“I was kind of babysitting her one day, while her mother was working, and Ellie wanted to walk through a cemetery nearby. Okay, that seemed a little weird, because I thought I was the only person who liked visiting cemeteries, but I went along with it. And then she told me she saw someone there. I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t want to tell her to stop imagining things. It wasn’t until a while later that we saw the same person at the same time. Someone we were both related to, as it turned out. But Ned and I had already kind of figured out there was a genetic component, something that gets passed down. I apologize, but I thought it had kind of skipped you—you’ve always been so practical.”
“Is that a compliment?” Rebecca asked sadly. “You know your father is, well, a dreamer, so I ended up being the one who had to take care of day-to-day stuff, like making sure the mortgage was paid and the oil was changed in the cars, and we had wills and some sort of retirement savings. Don’t get me wrong: I love your father. I always have. That’s just the way he is and always has been. So we fit together well, I guess you’d say.”
“Well, it’s always looked like a happy marriage to me,” Abby said.
“I’m glad you see it that way.” Rebecca leaned forward in her chair. “Look, can I ask you something?”
“Of course. What is it?”
“This thing that you’ve got, and Ned’s got, and Ellie’s got—it doesn’t mean you can cast spells on people, or move things around, does it? Or see the future?”
“Are we witches? No, of course not. If you believe witches exist—I haven’t made up my mind, but I’m not ruling it out. What we share is the ability to see the residue of an ancestor’s past experience—usually something that was stressful to them, in a good or bad way. Death, war, that kind of thing. But think of it as a snapshot, on a certain wavelength, that only certain people with the right antenna or sensors or whatever you want to call them can see. We don’t see people who aren’t connected to us in some way. Maybe someday we’ll figure that out, but not right now. And things might get kind of crowded if we started seeing a lot more dead people.”
Rebecca was silent for a while. Abby waited, then asked softly, “What are you thinking?”
Rebecca shrugged. “A lot of different things, I guess. For one—that I never noticed you had anything like this.”
“Probably because we didn’t have any ancestors around when I was growing up. Ned did—his first encounter was in his own home, which had belonged to an ancestor. He was still a kid, and then he saw another boy who had died a couple of centuries earlier. He didn’t think about it—they sort of played together.”
Rebecca nodded. “All right, I can buy that. So then I have to wonder, how much have I missed seeing in my own life? Were there things like this that I ignored or pooh-poohed? I’m going to have to haul out a lot of memories and take a hard look at them.”
“Only if you want to, Mom. There’s no requirement that you pay attention to any of this, and no penalty if you don’t. You may not want to—like I said, a lot of what I see can be sad, because the people were in pain. Or angry. But they can’t reach us—we can only see them. We can’t change the past, but we can understand it a little better. Oh, there is one other thing I should mention.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Maybe. It seems that when those of us who share this gene or trait or whatever get together, especially if we touch, it kind of amplifies what we see. Like if Ned and I hold hands, sometimes I can see what he sees and vice versa, even if there’s no personal connection to both of us. And I think that’s what happened when Ellie and you and I held hands: it boosted the signal, if you want to look at it that way. And we are all related, back a ways, which might make it stronger.”
“Does having a ‘thing’ make a difference?” Rebecca asked.
“You mean, like holding something that belonged to the person you end up seeing? Yes, sometimes.” Abby hesitated. “That’s what happened when you delivered that chair that belonged to your grandmother.”
“You mean my mother?” Rebecca asked.
“Well, that’s what we always thought, but it turns out it was her mother’s—Ruth’s. And there’s something else, but I’m not sure if you want to hear it.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound. What?” Rebecca said.
“Your mother wasn’t an only child. There was another baby, a boy, who died in infancy—while his mother, your grandmother, was holding him in her arms in that chair.”
“You saw that?” Rebecca whispered.
Abby nodded. “I think it was pneumonia—the baby was having trouble breathing. And I think that might cast a little light on why your grandfather left—he couldn’t handle the pain of it, the guilt, that he couldn’t do anything to help his own child. Remember, that was the Depression. So he bailed out. It doesn’t excuse him, but it helps us to understand why he did what he did.”
“I don’t think my mother ever knew—about the other baby, I mean. How on earth did you figure it out?”
“I found his birth record, when I went looking for it. He was barely a year old.”
“Abigail, how do you live with this?” Rebecca said, and Abby realized there were tears in her mother’s eyes.
“Mom, it’s not all bad. There are happy times too”—although not as often, but Abby didn’t say that. “But I’d rather know than not know. These are people who made us who we are. Not exactly directly, but the choices they made, and the things that happened to them, shaped their lives and eventually ours. Trust me, it’s not a scary thing. They can’t hurt us, and by acknowledging them we honor their memory.”
Rebecca looked down at her hands in her lap and shook her head. “I don’t know what to think. It’s a lot to take in.” Then she looked up. “Did you invite us here to tell me all this?”
“No, I wanted you to meet Ned—I’d already waited too long. And I wanted to ask you if you remembered anything that your mother or grandmother had said about Olivia or Cape Cod. Nothing psychic—just a family story, passed down.”
“Because you saw her here.”
