“It is, but it’s as close as we’ll come to seeing history. At least in a pre-video era.”
“I’m looking forward to it—I think. Thanks for your help.”
Abby drove home in a pensive mood. She had found a lot, but she knew she needed more. She wasn’t any closer to identifying the man on the green. And tomorrow was a workday and promised to be busy. This hunt might take her a long time.
6
Once she arrived back at the house, Abby started to feel depressed. Had she set herself a hopeless task? Sure, she had seen the man on the green, and it had been more than a glimpse from the corner of her eye. She had looked at him, studied him long enough to take in a lot of details. He’d moved, so he wasn’t a still image, or a single one. He was as real as a long-dead person could be, unless she was truly hallucinating. When all this business had started happening, she’d looked up various psychological disorders that might explain what was happening, but nothing had fit. She had been intrigued by one promising category: Folie a Deux. The definition read, “delusion develops in an individual in the context of a close relationship with another person, who has an already established delusion.” That almost worked, except that her delusion, if that’s what it was, came before the relationship with Ned. Or had Ned caught it from her, so he was the delusional one? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This was ridiculous.
Was she delusional? She didn’t think so. But did any crazy people believe they were crazy? What about Ned? She hadn’t known him long enough or seen enough of him to make a final judgment. He seemed sane enough, but he was also clearly smart, and smart people were often good at concealing their own peculiarities, so they could function in society. That’s how serial killers managed to go on killing—because they could pass as normal.
What was wrong with her? Why the dark thoughts? Well, if she was going to be honest, she missed Ned. She’d lost count of how many times she had come across an interesting fact as she read the old books in the library, and thought, I have to tell Ned about this. Well, she hadn’t shut the door completely, just asked him for a timeout. It troubled her how quickly she had come to depend on him. She had depended on Brad far too much—for her own plans, for her entertainment, for her purpose in life. He had proved to be inadequate. Ned was a better choice—at least he paid attention to her—but she didn’t want to lean on anyone that way again. Or at least, the leaning should be mutual, not one-sided. Learn from your mistakes, Abby.
After a quiet evening with a book that had nothing to do with history or spirits or romance, Abby went to bed. Monday promised to be challenging, as did every day between now and April 19. She needed her rest.
• • •
While she arrived at the museum at her usual time the next morning, she felt like she was dragging. She hoped focusing on her work would help. While school groups could be taxing, she usually felt revived by eager kids, including the ones who didn’t see the point of learning about history, even in their own backyard. For Abby it was always a challenge to figure out something that would spark their imaginations and make them see long-past events in a different light. She spent the morning polishing her presentations and swapping out some visual materials for different ones.
Leslie stuck her head in Abby’s door just before noon. “Lunch?”
“Do you really have time to leave the building?” Abby said, only half joking.
“No, but if I don’t get out of here and get some fresh air, I’ll lose it. Come on, you look like you could use a break too.”
“All right. You’re the boss.” Abby gathered up her jacket and bag and followed Leslie out of the building.
They walked to the nearest restaurant, since their time was short, and were lucky to find a table. After they’d ordered, Leslie looked Abby in the eye and said, “What I would have said earlier is that you look like somebody broke your dolly and stomped on it. Work getting to you?”
Abby shook her head. “No, not at all. I find I really do enjoy working with kids. Well, I knew I did, but I was happily surprised how quickly it all came back to me. I’m having a good time with them, and I’m experimenting with some changes.”
Leslie looked relieved. “Good, because the reviews have been consistently good. Translation: the kids like you, and so do the teachers. Keep it up.” The waitress delivered their sandwiches and drinks, and then Leslie said, “So if it’s not work, why do you look so down? Trouble in paradise?”
Normally Abby would have given a bland and evasive answer, but this was Leslie, and Leslie knew Ned well. Which more or less gave her the right to ask, although she probably wouldn’t press if Abby asked her to back off. “I assume you’re talking about Ned. Well, not trouble exactly … I kind of asked him to give me a little time off.”
“Okay,” Leslie said cautiously. “Is that a brush-off? As in, please go away forever?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s just that … well, you know. A lot of things happened very fast, and it’s like my brain is only now catching up with it all. I love my job. I like my house—only it’s not mine and I’m going to have to do something about that sooner rather than later. With Ned it’s … complicated.” She stopped, unsure how to go on.
“Uh-huh,” Leslie said. She took a large bite of her sandwich and chewed, conveniently giving herself time to think. After she’d swallowed she said, “You’d tell me if I was butting in where I wasn’t welcome, wouldn’t you?”
Abby nodded.
Leslie went on, “And I’m your boss, which makes things even more confusing. But putting that aside for now, let me talk to you as a friend. I think you’re absolutely right about getting slammed by a lot of things at once, and you should allow yourself the time to adjust. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen on anybody’s schedule but yours. So if you’re feeling smothered by Ned, you have every right to put the brakes on. Or at least take your foot off the gas. You got that?”
