• • •
The house was dark and quiet when she arrived. No ghosts. Abby wondered whether, if she were staying somewhere long term, she’d get a pet—a cat or a dog to welcome her home, even if all they wanted was their dinner. Her family had had a few when she was growing up, but since then the timing had never been right. Brad hadn’t wanted small furry things that would get in his way and shed all over his business suits. Abby had always suspected that Brad didn’t want anything around that diverted her attention away from him, even for a little while. Well, Brad was gone, but she still had no pets. She’d have to make sure that the next place she lived would allow one.
After another quick supper she settled in front of her laptop, but sat there, staring at the screen, her shoulders slumped. She wanted to talk to Ned. It had been a week since they’d had any contact—since she’d more or less demanded that he give her some space. But now she had this great new discovery, and she wanted to tell him all about it, ask him what the best way to research it would be. Oh, Abby, be honest! You miss him. She’d given him a list of reasons why they shouldn’t rush into anything now—and they weren’t worth warm spit. If she could erase the Brad years, would she have acted differently? Yes, she thought so. She wouldn’t be so cautious now, so suspicious of Ned’s motives and of her reaction to him.
She’d been attracted to him from the beginning, but she had buried that deep, out of loyalty to Brad. She wasn’t about to carry on with two men at once, no way. She had been open about Ned with Brad—heck, she had made a point of introducing them, to make sure everything was aboveboard—and Brad had dismissed him, even suggested that Ned was gay. In other words, based on one quick meeting, Brad had decided that Ned was no threat to him, and that was that. She had been so pathetically grateful that anybody had noticed her that she hadn’t dared examine too closely whatever was going on.
And when she had started to look more closely, she had panicked. Ned wasn’t Brad—she knew that. Ned did listen to her and pay attention—but she had worried that it was for the wrong reasons. She didn’t want attention if it meant she was somebody’s science experiment. Her head told her now that she had been right: she had to slow down for her own sake, take time to understand all the changes that had taken place in her life over the past six months or more. That was the reasonable, adult thing to do.
But she missed Ned. Was that so wrong? If they were meant to be together, shouldn’t they be working out their problems together? She reached for her cell phone, put it down, then picked it up again and hit his number. It rang and rang, then went to voice mail. She couldn’t think of anything to say in a message, so she just hung up. He would see that she had called; let him take the next step.
She turned back to the computer and booted it up. Two hours later she had a sheaf of printouts and the beginnings of a headache. She’d found more than one military record for Henry Perry, but she didn’t understand them. Part of that was her ignorance of military language and organization in 1775, she admitted. But the records seemed to contradict themselves: he was enlisted here; no, he had signed up there, for three years. He had deserted; no, some officer up the ranks had declared that Henry had been present and accounted for during his entire service. Maybe there were two different Henrys? Or maybe record-keeping at that point had been chaotic, which wouldn’t be surprising under the circumstances, when the military chain of command was changing rapidly. She couldn’t find any record that he’d applied for a pension, but given that he’d sired two sons after the Revolution had ended, he’d survived the war.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, apparently he’d had two wives, although not at the same time. And, if she had it right, she was descended from the second wife, not the first. They’d had a son named Reuben in 1788, and he was Mary Ann’s father.
Abby sat back and rubbed her eyes. This was ridiculous. It was like hunting black rabbits in the woods at midnight. Every now and then she’d catch a glimpse of something, or hear a rustle as it passed, but then it would disappear and she couldn’t find confirmation of it. Or if she did, it was just a repetition of the same information that she didn’t trust in the first place.
All right, go back to the beginning. Why had she seen Henry on the Littleton green? She’d already guessed that she was seeing him through the eyes of one of her own ancestors. From what she’d found, it looked as though his two eldest sons had also fought in that war—and one of them appeared on the monument on the green. But … son Benjamin was not her lineal ancestor. Why would she be channeling him? Or maybe it was Henry’s wife, worried about him? No, that wouldn’t work because he was still married to his first wife, Susanna, Benjamin’s mother, who Abby wasn’t related to.
Abby pulled out the list of names she’d copied from the Littleton records. Wife Number One, Susanna, had been born in 1736, and she and Henry had already had seven children by 1775. And, Abby noted with a smile, number eight had been born almost exactly nine months after the battle at Concord—they must have had a nice celebration of the victory! And there was a ninth child after that, and Susanna had lived another few years beyond his birth.
So, if it wasn’t Benjamin who was “reporting” to her, Abby thought, and Susanna wasn’t her lineal ancestor either, what about the second wife, Jane? Henry had married her less than a year after Susanna’s death, but Susanna hadn’t died until 1785. Jane would have been past thirty at the time of the battle, but if Abby was going to stick to her original hypothesis, that only lineal ancestors appeared to her, or she saw through them, then she’d have to put Jane on the green there too, watching Henry and lusting after him and agonizing about the impossibility of doing anything about their forbidden love (Henry’s very-much-alive first spouse and a slew of small children did complicate things!). That would have been intense enough to leave a mark, right? But Abby had now created a steamy soap opera in 1775, with no proof whatsoever. And with that she shut down her computer with a laugh. Maybe it could have happened that way, but what were the odds? And there was no way to prove any of it, unless Mary had conveniently left a detailed diary. She could ask Esther if there was one, but she wasn’t going to hold her breath.
