Search for the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  “I think so. Which is nice, as long as Leslie doesn’t mind.”

  “Ellie is very good at keeping quiet about things she knows might upset her mother.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

  Ellie came out the back door and stopped on the steps. “Dad’s out front waiting so I’d better go. I’ll think about the costume, but you can get it started if you want to. Are you picking me up tomorrow? And are you going to keep painting without me?”

  Oops, one more thing to clear with Leslie—they hadn’t discussed the when and the how of the trick-or-treating plan. And Abby needed to have Ellie on hand if she was going to throw together a quick costume, so it made sense for her to pick Ellie up at school.

  “Second question first: If you want me to wait until Thursday, when I’ll see you anyway, we can finish the painting then. It’s your room. As for the first question, I’ll be there tomorrow after school. And we’ll get this costume put together, right? I’ll work on it in the morning.”

  “Yeah. Bye, Abby, Ned.” Ellie took off around the house to her father’s car. Abby heard the front door open, a car door shut, an engine start up, and they were gone.

  Chapter 29

  “Ellie said Leslie was pretty busy these days,” Abby said dubiously. “Maybe that’s why she sent George?”

  Ned was still measuring windows around the outside of the house and jotting down notes on a pad. “Could be. Don’t read too much into it. Anyway, we’re still a few short on storm windows, so we’ll have to think about which windows we can skip. Did Ellie say something about a costume?”

  “She did. She’s going trick-or-treating with us, remember? With you, actually. She wants you to take her around, so I’ll be on candy duty. By the way, do we have candy?”

  Ned looked blank. “Uh, no, not unless you bought some. I told you, I usually turn off the lights and hide on Halloween.”

  “I’ll add it to my to-do list for tomorrow. You’ll never guess what costume Ellie wants.”

  “I assume it’s not a Pink Princess?”

  “Not even close. The Headless Horseman.”

  “Wow. Very appropriate, if a bit scary.”

  “Will Leslie veto that?”

  “I doubt Ellie will tell her about it. Are you going to make it?”

  “I’ll put together what I can today or tomorrow morning, but we’ll have to finish it together. Kind of a tight schedule. Nothing store-bought. Like father, like daughter.” Abby took a last look around, then said, “I guess I’ll go rummage through the fridge and figure out what dinner is.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’m almost finished up here, and it’ll be dark soon.”

  Once inside, Abby decided she had plenty of time to make a boeuf bourguignon, which required a long, slow cooking, and she happened to have all the ingredients, so she assembled beef, onions, potatoes, and wine and started in. Cooking was another activity that left part of her mind free to roam—as long as she paid attention to which ingredients she had or hadn’t added to the dish.

  The most important point: Ellie was upset by Abby’s loss of her psychic ability. She could understand that. And telling Ellie that she didn’t know what to do about it didn’t help. So, she should figure out proactive things she could do about it—about finding out what had happened and if there was any way to reverse it.

  Did she believe the MEG machine had malfunctioned—or worse, taken a dislike to her? No, that was ridiculous. It had worked for Ned. Joe, who had been standing right there, said he had never seen a result like hers before with his precious machine. Therefore the problem had to lie with her rather than MEG. Why would the machine accept Ned but mess with her? Where was the difference? Well, gender, of course, but Abby was pretty sure without asking Joe that in the past it had been used by men and women, boys and girls, with no mismatched results. Scratch that.

  MEG had seemed to be working fine when Abby simply sat there, at the beginning. There were recordings to prove it. The trouble had started only when Ned touched her. But she’d touched Ned when he was in the machine, and nothing unusual had happened. Which pointed to her again.

  The only explanation she could come up with was that her signal or emanations or brain waves were either different from Ned’s or stronger than Ned’s, or both together. Or her brain was less successful at muffling them. She was the one who had passed out the first time she’d discovered it—not Ned, who had been right there with her, and had touched her. She hadn’t known it existed, and Ned kind of knew but had been in denial for years. Was suppressing the ability a passive or active effort? Was it “use it or lose it” or “I don’t wanna”? Their sample size was too small to tell. It was really hard to build a theory with a subject pool of fewer than ten people.

  Back to the main question, Abby told herself as she sauteed mushrooms. Maybe, in a way, this was a repeat of that first experience with Ned, the one that had knocked her out then. Whatever the source, it had been too much for her brain to handle and it had shut her down. MEG was supposed to be a big, glorified recorder, but what if somehow it—she?—had sucked too much out of Abby’s neurons all at once? Or she simply had more of those neurons than Ned or other people, and they’d gotten tangled up somehow? It sounded ridiculous, but at least it was a physical explanation. Kind of.

  Would those poor neurons recover? She pictured all these microscopic cells trying to sort themselves out after the great upheaval—“No, you belong over there. You, come back here! Straight lines! Stand still.” Unless they were dead, of course. She didn’t want that. She refused to believe that was true, and all the other brain neurons seemed to be functioning normally.

