How would Ellie react if she learned that George wasn’t her biological father? Abby had almost slipped and said “real father” to herself, and that wasn’t fair. Parenthood was about a lot more than biology, and George had always been there for Ellie. From what little she had seen of them together, Abby thought they had a good relationship. But then it got complicated: did Ellie feel something unusual when she was with Ned? Socially she wasn’t ready to jump to the conclusions that adults might, but surely there was some unspoken awareness? Even as she was thinking this, Abby watched the pair as Ellie slipped on some wet seaweed and Ned put out a hand to steady her. At that moment of contact, they froze for a millisecond, looking at each other, and Abby could almost see a spark fly between them. Oh, dear.
Well, she wasn’t about to tackle that question now, not without clearing it with Leslie. And Leslie was busy with George at the moment, and no way was Abby going to add to her problems. She and Ned and Ellie were going to have a brief happy vacation, playing in the sun, dabbling their toes in the water, eating whatever they wanted to, and getting to know each other better—without asking or answering any awkward questions. Well, personal ones, anyway.
Ned’s energy started flagging by mid-afternoon, so Abby dropped him off at the house and then she and Ellie went back to Falmouth to pick up more groceries. “What do you want for dinner tonight?” Abby asked.
“I dunno. Daddy makes sausages on the grill sometimes, with buns and stuff.”
“Well, that’s easy. We should hurry up, because today’s Friday, and from what I’ve heard, half of Boston decides they have to be on the Cape for the weekend, and half of those will be buying groceries. It means a lot of traffic. You have enough books to keep you busy?”
“Yeah. There are more in the house, right?”
“Probably.”
“Is Ned your boyfriend?”
Where had that come from? “Yes.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“We haven’t talked about it. Maybe. Why?”
“Mommy said she knew Ned a long time ago, and they almost got married.”
“Yes, Ned told me that. They’re still friends.”
“I like him. He doesn’t treat me like a dumb kid.”
“Do other people?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, they shouldn’t. We should all pay attention and not jump to conclusions about the people we meet. And children aren’t stupid, just less experienced. You can’t just lump them all into one big pile labeled ‘Children.’”
Ellie gave a snort of laughter. “Could we make two piles, one for ‘Smart’ and one for ‘Stupid’?”
How could she avoid sounding like a preachy teacher? She’d often felt the same way when she was a kid. “Just don’t tell the stupid ones that they’re stupid, okay? Let them figure it out on their own.”
“What if they don’t ever?”
“Then don’t hang out with them. But be kind.”
“Yeah, right,” Ellie muttered, and Abby wondered if she was having problems at school. It was hard, the way she remembered it, always knowing the right answer before most of the class. It sure didn’t make you popular.
“Okay, we’re getting food. Don’t forget we need stuff for breakfast too.” And cat food, she reminded herself.
“Maple syrup!” Ellie crowed, and they dove into the market.
An hour later they were back at the house. Abby unpacked the groceries and stowed them away, trying to be quiet, then said to Ellie, “Can you find something to do for a bit? I want to check if Ned’s awake.”
“See if Kitten is with him, okay?”
“I’ll do that. I’ll tell her to come down and play with you.”
Abby climbed the stairs quietly, then peeked into the front bedroom. Ned was sprawled out on the bed, and Kitten was mimicking his position, snuggled against the front of him. For a moment Abby wished she had a camera to capture the moment.
Even though she had been all but silent, Ned opened his eyes, as if sensing her presence. “Hi,” he said. “What time is it?”
“About five. You two look happy.”
Ned looked down, as if startled to find he had grown a cat attachment. “I didn’t even notice her. So what’s up next?”
Abby lay down beside him on the bed. Kitten didn’t move. “Nothing much. This is a vacation, remember?”
“I don’t think I know what that is.”
“Is George really going to be okay?”
