Read Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) Online

Authors: Sheila Connolly

Tags: #mystery, #genealogy, #cozy, #psychic powers, #Boston, #Salem, #witch trials, #ghosts, #history

Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) (7 page)

BOOK: Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3)
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“Don’t you start making jokes—it’s bad enough with Leslie. You know what I mean. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but I want to think about it. What I’m asking is, are there code words for these abilities?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure there must be publications somewhere that can tell you. What are we doing about dinner?”

“You’re taking me out. It’s been a busy day.”

6

 

Over the next couple days, the weekend, Abby fell into a regular pattern. Breakfast with Ned. In the mornings, when the light was best, she’d strip wallpaper. They’d eat a quick lunch together, then she would settle in with some books she’d taken out from the library or downloaded to her computer, and explore the many theories about what had happened at Salem and why. There was no shortage of hypotheses, and new ones kept popping up, as both technology and psychology evolved. When her eyes could no longer focus on the print or pixels, she’d dive back into her family history, which was kind of fun. Should she go back to Concord and ask the long-departed Reeds in the cemetery there for help? No, that was silly: so far she’d had little luck with initiating any kind of interaction with those from the past, much less asking them for the names of their grandparents.

Well, no, that wasn’t exactly true. It seemed to be possible but inconsistent. Ned had seen and been seen by his “friend” Johnny, in the house where he’d grown up. Ellie had played some inter-century game of hide-and-seek with an ancestor she and Abby shared, whose family had lived in Littleton. And she herself had had direct conversation with a recently deceased descendant from the same Perry line, at the Littleton Historical Society. She was still somewhat incredulous about that, because she would have sworn that the person she was talking to was real—but she’d been firmly told otherwise by the director of the historical society, and Abby had visited the grave and found her there again. But none of that meant she could waltz into a cemetery, knock on a tombstone, call up an ancestor and ask politely, Did you have any ancestors at Salem? She’d have to find out the old-fashioned way, by doing the research. Maybe when Leslie had fired her, telling her not to come back, she’d done her a favor: now she had the time to pursue this. She could think about finding a job later, maybe in the fall. Still, she felt like a parasite, living off Ned. She’d always planned to be self-sufficient, something that former boyfriend Brad had conveniently ignored, expecting her to do all the unpacking and setting up of their new home while he went off to the city to do important financial things.

Leslie had called on Sunday. “One day a week. That work for you?” she had said without preamble.

“Fine. You want me to come pick Ellie up at your house, or meet you at the museum?”

“We can work that out later. I’m going to have to trust you not to do anything too weird, or dangerous, or anything like that.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. When do you want to start?”

“Last day of school is May twentieth. How about the first week in June? I’ve got to tell the summer program which days Ellie will be there.”

“Okay.” Abby wasn’t about to argue. She was glad Leslie had seen the logic of her suggestion, that she and Ellie explore their talent together. Now all she had to do was figure out what to do with Ellie for those days. She didn’t want Ellie to think Abby was using her as a guinea pig. And she was pretty sure that Leslie would be watching with an eagle eye to make sure she didn’t push Ellie too hard, not that she would. She liked Ellie, and was looking forward to spending time with a child, something she had missed since she’d lost her job.

“I’ll give you a call next week,” Leslie said, then hung up. Obviously she was still conflicted about the whole thing, Abby thought, but at least it was a baby step forward.

So: she had a couple of days to do her homework and think of a strategy.

By Monday the front and back parlor and the dining room walls were denuded, which Abby thought was good progress even though they looked terrible at the moment. Luckily the kitchen had never been papered, only painted, and that was easy to clean, and repainting it could wait for a while. She wasn’t ready to tackle the upstairs, although at least up there the ceilings were lower so the walls were shorter. The grand hallway she wasn’t going to touch, now or in the future: the stretch from the ground floor to the top of the wall on the second floor had to be twenty feet and would require not only longer ladders but some kind of scaffolding to straddle the elegant staircase—miraculously never painted. That she would willingly pay for someone else with the equipment and the skills to handle.