Abby was surprised that her mother had reached that conclusion so quickly. “Yes. And she was sad. Ellie and I both felt the sadness as soon as we walked into the house, but we didn’t see Olivia until the storm.”
“You were together then?”
“Yes, and we both saw her. And the kitten did too.”
At that last comment, Rebecca burst out laughing. “Seriously?”
“Yes. See? It’s a different wavelength, but cats seem to get it too.”
Abby looked up to see Ned in the doorway. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“We’re fine,” Abby told him. “I’ve just been explaining, well, everything to my mother.”
Ned turned his attention to Rebecca. “I’m sorry we’ve hit you with all this at once. It wasn’t planned. I thought we could have a pleasant day or two and get to know each other.”
“That’s okay, Ned. The cat got out of the bag when Abby and Ellie touched me, and I think I just met my great-grandmother for the first time. So Abby had to explain. Not your fault, and I guess when I have time to wrap my head around the whole thing I’ll be glad that Abby found you.” She stood up. “Are Marvin and Ellie still battling each other?”
“So it appears. But it’s time for Ellie to get to bed. How long do you think you can stay around tomorrow?”
“Longer than we’d planned, but not long enough, apparently. But right now I need time to think. Let me go retrieve my husband so you can put Ellie to bed.” Rebecca approached the door, then stopped in front of Ned. “This might sound odd, but may I touch you?”
Ned’s eyes darted toward Abby, but he said politely, “Of course.”
Rebecca reached a tentative hand toward Ned’s face, then laid it on his cheek. She was silent, watching his expression. Then she dropped her hand. “I see. We’ll have to talk more tomorrow.” Rebecca turned and went into the house, calling out her husband’s name. He answ
ered from the living room.
“That was . . . odd,” Ned told Abby. “I take it you told her everything?”
“A lot of it,” Abby admitted. “It’s a lot to take in all at once. By the way, she knows that Ellie’s your daughter, but she doesn’t know about Leslie and my job and all that. You want to put Ellie to bed?”
“Sure.”
Abby stayed on the porch, looking out into the darkness, listening to the slap of water against the bulkhead. This mini-vacation was not turning out the way she had planned. Okay, she’d been avoiding telling her parents about Ned, or at least the details, because she had feared exactly what had happened: she couldn’t explain their relationship without talking about all the other stuff that had brought her and Ned together. And then there had been Ellie. And she definitely hadn’t planned that moment of contact when, apparently, she had blown her mother’s mind. Actually her mother had taken it all surprisingly well. Abby wondered what Rebecca would tell her husband. No doubt he would take it in stride, because Rebecca was still Rebecca, and Marvin had loved her for decades. This was just another facet of Rebecca, one that had been there all along, but concealed. She found she wasn’t worried: her parents would survive this.
Ned came back down. “Ellie was practically asleep by the time her head hit the pillow. How’s your mother coping?”
“Pretty well, I think. I told you she was a very practical person. I sit her down and tell her I see dead people, and, oh, by the way, you do too and we just proved it, and she’s going to find a way to organize it. At the very least I think we’re going to learn more about Olivia and why she was here. I’m relieved it’s all out in the open now.”
“So am I,” Ned said, holding out his hand. He pulled her out of her chair and into his arms.
Abby studied his face. “I think my parents have a good relationship. They love each other, and always have, and more than that, they trust each other. Can we do that?”
“Do you have to ask?”
Chapter 16
Breakfast was an odd meal. Abby assumed that her mother had told her father about the conversation of the evening before, although if that was true, Marvin showed no sign of being fazed by the information. Rebecca bantered with Ned while Abby scrambled eggs. Ellie watched the grown-ups without saying anything. Kitten remained on her lap, her tiny head peeping over the edge of the table, taking it all in. That kitten really was attached to Ellie, although she was friendly enough with the other people in the house, male and female, old and young. But left to her own devices, she headed straight back to Ellie, or fell asleep.
Abby decided to take the bull by the horns. “Dad, did Mom tell you what we talked about last night?” Ned looked startled by her question.
Marvin nodded. “She did. Interesting stuff,” he said, and did not expand on that.
Abby was not content to let it go. “Yes, it is. Can you think of any examples over the years that Mom might not have recognized?”
“Well, I have come upon her staring into space with a dreamy expression on her face, but I figured she was thinking about some actor. Paul Newman, maybe? Certainly not me.” Marvin smiled at Rebecca.
Rebecca swatted his hand, then smiled back. “Nope, Daniel Craig these days—he’s hot.”
No help there, Abby thought. Of course, she had to admit she might have missed a lot of clues before she knew what was what. Whatever it was.
“Was there anything you wanted to do today, before you head back to Maine?” Ned asked, changing the subject.
“I think we’ve done our fair share of sightseeing, Ned, but thank you for asking,” Rebecca informed him. “We’d like to spend what time we have here with you all, not in a car fighting traffic and looking for parking.” She turned to Abby. “And we can talk about Olivia.”
Abby was happy to see that even if her dad was ducking the issue, her mother wasn’t. “Have you remembered anything more, Mom?” Abby asked.
“Not yet, but I figure if you and I kick some ideas around, we might come up with something. You know more than I do about who’s who and dates and stuff.”
