“Oh. Right.” He took a step back while Abby locked and armed the appropriate bits.
When she was done, she turned back to him. “You want something to drink? Hot, cold, alcoholic?”
“No, I don’t need anything. I just wanted to be sure that you were all right. And Mom. And the two of you together.”
“Then let’s go downstairs and I’ll … debrief you, I guess.” When they were settled on a couch in what Abby regarded as “her” living room—the one with the owners’ wide-screen TV—she said, “I really like your mother, you know. It’s a shame you two didn’t talk about all of this years ago, but I think I understand why.”
“I should have said something. I thought about it, but I kind of learned that guys aren’t supposed to share with their mothers, not unless they’re gay.”
“Is that what your father taught you?” Abby asked, surprised.
“No, nothing like that. Dad’s a nice guy, and he really loves Mom. I know she said she never told him, but I agree with her that he wouldn’t have known what to make of that information. He’s a simple guy. We get along well, if you’re wondering. Anyway, it was hard enough having to deal with ‘seeing’ people without having to defend my masculinity to a bunch of high school jocks.”
“Kids can be cruel, I know. No girlfriends in high school?”
Ned shook his head. “Friends, maybe, but not romantic. I was a geek, remember?”
“So were a lot of people, of both genders,” Abby told him tartly. “Including me. Don’t worry—you grew up just fine. So what was your understanding of what your mother told you tonight?”
“That she’d always had this ability, but that she’d ignored it as much as she could. That Dad didn’t share it, even though he’s from an old New England family just like she is. That there were other … presences in the house, but I told her I’d never seen them. Of course, I was in total denial back when I lived there. That she thought maybe we had some extra-normal connection between us, but that she never encouraged it. That was unselfish of her, don’t you think?”
“Yes. It must have been hard for her, all along. Wait a minute—if you didn’t see those others, does that mean they weren’t related to you? Were they related to your father, do you think? Or does that even make sense?”
Ned shrugged. “I really don’t know. The thing is, I may have seen Johnnie only because I was young and didn’t have a lot of preconceptions then. As I grew older, he disappeared, so I guess I accepted what my mother told me, that he was an imaginary friend. But you know he’s still around.”
For a moment Abby debated whether to tell Ned her suspicions about Leslie’s daughter Ellie, but she decided Ned already had too much information to process at the moment. The discussion of Ellie’s ability would keep. “Hey, it’s late, and I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
Ned stood up quickly. “I should go.”
“You should not! I’m not throwing you out. Stay. Please.” She reached out a hand.
Finally he smiled, and took her hand. “Thank you.”
Just as they were falling asleep, Abby murmured in Ned’s ear, “Your mother’s touch smells like cinnamon. Does that make any sense?”
Ned lifted his head to look at her. “I always noticed that. But I thought she just did a lot of baking, when I wasn’t home.”
Abby nestled closer. “Nope. It’s her. I’m glad we both get that.”
• • •
The next morning was a flurry of dressing, brushing, combing and the like, with only a quick grab at coffee and a muffin. No time for talk, but none was needed. Ned seemed to be his usual cheerful self, and that made Abby happy. She managed to get to work on time; the museum was more chaotic than usual. She slipped quietly up to her office and studied the To Be Done piles on her desk.
Leslie stuck her head in briefly. “Thanks for covering for me yesterday. Ellie seems to like you, which is a huge compliment coming from her. I hope she didn’t creep you out by demanding to go to the cemetery.”
Abby smiled. “Not at all—I love them, and that one down the street is a good one, which I haven’t really explored. She was particularly interested in the slave tombstone.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of unusual for the day. Did you tell her he was a drunk?”
“No, because I didn’t know myself until I came back and looked him up. She did manage to read the word ‘vice.’ Did you have to explain that?”
“No. She does read well for her age, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” Abby agreed. “Was there anything else you needed?”
“Nope, not right now. Staff meeting at three, mostly to make sure that everything we need to do is actually getting done. I’ll be glad when this craziness ends.”
Abby too was looking forward to some peace and quiet after Patriots’ Day, and even more she was looking forward to the summer, when there would be no school groups. Not that she didn’t enjoy them, but she really wanted to do more work on genealogy, and the longer days of summer would give her a chance to hunt for more relatives locally, at least in cemeteries. She wondered briefly if local historical societies kept longer hours in the summer, but she kind of doubted it. After all, their employees, so often volunteers, wanted to take their own vacations. She sighed. There was always too much to do, and there was so little time. Would she find answers faster if she had unlimited time to hunt down all her relatives? Or wouldn’t it make a difference? Right now she seemed to be living in the midst of a clutch of those ancestors, so she should really figure those out before she tried to expand her search. At least the Patriots’ Day parade should be interesting. How many “former” people would show up? Or would they show up at all, since it was pretty much a modern event, and rarely on the right day?
What about the one Littleton ancestor she had seen? Should she start out there and see if she saw Henry again? Or had the first “seeing” exhausted his residual energy? She tried to recall how many of her ancestors had appeared more than once. She could count at least a few, and Ned had seen young Johnnie regularly for a while. So if Henry—and his son or wife or whomever—were at the battle, could she physically follow them from Littleton to Concord? She reminded herself to ask Ned if he had seen anyone at past parades, or along the Battle Road. Or maybe he had made a point of avoiding them, in order to avoid waking up those sleeping dogs of his.