She showered and crawled into bed with a book. Ned hadn’t called by the time she was ready to turn off the light. Maybe his phone was dead. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he was out of the country and couldn’t get reception. Or maybe he simply didn’t want to speak to her; he’d decided she was too high-maintenance, what with all these ghosts floating around her. Well, she hadn’t asked for them, and they weren’t going away, so she was going to have to figure out how to live with them, with or without Ned’s help.
• • •
She was lying in bed contemplating the ceiling and trying to decide what she wanted to eat for breakfast when the doorbell rang.
“Crap!” she said. It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning. She hadn’t combed her hair or brushed her teeth, and she was wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved T-shirt. But this could be a neighborhood crisis (the water main had broken? there was a blackout? an approaching swarm of bees?), or one of the three people in the world who knew where she was living was at her front door ringing her doorbell. And she was pretty sure it wasn’t either Brad or Leslie.
She pulled on a sweatshirt (mornings were still cold!), slid her feet into her ancient Crocs and went up the stairs to the front door. A peek through the peephole confirmed her suspicions: Ned. Did she want to open the door?
Of course she did. She fumbled with disarming the alarm system and undoing the locks before she could finally pull the door open, and then she couldn’t think of anything to say. The best she could manage was “Hello.” Heck, she hadn’t had any coffee yet.
Ned looked about as clueless as she felt. “You called last night.”
“Yes, I did. You didn’t answer.”
“I was … involved with something and I couldn’t pick up.”
Abby’s mind leaped to someone rather than something—a tall blo
nde with few clothes on. The image fueled an acid spurt of jealousy. “Do you want to come in?” she asked. Duh—he was standing on her doorstep in the cold.
“Please,” he answered.
Abby stepped back to let him pass, and her hand brushed his by accident. Or was it accident? Ten minutes later she managed to put an inch of space between them. “I’ve missed you.”
“So have I,” Ned said into her neck. “I mean, I missed you, not I missed me.”
“Whatever.” With a huge effort Abby peeled herself away from him and moved back. “I’m sorry—I don’t think I explained myself very well the last time we were together.”
“No, I understand. Really. I should have realized how much you had, and still have, on your plate. I was being selfish.”
“And I let you be selfish,” Abby countered. “Come on, let’s sit down and eat some breakfast and pretend we’re rational adults.”
“Worth a try, I guess.” Ned smiled for the first time since he’d arrived.
He followed Abby into the kitchen and sat at the table, watching her as she made coffee and scrambled eggs and toasted bread. Abby kept smiling to herself, mostly when he couldn’t see it: none of their problems had evaporated, but it sure felt nice to have him here again.
Eating took five minutes. Then Abby launched into her most recent discoveries (undeterred by the fact that Ned simply kept staring at her face and might not have heard a word), and by the time she was through the breakfast dishes were heaped in the sink and Abby’s notes were strewn over the table. “And then I realized I’d constructed this ridiculous scenario about unrequited love. Heck, maybe Jane finally poisoned Susanna so she and Henry could be together. Or Henry did the deed himself. Think there’s a way to find out?”
Ned smiled—or had he been smiling all along? “Unless you’re planning to dig up the bodies of everyone concerned, assuming you can find them, and then have autopsies performed, I don’t think so. Do you know where they’re buried?”
Abby shook her head. “I haven’t gotten that far.”
“Or where any of them lived, in Littleton?” Ned pressed.
“Come on, Ned, I just found Henry yesterday. Plus I’ve been having enough trouble figuring out where the boundaries for the towns were back then.”
“Yeah, that can be a mess. So what do you want to do next?”
“Find Henry and ask him what happened?” She smiled to let Ned know she was kidding. Wasn’t she? “Have any of them ever talked to you, or interacted in any way?”
“Nope. I … well, I know Johnnie Phillips ‘saw’ me”—Ned made air quotes—“but he never spoke to me. It seemed normal at the time, but I was young. It was like we were playing a game. A very quiet one.”
Abby herself had seen Johnnie at the house Ned grew up in, the first time she’d visited there, but she still hadn’t checked to see if they had any family connection—young Johnnie had been in the house for centuries. “I’ll bet he was great at hide-and-seek.” Abby made an effort to gather her scattered thoughts. “Anyway, to move forward, I can’t see wandering around Littleton looking for him, like he was a lost dog or something. I tried the old cemetery, but there are no Perry stones there. And even if we could track down where he lived, would there be enough emotion there to reach me?”
“I can’t say. It might be better to look for more battle sites.”
“Where?”
Ned sat back in his chair. “Well, from the military records you pulled up, we know he was at Valley Forge.”
“So were a lot of other people—that could be a real muddle. Besides, I don’t have any vacation time, and it’s a long drive to that part of Pennsylvania, like five or six hours, right?”
“It is. But Henry’s company also fought at Bunker Hill, and that’s a lot closer.”
“So it is. Road trip?” Abby asked eagerly.
“Looks like it.”
