly to her main interest. “You know how to put pictures on your laptop?” Ellie said.
“Sure. Give me the camera and I’ll take out the card. It goes right in this slot here”—Abby pointed at the front of the laptop—“and then we can save them. We’ll need to make a folder for the pictures—what do you want to call it?” She pulled out the card and demonstrated how to insert it.
“You could call it ‘Ellie’s Pictures.’”
Abby laughed. “That would be a whole album, at the rate you’re going! So let’s make that album, and then we can put your first pictures into a folder called Ellie One, and maybe a date.” Or it might make more sense to upload them to the Cloud or whatever it was called, but Abby was less familiar with that process, and she wasn’t sure what kind of computers Leslie had at home. Better to start with a simpler format—one that Ellie could take with her.
“Okay.” Ellie pulled up another chair and sat next to Abby, watching eagerly. Abby followed the steps she had outlined, creating a home for Ellie’s pictures and uploading them. There were, as Leslie had suspected, hundreds of them, but there was still space remaining on the card, so Abby put it back in the camera.
“Okay, we’re all set. How’s your dad doing?” Abby asked.
“He’s better, but he’s still kind of tired. Mom makes me play with Petey. He’s a baby! And a boy!” Ellie didn’t look happy.
“It won’t be for long. How’s school?”
“It’s okay. I like my teacher, but I already know a lot of the stuff she’s telling us.”
“Hey, it’s only the first week! Let the other kids catch up. Want to tell your mom we’re ready now?”
“Okay!” Ellie bounded out of her chair and all but ran to the kitchen. She returned quickly, with Leslie and Ned in tow.
“I didn’t realize it was Daniel’s house you were using,” Leslie said as Ned pulled up another chair for her. Ellie stood behind Abby’s chair, looking over her shoulder. Net stationed himself against the wall, since they’d run out of chairs.
“That’s right—you must have known him,” Abby said. “I didn’t meet him until yesterday, actually. He has an agency that handles the rentals, but he and his family are there now for the long weekend.”
“Nice guy,” Leslie said. “A touch of ADD, but he’s fun to be around. You meet the family?”
“No, they were at the beach. We just chatted for a few minutes. The house was lovely—just right for a beach house. Not too fancy.”
“Can we look at the pictures now, Abby?” Ellie demanded impatiently.
“Of course.” Abby called up a media program and accessed the folder. “You want to start at the beginning?”
“Okay.”
Abby clicked on the first picture file, and kept going. The first few pictures were predictably awful, but it was clear that Ellie had learned quickly, and she had a good eye for a subject and how to frame an image. The pictures of the West Falmouth house began about a quarter of the way through the list. There were some perfunctory pictures of the house itself, and then Ellie had started taking pictures of water and shells and beach glass, and even the crabs underwater. Abby and Ned appeared in a few of them, but usually as part of the background, not the main subject of the picture.
It was a time-consuming process, as Ellie wanted to explain each picture, and then waited for the adults to comment. They were maybe halfway through when Abby stopped. “Ellie, I didn’t know you were taking pictures during the storm.”
“Yeah, I wanted to see if I needed a flash or not. It was real dark outside, Mommy.”
“I can see that, sweetie. That’s when you found Olivia, right?”
“Uh-huh. It was windy and noisy, but then I t
hought I heard something else, and it turned out to be Olivia. She was outside. I didn’t take the camera outside because I didn’t want it to get wet. So Abby and me, we went out and saved her, and then we had to make her dry, and find something for her to eat. There’s a picture of her and Abby, when she was wrapped up in a towel.”
Abby clicked forward to find the picture, until she found Olivia’s tiny face, peering out of the folds of a large fluffy towel that Abby was clutching to her chest.
“And then we put her on the floor, to see what she would do,” Ellie chatted on. “She ate a bunch, and then she drank some water, and then she started exploring. Go forward, Abby.”
Abby followed orders, clicking through pictures of Olivia eating off a small plate, and Olivia cleaning her whiskers after eating, and then Olivia venturing into the dining room, where Ellie followed, still taking pictures. Olivia crossing the hall; Olivia in the doorway to the living room. Olivia looking out the window . . .