“I do, but I don’t want to bore you with what’s in my computer program.”
“No need,” Rebecca said complacently. “We can just go sit out back and see what comes.”
Rebecca had certainly adjusted to her new status as ghost seeker quickly. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe what Abby had told her had explained a lot of things that Rebecca had never quite understood. It was worth a shot, anyway, and Abby had no other plans for the day. “That sounds good to me.” She turned to Ned and her father. “Guys, what are you going to do?”
“We’ll figure something out, and we promise we’ll stay out of your hair,” Ned said. Marvin said nothing, but smiled.
“What about me?” Ellie asked plaintively.
“Do you want to stay with us, sweetie, or go with Ned?” Abby asked.
“You. Here. Please,” she added as an afterthought.
“Okay, you’re with the ladies’ team. Let’s finish breakfast and then we can get started,” Abby said firmly, although she had no agenda.
An hour later the men had taken themselves out to parts unknown, leaving the women—and girl child—on their own. As Rebecca had suggested, they went out to the porch and settled in the creaky old chairs. “What now?” Rebecca asked.
“Mom, I don’t know. This isn’t exactly a séance, where we all sit around in a dark room and wait for a spirit to show up. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Okay,” Rebecca said, untroubled. “Why don’t you start off by telling me what kind of research you do, if you want to find out something about who was where, who they were related to, that kind of thing?”
“That’s a good idea. No surprise, I’ve done a lot of this lately, at least for a few generations. I used censuses, local histories published in the nineteenth century, city directories for the more recent people. Wills. Public records like birth and death certificates. More and more of this information is available online now, just in the past few years. I can teach you how to use all that if you’re interested, but I really wanted to talk to you because I thought maybe you overheard some stuff from your family that wouldn’t have been written down—like that story about the election you told me last night.”
Rebecca laughed. “Well, that one was memorable, so much so that it got passed down. And I guess I see your point—it tells us something about what kind of people they were. The problem is, on our side most of the families were kind of small, so there aren’t cousins and such to compare notes with. Let’s see . . . When did Olivia and her husband marry?”
“Olivia and Samuel Ellinwood married in 1886, when Olivia was just twenty—this was in Boston, at the Arlington Street Church. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that, but it’s lovely, and it’s right in the middle of the city. Kind of odd, I always thought, because both she and her family and her husband-to-be were all from Lynn originally, and were living in Waltham at the time. I always wondered why they didn’t marry in one of those places. Maybe it was a society thing.”
“She didn’t have my mother until 1901—so she’d been married about fifteen years,” Rebecca said pensively. “That was unusual.”
“She could have lost one or more before that—there wouldn’t be a record of that.” Abby glanced nervously at Ellie, who appeared to be ignoring the conversation. How much would she understand?
“That’s true.” Suddenly Rebecca’s eyes went blank, and then she turned quickly to Abby. “Wait a minute—I do remember something. I remember my grandmother Ruth saying that when her mother—that would be Olivia—was finally pregnant after all those years—of course, she wouldn’t have put it that way—she went to tell her mother, who must have been living in Waltham then. And what Ruth told me was, her mother took one look at Olivia as she was walking up to the house and said, ‘You’re pregnant.’ Before Olivia even had a chance to open her mouth. Like she knew. What do you think of that?” Rebecca sat back in he
r chair, beaming.
“That’s amazing, and it could fit. I wish I remembered your grandmother better, but I’ve got only some kind of brief memories of her. I was, what, maybe eight when she died?”
“About that. And we’d kind of kept you away from her for a while before that, when she was so sick. I’d hoped you would have happier memories of her.”
“She used to read me stories, didn’t she? When I was little? And she smelled nice.”
“She always liked lavender. Do you know, there’s something else I just thought of. She once told me that her mother—Olivia again—liked one particular kind of expensive perfume. That must have been when she was a rich widow. I think they still make it—what the heck was it called?” Rebecca’s brow furrowed, then her expression brightened. “Black Narcissus, that was it. My mother kept an old bottle of it around, to remind herself of her grandmother, and I used to sniff it now and then. Wow, it gets confusing trying to keep all these generations straight, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Abby agreed. “I’ll have to look for the perfume. So, Olivia and her husband owned a house in Westfield, and they’re in the censuses. But the house was in her name, right? Did they have any other properties?”
“No, I don’t think so. If Ruth inherited from Olivia, she would have sold them off pretty quickly. I guess you’d have to look at New Jersey records for those? Anyway, most of what Olivia and her husband had owned was gone by the time Ruth’s husband, Samuel, ran off, so Olivia couldn’t help much. Not that my grandmother Ruth ever asked for help. She was determined that she would never depend on anybody again. She managed pretty well, all things considered.”
“You know, I did look up Olivia’s will a while ago, but it was one of those frustrating ones that said something like, ‘I leave all my worldly possessions to my beloved daughter.’ No inventory or valuation or anything useful like that.”
“Well, wouldn’t there be records of when Ruth inherited the Westfield house? And sold it?”
“You’re right, Mom, there should be. I haven’t had time to look. Even without any details from the will, there should be property transfer records.”
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