And her research into the history of the Salem witch trials had proved fascinating, although she wasn’t sure what to do with the information. She still didn’t believe in witches. She was more than ever convinced that
other
people had then and maybe still did believe in witches, although in the seventeenth century that was more likely to mean someone who channeled or worked for the Devil. People had reacted with fear and anger, and they had done real harm, not only to particular individuals, who had been imprisoned, and lost their homes and their families and sometimes even their lives. Why? The whole thing had been started by a small group of girls, all under the age of twenty. They had come from respectable families, pillars of the community. And they had gone crazy together and torn apart their community and even threatened the foundations of the colony. How could something like that happen? Why had sensible adults even believed the girls in the first place? It still made no sense to her.

If it was ever going to, Abby thought her best chance was to track down one or more ancestral relatives and see if her connection through their eyes worked, going back over three hundred years. There was no guarantee: plenty of her more recent local ancestors remained stubbornly silent, so far. But Abby was hoping that the intensity of emotions in Salem at the time could make it work, with or without a personal connection. And if—if!—it did, she might gain a peculiar and unique insight into how people had seen and interpreted what was going on at the time. The odds were long, but wouldn’t it be interesting?

Then there was Ellie, who shared some of her ancestral lineage but not necessarily any that connected to Salem or Andover—that meant more research. Had Ned ever looked? He seemed to have followed the Reed line back to the beginning, but oddly enough there were no Reeds in Salem or Andover at the right time, even though she’d found the name almost everywhere else she had looked since she began her research. So next she would have to start checking out the other lines she hadn’t looked at yet. It would be easiest to start with the Reeds and see if she could push that line back in the right direction. If not, she’d have to come at the hunt in a different way.

She hadn’t looked at her family’s genealogy information for a while, since her life had been shaken up: finding out about Ellie, losing her job, moving in with Ned. That meant she had to reacquaint herself with her own family. It wasn’t like she knew them well—she’d only “met” them a few months before, when her mother had appeared with her grandmother’s rocking chair. Then when she’d gotten the job at the museum, she’d thrown most of her energy into that, without giving much thought to all those lurking ancestors—until one had shown up at the green in Littleton just before Patriots’ Day: Henry Perry, one that Ned couldn’t see, so he was her relative but not his. And his untimely appearance had started the whole cascade of events that led to Leslie driving her out of the museum and Abby moving into Ned’s house.

So now it was time to dig in once again, starting with Olivia, her great-great-grandmother, née Flagg, who had married Samuel Pendleton in 1886. Olivia she had traced back along a couple of lines, but Samuel’s forebears were all blank. She was poised to start when her phone rang. When she checked caller ID she was surprised to see that it was Leslie.

“Hey, Leslie, what’s up?” she said when she answered.

“I’ve got a favor to ask. This is an early closing day at Ellie’s school, and my sitter can’t make it—we messed up with the dates. Could you pick Ellie up?”

“Sure, no problem. You want me to bring her back later?”

“If you could. Sorry to dump this on you.”

“Hey, I’ve spent enough time around kids and schools to know how often this kind of thing happens. I’m glad to help. What time and where?”

Leslie gave her the details. “School lets out at noon. I should be home by six, if you can bring her by then.”

“That’s fine. You mind if I feed her sugar and stuff?”

Leslie gave a short laugh. “I think she’s seen it before. I guess that means I’m not one of those progressive parents, like most people around here.”

“Then cookies it is. See you later!” Abby hung up. So much for research, but she could start building a relationship with Ellie. Only a few hours, though, so not enough for an excursion. Well, they’d just have to wing it.

Abby grabbed a quick shower and was waiting at the elementary school when Ellie came out. She was chatting with a couple of other girls her own age, which pleased Abby—at least she had a few friends. Abby got out of the car and waved, and when Ellie saw her her face lit up. She said something to the others, then darted over to Abby’s car.

“Hey, what’re you doing here? Does my mom know?”

“She does indeed. She asked me to pick you up—some mix-up about your sitter.”

“Great. What’re we going to do?”

“I hadn’t gotten that far. How about we go to my house and start with some lunch, and we can take it from there?”