Abby smiled, almost in spite of herself. “Yes, and thank you. But I don’t want to hurt him, and I’m trying not to send signals that this is over, because I don’t believe it is. It’s just that I’ve got a lot of things to work through. Look, you know about Brad. I thought I knew him—heck, I even thought I loved him, somewhere in there. And look how that turned out. The thing is, I don’t trust my judgment right now. Ned is a great guy, and he really gets me. He isn’t all about himself. But that kind of works two ways. There are a lot of things about him that I don’t know, probably because I haven’t asked. I’m not sure what he does for work, other than that it involves DNA testing of some sort. I’ve never seen his house—he keeps telling me it’s barely habitable. And if you’re wondering, we haven’t even gotten close to discussing moving in together.” Although Ned had brought it up—and she had ducked. “And I’m not sure I’m ready for that anyway. You see the problem?”
“Unfortunately I do. No, don’t panic—it’s not awful. Tell me you haven’t wondered how Ned and I ever got together and stayed together for any length of time?” Leslie’s gaze challenged Abby.
“Okay, sure I have—he told me you were engaged, a while ago. You’re such different personalities.”
“Yes, we are, and luckily we realized that in time. He’s a good person, and he does pay attention and care. But toward the end, there were times when I felt like I was sucking the life out of him. I mean, he’d get all quiet, and I’d get louder to compensate. He’d try to join in, but it was pretty clear that was out of his comfort zone. It was just a bad fit—no harm, no foul. The two of you seem much better suited.”
If only you knew, Abby thought. “I think so too, although I guess I wonder if we’d bore each other to death at some point. Is there such a thing as too much quiet between two people?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Leslie grinned. “As for the other stuff: ask him. He’s not hiding anything. It’s not like he’s got a wife and six kids stashed in that house of his—I’ve been by it, and it really is a fixer-upper, but he likes tha
t. Only he never seems to have the time to do any of the fixing up. As for the job … well, I can’t claim to understand the science of what he does, but I gather from what he has said and what I’ve heard from other people that it’s pretty much cutting-edge. It’s a big deal, in a very specialized and competitive field. And that’s about all I know.”
“And he’s not a CIA double agent or a sleeper terrorist harboring a sleeper cell in his basement?” Abby asked, striving to look wide-eyed and innocent.
“Not hardly,” Leslie replied. “Have I helped at all?”
“I think so. He is what he appears to be, right?”
“Exactly. But if you want this to work—assuming you do—then you have to talk to him. You can’t just shut down on him.”
“I more or less figured that, and I think you’re right. Let’s just chalk it up to growing pains, with all this new stuff that’s been going on. We’ll work it out.”
“Well, I’m pulling for both of you, but I’ll keep my nose out of things. I want you to stick around—it’s a pain in the butt to recruit and interview new employees.”
“As I recall, my interview lasted about ten minutes.”
Leslie waved away the comment. “Ah, you were a done deal, since Ned recommended you. I’ve always thought he’s a good judge of character.”
Abby suppressed a sigh. It was nice that Ned had helped her get this job, but a stubborn part of her wished she had gotten it solely on her own merits. “Well, I’m glad it all worked out. Should we get back?”
“Yes, we should. We’ve got another meeting this afternoon, if the memo hasn’t gone out, which because I never got around to sending it probably didn’t, unless we’ve got elves in the building who step up and take care of things like that.”
As they both stood up and tossed some bills on the table, Abby asked, “But haven’t you all been doing this for years? It should be almost automatic by now.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But a year seems to be long enough to forget how it all works, and then there are things that need to be replaced, and then somebody says they saw something on vacation somewhere else that they thought was really cool and maybe we should try it. And so on. You’ll see.”
“I hear it’s a madhouse on the day.”
“It is. But it’s nice to see people who care about their own history. Even if it is only once a year. And who says you can’t combine fun and learning something?”
• • •
When she returned to the museum, Abby had to rush to collect her materials for the school group presentation, and as soon as that was over, and she’d chatted with some of the kids and the teachers, and told them what else they really ought to see, and asked if they’d seen the Alcott House and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home and Walden Pond, it was time for the staff meeting, which went much the way Leslie had predicted. And when that ended, it was time to go home. Somehow Abby had neglected to buy any groceries on Saturday or Sunday, so she detoured to the market on the way home and stocked up.
Back at the house, she ate and tidied up, but instead of going to bed when all that was done, she felt the siren call of the laptop. Logging on, she filled in the bits and pieces of information she’d gleaned at the library, but the results weren’t impressive. Her family tree didn’t have many leaves on it, much less fruit. She knew that some people spent years, even decades, filling such things in, and she also knew that the process never seemed to end, but she was in a hurry. Why, Abby? Because she was afraid to meet more of her long-dead ancestors at the reenactment? Because she wanted to understand how it came to be that she was on the same wavelength as people who had been dead for more than a century? Or because she wanted to reach some resolution with it so she could get back together with Ned and work through whatever problems they had? Or to end it for good because this weird ability was just too much to deal with? Yes, to all of the above.