  So, assume the neurons were in shock. How to bring them back? Touching Ned and Ellie hadn’t done it, but the response to those connections would be familiar to the neurons, and maybe they’d ignored it. If that was true, then getting together with Sarah or Rebecca wouldn’t help, not that she was ready to explain what had happened the day before to either of them. But she needed a physical contact, the equivalent of a Vulcan mind meld, but an unfamiliar one. Which left . . . Christine?

  The more she thought about it, the more logical that seemed. She had met with Christine only twice, and they’d touched only the first time, and had broken off the connection fast. But in theory Christine might have a link to one of Abby’s family members: Samuel. Was Christine a descendant nobody knew about? Samuel had been AWOL from the family for a long time. So it was possible that Christine had a connection—distant, and so far unexplained, but there. All things considered, Christine was a good choice to try to jump-start Abby’s neurons, without doing any further harm. Assuming she was willing. One way to find out: call Christine. Before she could overthink the idea, she retrieved her cell phone and punched in Christine’s number.

  To Abby’s relief, Christine answered quickly. “Abby?” she said.

  “Yes, it’s me. I apologize for intruding on you at home, but I’ve got a sort of a problem, and I’m hoping you can help me with it. Can you come over for dinner?”

  “I’ve got plans for the evening. Will this take long?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” One touch would tell Abby what she needed to know, and that would take no time at all, once Christine arrived. “A few minutes, maybe.”

  “But you can’t just ask me about it over the phone?”

  “I’m afraid not. Again, I apologize. I’ll be grateful if you could just stop by.” Which Christine was under no obligation to do, Abby knew. They barely knew each other, and Abby was in no position to ask favors.

  “Okay. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  “Thank you,” Abby breathed into the phone, but Christine had already hung up.

  Ned came in the back door at that moment. “I heard your voice. Were you on the phone?”

  “Yes. I called Christine and asked her to come over.”

  “The psychic you met at the fair? Why?”

  “Because we’ve got some kind of link, and I thought, well,
that she might be able to recharge my batteries or something. She brought the message from Samuel, and she had no reason to know him or know of my connection to him. Before you argue that I should get in touch with your mother or my mother, I thought about that, but I think I need someone with a different, outside connection. I want to see if touching her again brings back . . . the thing. It can’t hurt, can it?”

  “I guess not. If she’s for real, it might work. If she’s a fake, no harm done.”

  “I don’t think she’s faking it. I think she has some degree of talent, but hasn’t ever really developed it, but she’s curious enough to dabble in the fairs and such. But I need to touch her. Does that sound too odd?”

  Ned smiled. “Only to normal people. When?”

  “As soon as she can get here.”

  “Dinner?” he asked.

  “Boeuf bourguignon, and it won’t be ready for an hour or two—it’s in the oven.”

  “Smells great. Well, I’ll be upstairs measuring windows if you want me.”

  “You want a glass of wine?”

  “Let me clean up first.”

  Abby had a filled glass waiting for him when he returned from upstairs, with clean hands and clean clothes. She handed it to him and he took it carefully—avoiding touching her. She was both touched and annoyed: touched that he didn’t want to remind her once again that the spark was missing, annoyed because if they didn’t touch, Abby wasn’t convinced that anything would change.

  • • •

  Christine arrived half an hour later. Ned had gone back upstairs, to give the two of them some space, but Abby wasn’t sure how to start. “Let’s sit in the kitchen. Coffee? Or something stronger?”

  “Nothing for me, thanks. You’ve seen your mother since the last time we talked, haven’t you?” Christine countered.

  How did Christine know that, or was it just a lucky guess? “Well, yes. She spent a couple of nights here last week.”

  Christine looked at her levelly. “You aren’t quite sure I’m for real, are you?”

  “I guess not. I’ll admit that when you mentioned Samuel and Rebecca, it really threw me for a loop. Of course, I know that once you had my name, you could look up my parents, but my great-grandmother did her best to erase Samuel’s existence in our family, including his surname, so either you made a very lucky guess or you really do have a talent. Either way, I did pass on the message to my mother. And I think we’ve found she and I share this ability, but she’s been squashing it most of her life.”

  “That I can understand. So what is it you want from me now? I’m not like a phone connection—I can’t just call Samuel and ask him to show up.”

  “I know that. Before I explain, can you tell me what you felt when Samuel gave you that message?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Christine said.

  “Well, did you hear him? See him?”

  “I guess I’d have to say I heard him in my head. I knew I wasn’t hearing someone standing near me, but the voice was perfectly clear. Kind of in the center of my head. I didn’t see anything.”

  “And he identified himself?”

  “Only through the message. I told you all he said.”

  “Does this kind of thing happen to you often?”

  “I’m not sure what you’d call often. Sometimes when I’m doing a reading, I hear a voice. I know, that’s pretty standard fakery, historically. ‘I’m getting a message . . . from someone whose name begins with . . . S . . . Susan? Stephen?’ If you watch people’s expressions, when they’re sitting across from you, you can see their reactions and figure out which direction to go. Do you know the term ‘micro expression’?”

  “I’ve heard it. Why?”

  “Because most people can keep their public expression blank, to try to fool me, but they can’t hide their micro expressions. They’re subtle, but they’re involuntary. So I watch carefully.”

  “I see. But in some cases there really is someone, well, reaching out to them?”