“Sounds good,” Ellie replied. She climbed into the passenger seat and buckled her seat belt without being asked. She and Abby chatted about the school and what Ellie was learning until they reached Lexington.

“Here we are,” Abby said.

Ellie studied the building. “I like this house. It’s big, and it’s got lots of funny corners and things. Like that window seat.”

“Actually it’s Ned’s—I’ve only just moved in, so I don’t know everything about it yet.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“Yes.” That was the simplest answer, and it was true, although it was a lot more complicated than that. Abby wondered what second-graders knew about adult relationships. If Ellie asked her if she and Ned were married, she wasn’t going to lie, but neither was she going to volunteer any information.

Luckily Ellie seemed satisfied. “I like him.”

Which was good. Abby wondered when Leslie would get around to telling Ellie that Ned was her biological father. She wasn’t going to touch that subject with a ten-foot pole.

When Ellie had finished a glass of juice and a sandwich—and a few cookies—she said, “What are we going to do now?”

“Do you have homework?” Even the early grades seemed to assign something to students these days.

Ellie made a rude noise. “Yeah, but it’ll take me like ten minutes to do, and nobody cares because it’s the end of the year. Can we go look at the cemetery?”

“Which one?” She’d already visited one in Concord with Ellie, and the one in Littleton, in the short time she’d known her.

“The one out behind your house.”

That surprised Abby. “Sure. But why are you interested, Ellie?”

“I like cemeteries. And I like to see who’s there. Have you seen anybody there?”

Abby assumed Ellie meant the departed residents, not living visitors, and she wasn’t going to pretend not to understand. “I think so, but I haven’t spent a lot of time there—I’ve been busy working on the house. Has your mother let you go back to the Littleton cemetery?” Where Ellie had met her not-quite-imaginary friend.

“No, and I promised I wouldn’t sneak there either. Do you think Hannah will still be there when I go back?”

“Probably, if you go looking for her. I think she knows a lot about waiting.” Poor Hannah had died well over a century earlier, at about the same age that Ellie was now. To Ellie, she had been a playmate.

“Good!” Ellie bounced out of her chair and dutifully took her plate and glass over to the sink. “Can we go now?”

“Sure.” Abby grabbed her keys and they went out the back door, which led to the scruffy yard. There was a fence separating Ned’s property from the cemetery, but it was easy to get over. Abby let Ellie go first and watched with some amusement as she started darting among the stones, bending down to read one now and then. Abby followed more slowly. She hadn’t had time to really explore this cemetery, as she had told Ellie. She and Ned had caught sight of someone, the first time he’d shown her the house, so she assumed there were relatives of some sort here—was that one of the reasons Ned had bought it? But then, it had been a moment of high emotion, her first visit to the house, so she wasn’t sure how much she had been picking up.

She looked up from studying a fairly early stone to see that Ellie had sat down in front of a tidy row of eighteenth-century tombstones. Abby joined her, and Ellie pointed. “Look, a whole lot of Reeds!”

Why was she not surprised? She sat down cross-legged next to Ellie. “Are they here now?” she asked. She didn’t see anyone, but maybe she’d have to give it time.

“Not right now. That one’s too little.” Ellie pointed at a smaller stone at the end of one row, and Abby read the inscription, all in capitals. “Ruth daughter of William & Abigail Reed aged 3 weeks 4 days died February ye 14th 1704.” Mom and Dad were next to her, but they’d outlived her by many years. How sad. It must have been an important family, to have put up a nice stone for an infant who’d lived so briefly. Looking around at the nearby stones, it was clear that the Reed family had had other offspring, who hadn’t strayed far from Lexington. Little Ruth must have been loved.

“Can you feel her?” Abby asked softly.

Ellie shrugged. “Kind of. But she was a baby, so she can’t think in words, you know?”

Of course,
Abby said to herself. “What do you feel?”

Ellie paused to consider. “She hurts. She didn’t live long, did she?”

Interesting that Ellie picked up on the emotion, even without words. “No, as you can see. Tell me, Ellie, do you see more children than grown-ups?”

BOOK: Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3)
8.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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