It was approaching midnight when she finally shut down the computer and dragged herself to bed. She fell asleep quickly, but several hours later she sat bolt upright. “I got it wrong.” She said it out loud, to the darkness, not that it mattered. Apparently her subconscious had been chewing away on the genealogy questions even as she slept. Without turning on the light, she punched up her pillows and leaned against them, thinking hard.
The man on the green: she’d seen him clearly. But the question was, through whose eyes? All the other experiences she’d had—at the house in Waltham, at the cemetery there, at the Reed house in Weston—she’d been seeing through the eyes of a particular individual. She hadn’t always been able to identify that person right away, but when she finally had, it had always been a lineal ancestor. At first, touch had played an important part in it—touching something that the other people had touched or held—but more recently she’d gotten better at picking up the signals without a physical trigger.
But at the Littleton green she had seen a Revolutionary War soldier, clear as day. Ned had not seen him, which she took to mean that the soldier wasn’t a modern reenactor but someone from the past. Okay, she was getting used to that now. But if she was inside the head of someone else who was seeing that man, who was it? And why did he—or she?—see only that one other person and not a whole crowd? The only conclusion she could draw, at least for the moment, was that they were both ancestors of hers. The see-er and the see-ee? Damn, she really needed better terms! But the bottom line was, there were two people at that muster in 1775 who were somehow related to her. Siblings? Or two different and unrelated lines? Ned hadn’t mentioned seeing anyone there from the past, so neither of them was connected to him.
She considered her hypothesis but could find nothing wrong with it. But it was the middle of the night and she’d been jerked out of a sound sleep, so she would reserve judgment until daylight. In part her conclusion frightened her: as she had feared, she was running into more ancestors, now that she was more attuned to her peculiar ability. But there might be good news too: if they were siblings, or father and son, who fought at Concord, it might be easier to find them. Or what if it had been a wife or daughter or sister who was watching the men? She shouldn’t discount that, and she might be able to find out if a crowd had gathered to send the men off to battle on that day.
She lay back down and nestled into the warm bedcovers. Her last conscious thought was, I wish I could tell Ned.
7
As Patriots’ Day approached, Abby’s days became increasingly busy. She knew there would be a lull in her regular responsibilities when school break week arrived, the week following the big event. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have minded being so busy, because she liked feeling useful. But now she wanted to pursue her research into her family lines, and there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.
She could see why genealogy became an obsession for some people. She didn’t count herself among the obsessed ones, because she had a real and immediate cause to investigate her family tree: they kept popping up in her day-to-day life. Of course, she had to concede that a lot of other people might—what word did she want? Enjoy? Suffer?—the same phenomenon, only they never talked about it. Not that she talked about it either, except with Ned. Who, following her orders, had not contacted her. He was the only other person she knew personally who shared this particular ability. Surely there must be others? But Abby had no plans to go hunting for them, not until she figured out a few things for herself. Then she could think about forming a Secret Society for Spook Seers.
No, that wasn’t right. The people she saw, or through whom she saw, were hurting, or at least significantly stressed, and that’s what carried forward and made it possible for her to sense them. They were sad or suffering or angry. She could not treat them as a joke, not if their pain had persisted for centuries and was still strong enough to reach her now. She tried to remember if she had seen any happy events, but the best she could do was one instance where a child had died, and the earlier happiness had somehow become muddled with the pain of an infant’s death.
One day she stopped in at Leslie’s office to deliver some documents and found Leslie alone and not on the phone—a rare occurrence. “Can I ask you something?” Abby said. “Work-related, I mean?”
“Sure. I’ve got at least three minutes free. Sit. Talk to me.”
“This is very preliminary, but I wanted to run an idea by you. The more I look into my own family history, the more likely it looks to me like I had at least one ancestor who fought at the bridge here. I won’t bore you with the details, but I was wondering if that might make a good teaching presentation?”
Leslie did not look impressed. “How would you go about it?”
“Kind of like a look at an ordinary guy who lived in Concord or nearby, going about his business—farming or whatever—marrying, having kids. And then this war comes along and a lot of things change. There are lots of ways to approach it—what the farms and industries produced around here, what the population looked like. How people moved around a lot, mostly connected by family ties that might not be obvious today. How they dressed. Whether they had weapons of their own. How the militia was organized, and how that led to the army. But all of it linked by one local soldier and his family. What do you think?”
Leslie looked at her speculatively. “It’s ambitious, I’ll say that. I can’t recall that it’s been done before at the museum. You looking to focus on somebody famous?”
Abby shook her head. “No. I think it should be an ordinary person, caught up in extraordinary events. I think kids could identify with that.”
“So could adults, if you present it the right way. But that’s a different story.” Leslie cocked her head at Abby. “You think our school materials are getting a little stale?”
Abby shook her head. “I didn’t mean to criticize them—they work fine. And I’m not thinking about throwing them out. I just thought maybe a different slant might be interesting. I’m not talking about in-depth coverage, just an hour’s presentation—which is about the maximum attention span for most of the kids. We’ve already got plenty of physical materials in the collections.”
Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Page 5