Abby went still. Ellie had been standing at an angle to the window, so there was no reflection from the glass. Olivia seemed fixated on a window, and Abby wondered . . . no, it couldn’t be. She could see the skeletal framework of the white wicker chair in the corner of the porch, and it looked like there was someone seated in it, a hazy human figure, in profile.
Olivia?
Chapter 27
Startled, Abby darted a quick glance at Ellie. Ellie looked at her, eyes wide, and Abby guessed that Ellie had seen the same thing she had. Luckily Ellie didn’t say anything, because Abby didn’t want to try to explain to Leslie how they’d just happened to end up staying in a house that had a ghost who, by the way, was also a relative and apparently showed up in digital images. She didn’t dare look at Ned, to see if he had noticed anything. “Let’s see what else is in your folder, Ellie,” Abby said brightly, sounding false even to herself, and clicking ahead rapidly.
“Okay,” Ellie said. “The next day the sun came out and Ned came and we went to the beach. And the day after that Abby’s mom and dad came to visit and spent the night. Keep going, Abby—I took some pictures of them too.”
Numbly Abby clicked along through the pictures, making random comments where they seemed to fit. “Ellie, you mind if I make some prints of the ones with my parents? I don’t have a lot of recent pictures of them.”
“Yeah, that’s okay. Keep going.”
Then the pictures shifted over to Ellie’s house in Littleton, and were mostly of the feline Olivia doing cute things. Cat pictures were by definition cute, Abby mused. “How are you and Olivia getting along, Leslie?”
“Better than I expected,” Leslie said grudgingly. “So far Ellie’s been good about picking up after her, and she’s very quiet and doesn’t destroy things. At least not yet. Ellie, honey, we should go—we’ve got to go food shopping.”
Ellie didn’t put up a fight. “Okay. Abby, thank you for looking at the pictures with us,” she said politely.
“Hey, I enjoyed it. You want me to make you a thumb drive with all of them on it, so you can keep a set at home? And I bet you’ll be taking even more.”
Ellie nodded vigorously. “I’d like that. Please.”
“Come on, Ellie—out to the car. We can get the thumb drive later,” Leslie ordered. At the door, Leslie stopped and turned to Abby. “She had a good time with you, on the Cape.”
“We wanted to help, since you had George to worry about. How is he?”
“About ninety percent. I think he’ll be all right in the long run. But it was kind of scary there for a couple of days. Well, we should go. Thanks again.” Leslie went down the steps and joined Ellie in the car.
Once they had pulled away, Abby went back to the laptop and called up the photo program, while Ned wandered off toward the kitchen again. She clicked through the thumbnails of Ellie’s pictures until she came to the ones from the storm, and she opened that single shot of the porch to full screen size. “Ned, can you come here a moment?”
“That went well,” Ned said as he approached. “Maybe Leslie’s getting more comfortable with the whole thing. What do you need?”
“Look at this picture, will you?” Abby moved her chair back so Ned could get a clearer view of the laptop screen. “What do you see?”
“It’s the porch at the Cape house from the living room, during the storm, right? You shoved the chairs into the corner so they wouldn’t blow around, you told me. That’s one of them in the picture.”
“Anything else?” Abby asked.
Ned looked again, then went still. “No . . . not possible,” he whispered.
“What do you see?”
“There’s a woman seated in the chair, but you can only see her profile. Olivia?”
Abby nodded. “Explain it to me. How did this happen?”
“I can’t. There’s no rational way to make sense of it. You can’t take pictures of something that isn’t there.”
“What about X-rays?”
“But there is something there, in that case. It’s just not visible to the naked eye.”
“Exactly,” Abby said. “Why don’t you try to come up with an explanation? You’re the scientist.”
Ned shook his head. “I want to think this through first. We seem to be looking at a digital picture of a ghost. I know people have made that claim before, ever since photography was invented. Maybe back then they were hoaxes. Maybe the negative or the print was manipulated.”