“Leslie didn’t tell me anything different. But I might have failed to mention to Leslie that you and Ellie were spending time here on the Cape. We had never talked about going somewhere outside of Lexington. I figured she’d worry, and she’s got enough on her plate already. You and Ellie haven’t talked about . . . you know?”
“For intelligent people, we’re having a heck of a time coming up with the right vocabulary for this. To answer your question, no and yes.”
Ned shifted, plumping a pillow behind him so he could look at Abby, dislodging the kitten in the process. She strolled off into the hallway and disappeared down the stairs. “What does that mean?”
“No, because we haven’t had a heart-to-heart about our special shared abilities, other than some offhand comments. Yes, because . . . we saw someone.”
“What? Here?”
“Yes, and it’s someone you know too: Olivia Flagg.”
“From Waltham? What was she doing here?”
“I can’t begin to tell you. I don’t think she followed me, which kind of means that she was here—when she was alive, that is. But that’s the first I’ve heard of any Cape Cod connection.”
“Wow,” Ned said, almost to himself. “And you say Ellie saw her too?”
Abby nodded. “So did Kitten. You want the details?”
“Is Ellie going to interrupt us?”
“I don’t think so. But like I said, she saw Olivia too, at the same time I did, so the cat’s kind of out of the bag. I told her who Olivia was and how I was related to her, but I had to say I didn’t know how she and Olivia might be connected. I wanted to check with you first.”
“Give me the short version. What did you see?”
“It was at the height of the storm yesterday. Dark, pouring rain, wind blowing every which way. Ellie noticed something on the porch, or maybe Kitten did first. So we went out onto the porch to look, and there she was, sitting in a chair in the corner, looking out to sea.”
“Did she see you?”
“No, not that I could tell. And she was older. Remember she was around twenty when I saw her in Waltham? Well, yesterday she looked around sixty. Oh, and she was crying. In fact, I wondered if I heard crying on Wednesday night, before the storm really got started. Ellie was asleep then. But later she told me she thought she’d heard someone crying too.”
“How did Ellie react?”
“Do you know, I think she’s used to seeing these people, although she doesn’t know who they are. She wasn’t upset—it’s happened before, probably for most of her life, although I doubt she could put it into words at first. Actually, I think we both sensed something the moment we walked into the house, days ago. The place felt sad.”
Ned lay back and stared up at the ceiling. He was silent for a full minute, until Abby had to say, “What are you thinking?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Well, on a macro level, we have a clear choice: one, we forget about seeing Olivia and have a normal happy vacation, or two, we try to figure out what she’s doing here. Which do you think would be better for Ellie?”
Why do I get the hard question? “I don’t have a quick answer. She saw Olivia, and she knows the kitten did too. What’s she going to think if we refuse to talk about it and babble on about sightseeing?”
“That we have something to hide? Or should I say, something else? From what little I’ve seen, and what you’ve told me, children know when you’re lying to them, or being condescending.”
“I agree. Can we explor
e what Olivia is doing here without giving away too much?”
“Up to a point.”
“I’m pretty sure nothing in my genealogy program mentions the Flaggs and Cape Cod together.”
“So we start from scratch,” Ned replied. “With this house.”
“That friend of yours—Daniel?—did he buy it, or has it been in his family for a while?”
“I know his parents owned it, but it could go back further than that. The land records are in Barnstable, but I’d bet they’re online too.”
“And if Olivia was a guest, rather than the owner?”
“Then we’re out of luck. Unless, of course, you go through the newspaper archives in Falmouth, where they often reported who was visiting whom, during the season. Well, for people of a certain class, but I’m betting Olivia would have fit. They’re at the library.”
“Why do you know this?” Abby demanded.
“I’ve done a little digging myself. Not for the Flaggs, but for other families.”
“Nothing that overlaps with me?”
“Not that I know of, but we haven’t hunted down all those links. But let’s stick to this place for now, okay?”
“Hey, when’s dinner?” Ellie’s voice came echoing up the stairs. “Kitten is hungry!”
