Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3)

by Sheila Connolly

  “No problem. I enjoyed it, although now I’ve got antique trash strewn all over my backyard. But I learned something about the house. Call me if you need me again.”

  “I will.”

  When Leslie had gone inside, Abby started up her car and headed home. They were working things out, she and Leslie and Ellie. And as she’d said, Ellie really was smart and focused—far beyond her age. Which was another thing that made it hard for her to fit in with her age group at school. Maybe she would benefit from a private school? If Leslie and her husband couldn’t afford it, maybe Ned could help. If Leslie would accept his help, which was not a sure thing. She’d ask Ned what he thought.

  And she wanted to know more about the angry man who had broken all that china.

  8

  Ned arrived home at the same time she did, after driving back from Leslie’s house. He had much the same reaction.

  “What on earth have you been doing?” he asked, taking in her muddy clothes and grimy nails.

  “Playing archeologist with Ellie,” she told him, grinning.

  “You’re going to have to explain that, you know,” he said with a smile.

  “Can I shower first? Most of this dirt is older than I am. By the way, would you happen to have the title search for this property handy?”

  “In a file somewhere. You shower, I’ll hunt for it.”

  “Deal.” Ned hadn’t even asked why she wanted it. Of course, he’d fielded a lot of strange requests from her over the past few months. It was very comforting to know that he wasn’t easily rattled.

  Abby came downstairs fifteen minutes later, toweling her hair, and Ned handed her a glass of wine. “Okay, tell me all about it.”

  “Am I cooking?”

  “No, I am. You’re entertaining me.”

  “And you’re spoiling me! Anyway, Leslie called after you’d left this morning and said there was some mix-up with her sitter and could I pick up Ellie and keep her amused for the afternoon, and I said sure. So I did—pick her up, I mean. And we came back here, and first she wanted to visit the cemetery.”

  “The one out back?” Ned busied himself chopping onions.

  “Yes. You’ve spent some time there, right?” When Ned nodded, Abby continued. “She made a beeline for the Reeds on the far side. You know, that whole row of them?”

  “Sure. Prominent citizens, if I recall. We know we connect through that line. Interesting that she would pick up on them so fast.”

  “There was something else,” Abby said quietly. “You know that little stone? The one for the baby? She said she could ‘feel’ her. No words, just pain.”

  “Wow,” Ned said. “Was she upset?”

  “No. I asked her that and she said no. I’d never thought about whether babies projected anything, but Ellie knew about the pain immediately. Maybe that was enough for her for the moment, because right after that we headed back for the house, but we never quite made it.”

  “And that explains the mud?”

  “Sort of. How well do you know your property?”

  “Not as well as I should. You know me—I spend a lot of time at work, and that means I’m not here by daylight much. In some ways I’ve always known the place, because I’ve been going by it more than half my life, and coveting it. But on a micro-level, I couldn’t tell you about a lot of the details, like what’s growing out back.”

  “Well, Ellie found a dump.”

  “A dump?” Ned turned to her and raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes, for the house. The non-biodegradable stuff, like glass and china. She wanted to dig right in, so we did.”

  “That’s really interesting. Chicken stir-fry okay with you?”

  “Sure. And I love the way your mind jumps from antique trash to stir-fry like that.”

  “You understood me, didn’t you?” He grinned.

  “I did. Anyway, we spent the rest of the afternoon clearing out the first one or two feet of it, which we then spread across half the back lawn so we could inventory it. By the way, don’t go out wandering in the yard after dark for a bit, certainly not barefoot.”

  “Duly noted, not that I do that often in any case. So what did you find?”

  “The detritus of a late-Victorian household. Like I said, mostly china and glass, with a few odds and ends, like a very dead umbrella and about a dozen shoes.” Abby took a sip of her wine and let it slide down her throat. “But there was something else.”

  Ned chopped some ginger and garlic. “What?”

  “When we were done for the day, and were looking at all the stuff spread out, she said a man had broken it, and he was mad when he did it.”