9
It was amazing how much just being around Ned again lightened her spirits. “Where are we going?” Abby said, feeling like an impatient child.
“Bunker Hill, only it’s really Breed’s Hill,” Ned said patiently.
“And which PR flak got the name wrong?”
“Does is really matter? It stuck. The point is, it’s high, and it gives a great view of Boston, especially if you want to lob cannonballs at it.”
“How do we get there?”
“Have you been to Boston at all?” Ned asked, incredulous.
“Uh, once when I was a lot younger, with my parents. A couple of times with Brad, but he usually drove, so I didn’t pay much attention to where we were going.”
“Bunker Hill is in Charlestown. We were there when I took you to find Phineas Reed.”
“Oh. We could see the monument on the hill from the cemetery, right? You don’t think Henry is related to Phineas, do you?”
“I don’t know enough to make a guess. It sounds as though they or their descendants didn’t cross paths, but in case you hadn’t read about it, Phineas was granted a plot of land in Billerica by the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I think it was, in gratitude for saving the Plymouth colonists from an Indian attack. If you have Perrys in Billerica, there might be some connection. Although I have to say, Phineas’s descendants are pretty well documented.”
“Pshaw,” Abby said. “If you follow my line of thinking about Henry and his wife at the battle, he was a hot-blooded type. Maybe Phineas was too, and left a few mementoes behind.”
Ned grinned. “Abby, we can’t prove most of the stated facts. How do you expect to verify off-the-record items like illegitimate children?”
“Hey, I’m just trying to keep an open mind. Since I don’t know what’s available in the way of resources, I’m certainly not going to assume what I want is not available. Does that make sense?”
“In some universe. Maybe not this one.”
“Spoilsport. Ooh, I like this bridge! Was that Boston we just drove over, around and through?”
“More or less. And we’re going to duck off this bridge as soon as possible and head for the hill, or hills, if you will.”
“Whatever you say.” Abby subsided into silence, watching the cityscape change. After a few turns they pulled up alongside a large green, crowned by the tall obelisk she had seen only from a distance—and in a lot of history books.
Ned parked on the street at the base of the hill. “Feel up for a climb? I warn you, we’re talking 294 steps here.”
“Can we prowl around a bit first? I mean, my Henry never climbed the monument because it didn’t exist during his lifetime. But there’s not much on the ground to look at either. I should have read up on the battle.”
“I can give you the short course,” Ned volunteered.
She swiveled to face him. “Don’t you get tired of knowing everything?”
“You’d rather I didn’t? Of course, you could carry your laptop around and I could keep my mouth shut.”
“Oh, go on, tell me all about the battle,” Abby muttered.
“Right. Fought on June seventeenth, 1775, about two months after the battle at Concord. The British wanted to control all the high ground near the harbor so they could keep their occupation of the city going. The patriots decided that Charlestown would be a good place to fortify—you can see it has a great vantage point. Anyway, the British weren’t too happy about it, so they attacked. The colonial forces managed to hold them off twice before they retreated—and they also killed or wounded about half the British soldiers, that was over a thousand men—while taking somewhere around five hundred casualties of their own. The colonists may have lost the battle, but it was a psychological victory. Apparently the English hadn’t learned anything from their performance at Concord. We’re here now because Colonel William Prescott was one of the leaders of the colonial troops. He’s the guy who is supposed to have said ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,’ although that may be a myth. The theory goes that he was trying to save ammunition. Prescott
was the commander of the company your Henry Perry fought with.”
“Aha,” Abby said. “So you think that means Henry was here?”
“Maybe. The records are kind of patchy. But it’s very possible. Anyway, the monument you see before you was begun in 1825, so as you say, Henry wouldn’t have seen it. But the Marquis de Lafayette was at the official laying of the cornerstone. It took them until 1842 to finish it, and it was dedicated the next year, with an oration from Daniel Webster. Here endeth the lecture.”
“I am not related to Lafayette,” Abby protested. “But thank you anyway. Can I go look around now?”
“Without me, you mean? No problem.”
Her head stuffed with historical information, Abby strolled off over the grass. There were other—living—people around, but they ignored her. She had no method and no goal; she was just wandering around, trying to picture the chaos of battle, with thousands of men clashing on what was actually a rather small hill. How had they all fit? It occurred to her that it might be a good teaching excursion to make schoolkids walk through a real battle—not with live ammunition, of course, but carrying the equivalent weight of a musket and shot and gunpowder, while wearing multiple layers of woolen clothing on a hot June day. And then trying to push or pull a cannon along, not to mention the shot for the cannon. And once the battle started up, there would be a lot of people running around, and a lot of smoke, obscuring who was where. How had anybody managed to communicate under those conditions?
Abby wondered how parents would feel about staging a mock battle. And what would the girls do? Knit socks for the soldiers? Or maybe clean up their bloody wounds and stitch them up. Feed them. Mourn them.
Abby spied an empty bench and sat down, facing the city. It must easily be a mile to the waterfront across the water. How far would a cannonball fly? At least that far, if this was a good strategic site. How many other useful military facts was she totally unaware of? And she called herself a teacher?
Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Page 7