“Then we’d better go do something about that! Be right down!” she called out to Ellie.
The kitten was sitting on the counter when Abby and Ned arrived in the kitchen, and she managed to look pathetic, as though she hadn’t eaten in days. Well, Abby reflected, she might have missed a few meals when she was wandering around in the storm. “We did get some dry kitten chow, you know,” Abby told Ellie. “We could leave some of that down for her.”
“She likes the stuff in cans better,” Ellie replied.
“Why am I not surprised?” Abby popped open a can and put half of it on a plate, then set the plate on the floor, in a corner out of the way. The kitten headed straight for it. “By the way, this cat is not going to eat on the counter—there isn’t enough room, and it’s not a very clean habit. So, dinner?” For some reason both Ellie and Abby turned to Ned expectantly.
“What, it’s up to me?” he asked, laughing.
“Hey, we went out and slew the chicken,” Abby told him. “You can go all caveman and grill it. The grill’s in back, and it takes turning one switch to make it hot. Think you can handle it?”
“I’ll manage.”
After dinner they sat out on the porch, admiring the sunset. There were a couple of boats out beyond the spit of land that cut off most of the harbor, but none near the houses. In fact, Abby had seen only two piers or boatslips or whatever the heck they were along this stretch of houses. Apparently the owners, old or new, hadn’t been much into sailing or fishing or rowing.
Ned looked at Abby. “Anything?”
“Olivia? No, not now.”
“She was here during the storm,” Ellie said. Abby hadn’t even realized she was paying attention.
“She doesn’t come out on sunny days?” Abby asked. And why would Ellie know?
Ellie shook her head, absorbed with dangling a long tuft of seagrass for the kitten to bat. “She only came out when she was sad. The storm made her sad.”
Ned and Abby exchanged another glance. Ned shrugged. The Great Hurricane? The house had been here then. But was Olivia here then? One more thing to look into, Abby thought. But when?
“There’s peach pie for dessert,” she announced. “Anybody want any?”
Peach pie apparently trumped stories about spirits, and Olivia was not mentioned again.
Chapter 12
As soon as Abby opened her eyes the next morning, she knew what she had to do: talk to her mother.
Which was not going to be easy, for multiple reasons. First, she hadn’t seen her parents since over the Christmas holidays, now eight months past. She really had no excuses, since she hadn’t been working and was free to come and go as she pleased. She had told them about Ned, of course, but they hadn’t met him yet. In fact, her mother had been remarkably restrained, asking only in passing how her new boyfriend was working out. Maybe she’d gotten burned when Abby and Brad had split up so abruptly. Abby knew that her parents—or at least her mother—had liked Brad and thought they were a good match. Abby couldn’t explain to them why she had broken it off—because Brad was self-centered, oblivious to anyone else’s needs, and besides, he’d cheated on her with one of his so-called friend’s girlfriend. So maybe Abby could understand why her mother wasn’t putting any bets on Ned’s staying power.
Plus, her mother didn’t have a psychic bone in her body. She was a pragmatist, a doer. If anything, it was her father, Marvin, who was more of a dreamer, and probably more intuitive. Still, their marriage had proved durable, probably because they complemented each other. Which didn’t bode well for her and Ned, because they were both introspective and unassertive. But there was still that psychic connection, which carried a lot of weight.
Why did she need to talk with her mother? Not for female support. Not for any genealogy details—Rebecca had more or less handed over everything she knew she had, which hadn’t been much. Her mother had no patience for poking around in the past. She knew the bare bones of her own family tree only because it had been a rather odd one: her grandmother’s husband had run off at the height of the Depression, leaving his wife, Ruth, with a small child to raise on her own. Luckily Ruth had had some grit, because she had reverted to her maiden name and made her own way—and refused to talk about her husband after that, although she had verified, years later, that he was dead. She’d had only the one child, Abby’s grandmother Patience, who had died when Abby was too young to remember her. Patience in turn—scarred from her mother’s anger toward men in general?—had married but she too had had only one child, Abby’s mother, Rebecca.