  Ned stopped chopping and looked at her. “Mad as in angry, not crazy?”

  “Yes,” Abby said.

  Ned nodded once. “So that’s why you want to see the house records? To see who he was?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I know I glanced at them when I bought this place, and none of the names jumped out at me, but I wasn’t thinking about historical connections then. Well, unless I wanted to say Sam Adams came to dinner here, but the house is too late for that. Nathaniel Hawthorne, maybe? When did he die?”

  “I think he’s still too early for this place. I can check out the names of the past owners, anyway. But what seemed important is that she sensed an emotion from this unknown man. Who may not even be related.”

  Ned found a container of leftover cooked chicken in the refrigerator and started cutting it up. “You know, you could be seeing what you want to see. What’s to say she didn’t look at all those bits of crockery and imagine somebody hurling it around?”

  “It’s possible, but she sounded very sure. And I kind of agree with her. What’s out there went beyond ordinary trash. Sure, china and glassware get broken in any normal household, but there was more than there should have been, and of particular kinds, all from the same era. And there were broken decorative things that you wouldn’t expect to find.”

  “A careless servant?” Ned suggested.

  “I wondered about that, and Ellie had the same idea. But how would she have knocked plaster casts of various things off the walls? I think there was something more going on. But that’s easy to verify, once I know who lived here.”

  “You haven’t sensed anybody in the house?”

  “No, no one connected to me. You?”

  “No. Except the ones from the cemetery, and I guess we’ve accounted for them. They don’t exactly drop in here.”

  “I wonder what the range of a spirit is?” Abby mused.

  “No idea,” Ned said. “I never saw Johnny outside of our house. I’m ready to cook, once I start the rice.”

  “I’ll watch and admire. If you’ll pass the wine bottle.”

  • • •

  Abby washed up after dinner—not difficult, since Ned was extremely neat when he cooked, putting her to shame. As she washed, she thought about the hypothetical servant girl who had no doubt stood right where she was standing, up to her elbows in soapy water. Easy enough to drop things—but how many? Abby could guess that she might have been the angry one, fed up with her lot in life, but Ellie had been sure it was a man. Still, Abby had trouble picturing a man pitching a fit and breaking the household china.

  She was drying her hands when Ned appeared and handed her a file folder. “This is what I’ve got on the house. There’s a list of the prior owners going back to the beginning.”

  “Then it shouldn’t take long. I’ll check the censuses and see if there’s anything online for the local paper. Can you amuse yourself for a bit?”

  “Yes, Abigail, I think I can while away my time while I pine for your company.”

  “You sure you aren’t channeling all the literati from around here?”

  “More likely Downton Abbey. I’ll leave you to it.”

  As Abby had guessed, it didn’t take long to find the names of prior owners in the censuses for Lexington. She started with the period right after the Civil War. Surely there had been
earlier houses on the lot, but the china itself was later than that. She promised herself that she’d look up the Reeds sometime soon, but not right now. And she found what she was looking for.

  It was little more than an hour when she joined Ned in the back parlor, where they had parked the television. “I’ve got him,” she said triumphantly.

  “The China Killer?”

  “I think so. Want to see?”

  “Sure.” He stood up from the battered easy chair. “Let’s take it into the kitchen—at least there’s light there.”

  In the kitchen Abby laid a spreadsheet on the table. “These are the names you gave me, and I’ve tracked them through the federal censuses, which only go up to 1940, and also some state censuses and town directories. Actually, one family, the Harlows, owned it for about thirty years, spanning the Civil War. Then in 1897 one George Thomas bought the house, and he lived here with his family, including a couple of sons. And a boarder and, yes, a servant girl. George lived here until 1904, along with his son, also named George. And then things got interesting.”

  “Yes?” Ned prompted.

  “I found this ad in the town paper, from 1905. George Junior put the place up for sale, claiming it was too big for him. He turned around and built himself the house next door. It took this house a while to sell, but he had moved into his new house by 1907.”

  “So?”