“Or maybe a few of them were real?” Abby asked. “Look, this is all beyond me, but Ellie and I were in the middle of a major storm, which creates certain atmospheric conditions.” And also a few emotional and psychological ones. “We were together, and we both saw Olivia at the same time, and so did the kitten. So there was something there. Ellie was using a digital camera, which records images in a certain way. So which parts of all this came together to make that picture?”
Ned laid his hands on Abby’s shoulders, but his eyes never left the laptop screen. “I can’t tell you. But I’d really like to know.”
“Ellie didn’t say anything when the picture came up, but I’m pretty sure she saw what I saw. She might not have seen enough of it before to notice, on the small screen on the camera.”
“Smart kid. Leslie would not have been happy if she’d mentioned it.”
Abby sighed. “So now I’m looking for something to tell me why Olivia was so sad that her pain traveled across time until someone with the right receptors noticed, and why it was strong enough that she made some sort of electronic imprint on an inanimate object. It doesn’t get any easier, does it?”
“Apparently not,” Ned agreed. “Do you want to stop?”
“No!” Abby said quickly. “I see Olivia, and the others. I can’t just ignore them—that would be wrong.”
“Then get back to work.”
“I will, right after some lunch.”
After throwing together a sandwich, Abby returned to her task. Ned wisely left her alone, content to wait until she’d found something, anything. This was on her, because she was the one who had seen Olivia, along with Ellie. Well, so had the cat, but it would be hard to confer with a cat. Maybe she could carry a cat around as a kind of alarm system to alert her if a spectral presence was nearby. Did all cats have the ability to sense . . . whatever it was? Or was there something special about kitten Olivia? Abby refused to even consider the idea that the kitten was somehow the incarnation of the original Olivia. From what she had seen of Olivia, Abby guessed that she would have preferred to come back as some form of small stocky dog—a pug, maybe. A Boston terrier—that would fit.
Abby, you’re wasting time. Or are you afraid of what you might find? She dug into the box again. There were various postcards, as she had already noted—some showing the view of the West Falmouth shore from the other side of the harbor. Unfortunately the distance made it hard to distinguish any details about the houses, although Abby could tell they were spaced fairly close together. There were a few yellowed programs, from musical even
ts held at various venues in and around Falmouth during the summer months. And there was correspondence from a variety of writers.
Abby found it hard to imagine the world before phones. Back then people used to write notes or letters to each other. Maybe the postal service had been more efficient in those days, because if you wanted to plan lunch with someone, you couldn’t wait until the day before to send a note suggesting it, much less hope to receive a confirmation. Had there been a phone in the West Falmouth house in 1920? 1930? Hard to say. Or maybe life had been slower then. Had Olivia spent the entire summer on the Cape? In that case, setting up an engagement was not so pressing, if you knew you’d be there for a couple of months or more.
Was Olivia alone in the house most of the time, or had she brought the ever-faithful housekeeper Nora to help around the house—or to serve as a companion? Abby tried to envision living in the same house with someone for twenty to thirty years and treating that person as a servant for all that time. Surely they must have had some kind of personal relationship.
There would have been guests, now and then, wouldn’t there? Her daughter and her children? Had Ruth worked and been unable to get away? Had she sent her daughter to the Cape, while she was otherwise occupied? And had Isabel visited? With or without her mother, Elizabeth Reed Flagg? And were there perhaps other visitors?
Abby wondered if she’d ever find answers as she sifted through the contents of the box. There was so much pain in the world, both past and present. Why was she looking so hard to find one particular incident? It had nothing to do with her, did it? Say Olivia had had an unhappy marriage with Samuel—what did it matter now? Had it affected her own daughter’s choice of husband? Had Ruth not looked harder at the man she married? Had that original failed marriage set a pattern through the generations? No—her own mother seemed to have achieved a happy marriage—it was still going strong after thirty years. Wasn’t that a good model? What could she expect from marriage with Ned, if it came to that? She’d almost made a serious mistake with Brad; why had she been so willing to latch on to him and let him dictate how she lived her life? And was Ned just a guy who happened to be handy at the right time and place? A rebound romance?
Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4) Page 21