So what do I hope to learn? Abby asked herself. Her questions were about Olivia Flagg Ellinwood, Ruth’s mother, and Olivia had died in 1940, years before Rebecca was born. But . . . Rebecca was her only hope for finding anything like anecdotal information about the family—those stories that get passed down only within the family, that nobody ever wrote down. The ones that nobody wanted “the children” to hear, because they usually involved sex or crime or both. Rebecca might—just might—have overheard something that could prove to be a piece of the puzzle, but the only way to pry it out of her was to sit her down and ply her with food and maybe a glass of wine or two and happy talk until maybe something jarred loose a wandering memory of a half-told tale from years before. This could not be done over the phone.
Which meant that Abby had to sit down with her face-to-face. But she couldn’t go see Rebecca in Maine, because she’d agreed to look after Ellie, and she couldn’t just dump Ellie on Ned. And she couldn’t take Ellie along, because then Abby and her mother couldn’t talk freely, and besides, it was bad enough that Abby had brought Ellie to the Cape without asking Leslie first. Taking her out of state would be worse, and how would she explain Ellie to Rebecca? And leaving her alone with Ned wasn’t part of the deal with Leslie either.
Which left Abby with the option of inviting Rebecca, or maybe Rebecca and her father, to come down to the Cape. She could say it was to meet Ned. She could say that she hadn’t invited them to join them earlier because the whole thing had come up on the spur of the moment—that was true enough.
She could hear Ned moving around in the kitchen below—he must feel more rested now, since it was still early. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, and then he walked into the bedroom with a cup of coffee for her. “Good morning,” he said, smiling, as he sat down on the bed.
“Hey. You look better.”
“I feel better. I was wiped out yesterday, but that was my own fault—I was trying to finish up six things at once so I could get here sooner.”
“That was sweet of you.”
Ned was startled when his cell phone started to ring, buried in the pocket of his jeans. He fished it out and checked it
, then looked at Abby. “It’s Leslie. Should I put it on speaker?”
“You talk. I need coffee first.” You’re a chicken, Abby.
Ned clicked to connect, and Abby could hear Leslie’s tinny voice even without the speaker function. “Where the hell are you? I’m at your house and there’s no one here! Not even any cars!”
“Calm down, Leslie. Daniel Eldridge offered us the use of his house on the Cape—he had an unexpected cancellation so it was available on short notice—and I jumped at it. Abby came out with Ellie a couple of days ago, and I joined them yesterday. We’re only two hours away, not in Egypt. Is anything wrong?”
“Here? Not much, except that you kidnapped my daughter without asking me.”
“Leslie, we didn’t want to bother you—you had enough to handle. You can talk to Ellie if you like. Or do you want to talk to Abby?”
“Put Abby on,” Leslie all but snarled.
Ned grimaced and handed the phone to Abby, who hitched herself up higher in the bed. “Leslie, I’m so sorry we didn’t tell you, but we figured you wouldn’t want to be disturbed. How’s George doing?”
“As well as can be expected. But you could at least have told me where to find my daughter. I had to go out to get some food and stuff, and I thought I’d stop by and say hello to her, and then there was no one there.”
And no doubt she had freaked out, Abby thought. “Again, I’m really sorry. This whole trip came up at the last minute, and we grabbed it.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it’s all right. Since you’re already there. When are you coming back?”
“We haven’t really talked about it. Ellie starts school on Wednesday, right? So Monday or Tuesday, whichever you prefer. If that’s all right with you?”
“I guess.” Leslie sighed. “I’m sorry I jumped all over you, but it’s been a hard week.”
“When’s your son going to be back?”
“Probably Monday.”
“Can George handle it, having the kids around?”
“I think so. No heavy lifting for a while. So no picking up kids. Not that Ellie is small enough to pick up anymore. Is she okay with you?”
Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4) Page 9