  “His father wasn’t dead. He was living as a boarder in another part of town.”

  “Mildly interesting, but what’s your point?”

  “Okay, this is pretty much conjecture, but I’d guess that what Ellie and I found predates 1907. George Junior was clearing out the house. Now, since he wasn’t going far, he could have moved it, but I’m guessing he took a look at all the fussy High Victorian stuff and said the heck with it. He didn’t want it, and apparently nobody else in the family did either. So he started smashing it.”

  “Why didn’t he sell it, or give it away, or at least leave it intact when he dumped it?”

  “We’ll never know. Maybe he had a drinking problem, if those patent medicine bottles were all his. Or maybe he was lazy. Or maybe he was mad at dear old Dad. Who, by the way, was working in a local shoe factory when he first bought the house. Which would explain the shoes, although not why he kept them.”

  “Interesting. So you’ve constructed an entire family feud based on a pile of trash in the backyard.”

  “It was Ellie who started me thinking about it,” Abby protested. “All she got was the anger. I just fitted a story around it. Shouldn’t I? I haven’t shared it with Ellie. Do you want me not to?”

  Ned had been standing, looking over her shoulder as she explained what she’d found. Now he dropped heavily into a chair. “Abby, I don’t know. I guess I’m being cautious. Ellie may simply have an overactive imagination, and you’d be feeding right into that.”

  Abby saw red. “Ned, I think I’ve spent more time with Ellie than you have. We were together when we both saw Hannah Perry in the cemetery in Littleton—that wasn’t her imagination. She’s not embellishing what she feels. In this case, all she said was that the man was angry. Well, here’s a man who fits. Heck, maybe it was Dad who got pissed off and starting breaking things, because Junior was selling the house out from under him. We don’t know—we can’t know, unless somebody left a convenient diary, with an entry like ‘George smashed the china today.’ But Ellie felt something. I trust her.”

  Ned raised his hands. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to set you off—” he began.

  Now Abby stood. “Set me off? Like I can’t take criticism? I’d be happy if we would discuss this rationally. Go ahead, challenge my theories. Tell me Ellie was wrong. But be very careful when you doubt her word, because I’m seeing and feeling the same things, so if you doubt her, you’re doubting me. She’s just more open to it than I’ve been, but I’m working on that. And what about you?”

  Ned shook his head. “I’m sorry if you took what I said as a criticism—”

  Abby interrupted him again. “Not a criticism—you were being patronizing. Patting me on the head and saying, ‘There, there, dear, it’s just your overactive female imagination at work.’”

  “Whoa! Truce! I’m sorry. And, yes, I do see and feel at least some of these things. I’m just having a harder time coming to terms with it. I’m a scientist, remember? I like things I can prove, and replicate. This whole thing doesn’t fit my worldview, and I’m having trouble with that.”

  Abby’s anger fled back to wherever it had come from. “Ned, I’m trying to help. Ellie first, because she’s going to grow up with this, living with two people who don’t share it at all. But I’m trying to help you, and myself too. I don’t begin to understand it. I don’t know what the rules are—how and when and why it happens. Can I call it up at will? Turn it on and off like with a switch? I don’t know. But I’m trying to figure things out!”

  Ned remained silent for a few seconds, and then he gave her a small smile. “Do you realize we’re arguing about the trash of somebody who’s been dead for more than a century?”

  She produced an answering smile. “How do you know he isn’t watching us right now and laughing?”

  “Is he?”

  “Got me. But I have a feeling he left and didn’t look back.”

  9

  The next morning Abby woke up energized. She had enjoyed her afternoon with Ellie, and had been lucky to learn a bit more about Ellie’s abilities without prodding. She didn’t want to push her too hard, and she would have to be careful to keep Leslie up to date, but so far, so good. She hoped that Ned understood Ellie a bit better too. She’d have to ask Leslie how much time she wanted to let Ellie spend with Ned. Ned might benefit from being around her, but it might confuse Ellie if the girl sensed a connection with Ned but nobody would talk about it.