As she worked, Abby gave over a corner of her mind to Ellie. What was going on with her? Point one, Ellie had said she saw a man in funny clothes; Abby had not seen the man. But she had learned not to discount comments like that, based on her own experience. Point two, Ellie had said it tickled when she held Abby’s hand; Abby had felt it too. All right, assuming her interpretation of what was happening to her was correct, then Ellie had the same gift (ability?), and maybe she was somehow related to Abby. Or not. She’d have to check Leslie’s and her husband’s backgrounds to find out. So far, so good.
She certainly wasn’t close enough to Leslie to ask if Leslie had any reason to believe that her daughter had any kind of psychic ability. Besides, Leslie was her boss, and Abby wanted to keep her job, and asking weird questions was a good way to jeopardize it. In addition, Leslie seemed like an extroverted, no-nonsense person, one not likely to entertain fantastic statements coming from her seven-year-old daughter. Abby had to tread lightly: if she chose to say nothing to Leslie about Ellie, what was the risk? That Ellie would lose that particular ability? Would that be a bad thing? She could lead a normal life without worrying about dead people popping up unexpectedly.
Wait and see, was the best solution Abby could come up with. And talk to Ned about what to do, when their shared issues calmed down a bit. She wondered briefly what Leslie’s husband was like. She didn’t think that the ability had come through Leslie’s family line, so had it come from her husband’s? At the moment all Abby could say with any certainty was that Ellie’s line did not intersect with either the Reeds or the Perrys. That left a whole lot of families to explore.
/> And she should stick to her own, with what little free time she had. What was it the French used to say? Revenons à nos moutons? Which translated to, back to your own sheep. She had her own sheep to worry about. And that meant Henry Perry, the man on the green.
The day passed without any surprises or crises. The experienced staff had everything under control, as they demonstrated at the afternoon staff meeting, and Abby, who had no experience and no role in the event, could only listen and admire. Leslie had chosen her staff well: they were uniformly enthusiastic and competent. Whatever powers Leslie might or might not have, she was a good judge of character when it came to employment. Abby hoped she fit the mold.
She and Ned had made no plans for the evening, and if she was honest with herself, she was kind of relieved. Being with Ned was intense. Last evening she had had to deal with Sarah Newhall’s concerns, which had been difficult in itself. She could well understand why Ned had ducked the whole issue for so long, but now that it was out in the open between them, they couldn’t just bury it and pretend it had never happened. Well, they could, but Abby was pretty sure that wouldn’t work in the long run. They had to face the fact that dead people kept barging into their lives and figure out how to live with it.
After a brief supper Abby settled down in front of her laptop. She knew she could find military records online, although sometimes they were incomplete or contradictory or missing or rife with erratic spellings. That she could handle. Property records were harder. If she was lucky she might find some old maps that showed where people had lived in Littleton before 1800, but that might show only the big landowners, not the people who rented a house from them. Was there a way to dowse for ancestors? She could just see herself wandering around Littleton with a forked stick, trying to find any reaction. It might be a good idea to talk to the nice people at the historical society there—they were more likely to have detailed local maps than the big online sites.
It occurred to her that she wasn’t sure if the people she was seeking existed in more than one place. She knew she had seen various Flaggs at different locations, but always in Waltham. Was their spirit or electrical charge or whatever she wanted to call it tethered to one place? The most intense moment of their life? Or had they left multiple imprints along the way? In other words, would she see them on the battlefield and at a cemetery? If the death part was more traumatic than the battle, would the older, weaker signal be replaced by the newer one? Once she had “downloaded” an image, would it be erased or deleted? Abby shook her head: her questions were ridiculous. How was she supposed to know? How would anybody know? She could understand why Ned had shut the door on the whole thing: to a scientist the phenomenon must be very frustrating, because there was nothing tangible to test. Maybe they should start carrying devices that detected electrical charges, to see if there were any changes during an appearance.
She shut off her laptop abruptly. This was getting her nowhere fast, so she might as well go to bed.
13
The next morning before leaving for work, Abby dashed off a quick email to Ned, including only the skeletal information she had collected on Henry Perry’s military service. She could prove he fought at Concord, but she hadn’t found him at Bunker Hill—although she’d somehow intersected with a lot of other soldiers there, if the fragmentary “seeings” she had experienced were any indication. She couldn’t allow herself to think about how many relatives she had running around New England, because if she did she’d give up before she even started—there were bound to be hundreds of them. For the moment she was going to stick to the Perry line, because they were geographically closest.
She was surprised when Ned called her at work shortly after she arrived, something he seldom did. “You doing anything this weekend?”
Abby glanced at her calendar. “I’m not sure. I don’t think I have to do anything official for the parade, although Leslie may have other ideas. She hasn’t said. Why?”
“I was wondering if you wanted to take a quick run to Pennsylvania?”
It took Abby a moment to realize what he meant. “You mean, Valley Forge? To see if we find Henry there?”