  “Sometimes,” Christine admitted. “So why did you ask me here today?”

  Without identifying the lab or Joe—which was probably pointless because of how few MEG machines there were in the general area—Abby explained the events that had led up to her episode with the machine and the subsequent disappearance of her psychic abilities.

  Christine listened silently but attentively until Abby had finished. “That’s very interesting, but I know little about the machine you’re talking about, although I’ve heard through my work that it’s state of the art now. I’ve never heard of any problems with it. Any physical side effects, I mean. I know it’s been used with children.”

  “I understand,” Abby told her. “When this whole thing happened—and it was only yesterday—I didn’t know what to think. Part of me was glad that this ability was gone, because then I could be normal, ordinary. But there are definitely upsides to having it.”

  Christine smiled, and interrupted. “You’re blushing. I take it there are positive physical effects between you?”

  “Well, yes. But that’s not what I’m worried about. There are other people involved, and some of them depend on me, need me to have this, at least for a while.”

  “You mean, others who possess the same ability? I can see the problem. But I still don’t understand where I fit in this.”

  “Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. I know, or am close to, no more than five people that I share this with, and one of them is a child. In the past, this ability has been triggered by touching something that an ancestor of mine had owned or used, or had some kind of association with. Like a piece of furniture or a painting, or even a tombstone. Then we found out that physical human touch could trigger it, or maybe a different aspect of the same thing. There’s also a person who we haven’t looked very closely at yet, but who claims he saw visible sparks when Ned and I touched—like a short-circuit at the point of connection. He makes no claims at all to psychic ability, and he’s pretty levelheaded. But you—okay, you and I had the touch thing, which was pretty clear to us, and with Ned as well, when the two of you touched. But you had a different connection to Samuel, here at our house, and he’s my ancestor. I didn’t see or hear him. You have any reason to think you and Samuel are related?”

  “No. My grandparents on both sides came from Scandinavia.”

  Abby nodded. “So, you have a double, or two-barreled connection through two media, if you want to call them that—physical touch and some form of internal sensing. And no connection to me, but you and I had that charge between us.” Abby took a deep breath. “I asked you here because I was wondering if we could try it again and see if it’s still there, and if it is, if it could help to jump-start my own ability, or break up the logjam in my head. Reestablish my ability to contact—that’s what we’re thinking of calling it.”

  “What interesting problems you have,” Christine said. “So all you want me to do is touch you?”

  “That’s about it. That’s why just talking to you over the phone wouldn’t help. If you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not. Now? Here?”

  Abby nodded.

  “Are you ready?” Christine asked.

  “I guess so.” Abby held out her hand, and Christine took it.

  Chapter 30

  Abby wasn’t sure what she expected, but what occurred wasn’t exactly like any of her prior experiences. Her observant brain kept working: Christine touched her and Abby felt a tingling jolt, much like they had shared before. That first time they had broken it off quickly, but Abby wanted to see where it led. With Ned, their connection built and built until . . . well, never mind. That wasn’t what she expected from Christine. With her the link was steadier and less intense.

  And then she was hit with another jolt, and she found she had an image in her mind of an older man. He looked tired, and none too clean, and she had a pretty good guess who he was: Samuel Ellinwood. She wasn’t sure what to do next. Could he communicate with her, or was she just g
etting a reflection of what Christine was seeing? Could she communicate with him? She carefully assembled a thought: “Samuel?”

  The man—clearly in her head, not standing in front of her like her previous “seeings,” smiled crookedly, as though he wasn’t used to smiling. “Yes.” Abby heard it yet didn’t—a strange new experience.

  “I gave Rebecca your message,” she said silently to the man in her head.

  “I know,” he replied. “I’ve been watching. Thank you.” And then he faded away, leaving Abby sitting in her kitchen and wondering what had just happened. She looked down to see that she and Christine’s hands were still intertwined, and she gently disengaged herself, which didn’t seem to make a difference. She turned to face Christine. “Did you see that? Him? Samuel?”

  “Mostly,” Christine said, nodding. “It was kind of . . . faint, I guess. He wasn’t addressing me—I was only the conduit. He was talking to you.”

  “And then, poof, he vanished,” Abby said with a touch of wonder. “And our hands were still linked.”

  “Maybe he’d said all he had to say. Do you usually get into conversations with your dead ancestors?”

  “No, not at all. Most of the time they don’t see me, and they certainly don’t talk to me. Wow—this is something new.”

  “Did this answer your question?”

  “About whether the ability was gone? Yes, it did, at least in part. But this was different, something that I haven’t seen before. I wonder if I’ll ever understand what’s going on, or be able to control it?”

  “Do you want to control it?” Christine asked.

  “Well, when it shut down yesterday, I’d already been thinking about the whole thing. How would I feel if it was gone for good? Did I want to work to bring it back or just accept I’d lost it? Would Ned still care about me if I was just a normal person? And as I said, there are other people involved too. I hadn’t tried to think it through before. I guess what I’ve decided is that if this thing is real, I’d like to keep it—unless it somehow turns dark and evil. You haven’t seen any demons, have you?”