  She wasn’t sure where her self-defined Salem project would fit with her time with Ellie. She had to keep reminding herself that she had no right to use Ellie as a sort of spirit Geiger counter, sensing ghosts for her. But, she reminded herself, some of the key figures in the whole witchcraft debacle had been young girls, barely older than Ellie, so there might be some advantage there.

  She could hear Ned clanking around in the kitchen downstairs, and she could smell coffee—odd how odors wafted through the old house. She had to be careful to turn on an exhaust fan whenever she fried something like bacon or onions, or she’d be smelling them for at least a day. So, what was she doing today? If she wanted to advance the Salem project—she really needed to find a catchier name for it—she’d better identify a lineal ancestor somewhere up the tree. Her witch hunt? That seemed wrong, not to mention politically incorrect. Besides, she didn’t expect to find any witches because she didn’t believe in them. She was pretty sure there’d be at least one ancestor who’d been accused, maybe even convicted of witchcraft, but she still had to put names to them. Of course, she seemed to be assuming that a relative who’d been there would be an entrée for her, give her a window into those long-ago events. There were no guarantees of that. Surely she had dozens or even hundreds of ancestors who’d live and died—and presumably suffered somewhere along the way—in this part of Massachusetts, and it wasn’t like she was running into crowds of them on the street. Thank goodness.

  And she’d better take a look at the real places involved. Did she want to go back before or after she’d put a finger on her ancestors? Go in cold, or with some knowledge? Something to think about. From what she’d seen so far, some of the original buildings from the seventeenth century were still standing in Salem and maybe in Danvers too, and had become museums and were open to the public, generating tourist income for the towns. She couldn’t fault that. In some cases, if the sites weren’t known, the town had put up a sign saying something like, “Near here in 1692 . . .” Why were people so fascinated by that series of events? Because it seemed so unlikely? Because deep down they harbored a lingering fear of witches?

  That was something she wa
s afraid of, mostly for Ellie’s sake. She could handle herself, and knew when not to say something. But Ellie was young, and not as socially aware, even though she knew that some people thought she was kind of weird, or was afraid they would. How to explain to her how to decide what she could or could not say?

  Abby bounced out of bed. She couldn’t spend the morning sitting and stewing: she had work to do. She dressed quickly and went downstairs to join Ned in the kitchen, taking the back stairs, mainly because it tickled her that the house had two separate staircases. One was fancy, with a gorgeous curved mahogany railing; the second was utilitarian, with no railing at all, and led straight to the kitchen. For the servants. Were servants not allowed to be seen by the rest of the family? Or guests? What if a family member wanted a quick snack or a drink after hours—would they dare venture into the kitchen? Social mores were really strange.

  Ned handed her a mug of coffee. “Hey, you look cheerful.”

  She put the mug on the table and went hunting for the cinnamon bread she’d become addicted to lately. “I am. I have a plan. And it means more genealogy.”

  “You really enjoy that, don’t you?”

  “Actually, I do. And there are millions of other people who do—you already know that. This is personal: I’m hunting for a Salem ancestor to connect with. And the Reeds—at least the lineal ones—don’t work. So, new ground! Hey, this weekend can we go check out Salem and Danvers? I want to see where it all happened.”

  “Sure. What about wallpaper?”

  “Are we ready for that? Don’t we need to scrape and paint the trim first? And what about the floors? Are we sanding them?”

  Ned refilled his coffee mug and sat down at the kitchen table. “Abby, you’ve already accomplished more in a month than I have in a few years. Are you in a hurry?”

  The bread she was toasting popped up, and Abby slathered on butter, then sat at the table. “Well, kind of. First of all, I hate living in mess—it bothers me. Second, the rooms are so beautiful, I want to see what they could and should look like. Kind of reviving the ghost of the past. Look, if you want to tell me that you don’t like home projects, that’s fine—I can find craftsmen who can help. I won’t pretend I know how to run a belt sander, but I can paint and probably learn to paper. And don’t forget about furnishing the rooms.”