“That’s what I was thinking. Can you do it?”
“Why the urgency? I mean, he’s been dead for two hundred years, and if there’s anything of him there, it’s not going anywhere.”
When he answered, Ned sounded disappointed. “I thought you might want to get some sort of resolution, sooner rather than later. It would be a quick trip—either he shows up or he doesn’t.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense to wait for winter? I mean, that’s when everybody was suffering there.”
“From what you—we’ve seen, the residue is there whether or not there’s a date or event attached to it now. It’s what happened in the past that left its mark.”
That made sense to Abby. “But isn’t it a six-hour drive, even without traffic?” she said.
“We can fly and pick up a car at the Philadelphia airport.”
“I can’t afford that!” Abby protested.
“I can. Let me treat you. It’s a short hop to Philly, and it’s not expensive.”
“Expensive” was kind of relative. Abby had no idea how much money Ned earned, since she still wasn’t sure what his job was, but she knew she was on a pretty tight budget, and that was with rent-free housing. She didn’t want to be obligated to Ned financially—she was supposed to be making it on her own. “I was thinking of doing more research in Littleton,” she said.
“Abby, Concord and the whole area will be a zoo this weekend, leading up to the parades. It’ll take you twice as long as normal just to get around.
He was probably right. “Okay, I guess.”
“I am overwhelmed by your enthusiasm,” Ned said, sounding happier. “Let me get the tickets and set up the car. Early on Saturday okay with you?”
“Yes. You want to stay over Friday night, so we can get an early start together? Oh, and I’ll pay you back for the tickets, I promise.”
“If it makes you happy, fine. Friday’s good for me. Unless we get together before that. Let me go and get the trip set up, and I’ll get back to you.”
After he hung up, Abby sat staring at the phone. She should check with Leslie, to be sure there wasn’t anything she had to be doing at the museum. It would probably be busy, with all the tourists in town—although if they were here to march around and be seen, they might not be interested in touring a sedate museum. And she should do it sooner rather than later, so she could let Ned know if there was going to be a problem.
Abby made her way to Leslie’s office, which as usual looked as though a tornado had passed through. She leaned against the doorjamb. “Leslie, do I have any specific responsibilities this weekend?”
“Well, we can always use an extra pair of hands. Why?”
“There’s something I want to do, but it involves being out of town for at least one day. If it’s a problem I can postpone it.” She didn’t want to mention Ned, and she hoped that Leslie wouldn’t ask awkward questions about this mysterious errand.
Leslie cocked her head at her, and Abby wondered if she was trying to read her mind. “You can take the time off—heck, it’s yours anyway—but I’ll make a deal with you. You know next week is school vacation week?”
“Of course. Why?”
“You wouldn’t know, but it’s hell to find child care for that particular week, because everybody needs it all at once. How about you take Ellie for a day next week? She likes you, and maybe you can take her around looking at other historical stuff.”
“Does she actually like to do that?” Abby said dubiously.
“Well, sometimes. Yeah, I know, she’s had it shoved down her throat since birth, and she’s seen all the easy stuff, but if it’s with you, maybe she won’t mind so much. Take the whole day and drive somewhere. Heck, go to an amusement park or the beach—just as long as I don’t have to worry about her.”
“What about your son?”
&nb
sp; “He’s got day-care coverage—at least they don’t take vacations, thank goodness! It’s just the after-school programs that are a problem, because they usually follow the school schedule. So, we’re good with you taking Ellie?”
“Sure. She’s an interesting kid. And I don’t have anything in particular planned for next week, so pick your day.”
“I’ll get back to you on that—I’m trying to spread the job. Don’t get me wrong—I love the little darling, and she’s a sharp cookie, but the smart ones aren’t the easiest to handle. You’ll be fine, though. If that’s all, I’ve got a million things to do.”
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Abby said and beat a hasty retreat. In an odd way she was glad that Leslie had given her the opportunity to spend more time with Ellie. Maybe she could find a way to test her and see if what she’d noticed at the cemetery had been a fluke, or maybe just her own imagination. She realized that she still hadn’t told Ned about what she suspected about Ellie. Should she? She couldn’t think of any easy way to get Ned and Ellie together so he could make his own observations without any preconceptions. Well, she had a week to decide what she wanted to do.
Back at her office she texted Ned to say that she’d cleared her weekend with Leslie, and then she dug back into the work on her desk.
• • •
She and Ned met for dinner in Concord the next evening. After work—and since she felt guilty, she had stayed late—on Wednesday, she had fleshed out her profile of Henry Perry a bit more, but the results were pretty sparse. There was pitifully little about the man himself, beyond the bare statistics: birth, both marriages, births of children, deaths. He had a son Henry who had lived in nearby Acton, but both seem to have died about the same time. There wasn’t much of a trail apart from the vital records, which was probably par for the course at that time. Henry had been an ordinary person who had fought in a war, or actually, two wars, if she counted the French and Indian War, as had many other people. He had done nothing unusual, and certainly nothing heroic. Abby wasn’t even sure he could read or write. It looked as though the Littleton Historical Society was her best hope for information outside of the mainstream.
Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Page 10
