Revealing the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  “What did he do then?”

  “Got out of the house as fast as possible. The whole thing really upset him.”

  “So of course you started looking up who his grandfather was.”

  “Exactly, only the local papers didn’t have much to say about an elderly plumber. Yes, his grandfather died quite a few years ago. His son, and then Jack and his son, took over the business.”

  “And you can’t invite Jack back for tea and ask him if he’s had any messages from beyond the grave? Or if his grandfather has any reason to want to communicate with him?”

  “Not exactly. Ned, the man was scared. Maybe that means it’s happened to him before, or maybe it was unexpected and it startled him. But he definitely felt something. He went pale, and his hands were shaking. So what do I do now?”

  “For a plumber?”

  “No, you idiot. I’m pretty sure there are more plumbers around than people who can feel the presence of the dead. I felt badly for the man, but I have to wonder if trying to explain to him what happened would only make things worse.”

  “Only if what you think happened, did happen. Maybe he had a small stroke or he’s got epilepsy or something. Some simple physiological cause that he might or might not have known about. Maybe he left his medication at home and had to get to it in a hurry.”

  “Ned, I know there are plenty of possible explanations. Maybe there was a spider that bit him that neither of us saw. Maybe he stabbed his finger on a nail. But he sure left in a hurry.”

  Ned set about searching for ingredients for dinner in the fridge and cupboards. “Noodles? Potatoes?”

  “You’re cooking, you figure it out. By the way, please don’t tell me something I made is wonderful when even I know it isn’t, even though I know you mean it in a good way. If you don’t tell me, I can’t fix it.”

  “Got it. Noodles, then, with mushrooms and sour cream. So you never talked much about plumbing?”

  “Only that the newer stuff would have to come out if we wanted to pass inspection on anything we put in. We didn’t get down to the interesting stuff, like whether we could relocate the loo.”

  “You have a plan for the space it currently occupies?” Ned asked, pouring oil into a sauté pan.

  “Not really. Mostly I’m curious. Jack and I agreed that there had always been something there, based on the structure behind the modern stuff, but we didn’t talk about what it was for. What would you do with a hidey-hole like that?”

  “Use it for storage, I guess. Or maybe put in a wine closet. No hidden treasures in there?”

  “Apart from the wrench? I didn’t get a chance to look. And Jack flew out so fast that he didn’t manage to take the old fixtures with him, so you and I have some cleanup to do. Hey, did you ever do a title search on this property?”

  “I think I saw one go by, among all the purchase documents, but I wasn’t really interested at that point. I can dig it out of the files if you want.”

  “I’d like to know who came before us. I’m pretty sure they weren’t related to us, but maybe there’s some link to Jack. Or, heck, maybe it was a bordello, or the owners made illegal whiskey in the basement during Prohibition. You never know what you’re going to find when you start digging.”

  Ned sprinkled the chops with salt and pepper and slid them into the now-hot oil, then turned to slicing mushrooms. “Be careful what you wish for,” he tossed back over his shoulder.

  “I like to keep an open mind. Ned, how many of . . . people with this ability do you think there are? Not absolute numbers, but maybe what percentage of the population? I know we’ve talked about children having greater sensitivity and openness to it, but what about adults? If it’s buried in them somewhere, can it be released if they’ve been stifling it all their lives? Or is it all or nothing? You and I know we share a familial connection, but can it occur spontaneously, or are there family lines with it, when most don’t have it?”

  Ned turned the chops, and at the scent of frying meat Abby realized how hungry she was. “I wish I had an answer for you, but as we’ve said before, we’ve got such a small sample that it’s all but impossible to say. Let me suggest this: if you can get Jack back here and explore a bit further without scaring him off, do it. He seems to be entirely new to this, or he’s putting on a good act. But why here, why now? Does anyone else in his family share this? It may be impossible—he’s too old or too scared to want to look at it. And that’s his right—he doesn’t owe us anything.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever find answers? For our own lines, I mean?” Abby said, almost to herself.

  “I don’t know. On the one hand, we found hints of this going back centuries, but after all that time people are still reluctant to accept this kind of ability. It’s kind of presumptuous of us to think we can walk in now and solve the puzzle. But I’m happy to try, if only to satisfy my own curiosity.

  “And so am I. Anyway, I guess I’ll give Jack a day to cool off, because your mother did recommend him, and he seems like a solid guy, and I’ll finish the cleanup of the late powder room and see what it’s like when it’s empty. I kind of like your idea of wine storage, if you think whatever vintages you choose won’t mind us tramping on the stairs overhead all the time.”

  “I think my choices will survive. But I can’t guarantee I’ll get enough wine to fill the space.”

  “Well, maybe I can use what’s left to store the cookware I don’t use much, or maybe the good china that only comes out for holidays. But we still haven’t figured out if we can sneak a second small bath in somewhere else—it does come in handy, now and then.”

  “Agreed. Let’s wait for whatever plumber we end up with to add his two cents before we decide, and we can keep thinking about it for now.”

  “Fine. But don’t forget to give me those records for the house. I think it’s possible to look up property transfers online, and there must be old city directories for the town, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out who lived here in the past. But I kind of doubt it was anyone in the Maguire family. Sorry—does that make me sound like a snob?”

  “No, just a realist. You’re not being judgmental.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. Maybe now we can say that this ability doesn’t discriminate on the basis of class.”

  “File that idea away, will you? We can look into it five or ten years down the line.”

  “Right.” Abby went back to trying mentally to reconfigure the laundry area, with little luck. Funny how such a large house had allotted so little space to a basic function. The kitchen was fine, but laundry? What had people used when the house was built? And which people? “Ned, was there a maid’s room or any kind of servant’s quarters here?”

  “You know, I’ve never really thought about it. You might look in the attic—I think we’ve accounted for the bedrooms. Or you could look at censuses, they would list anyone living in the house at the time.”

  “Good point. Maybe tomorrow. Do you think we all leave something of ourselves behind in a place, without knowing?”

  “Could be. But not everyone can sense the residue, if you will. It’s unlikely that it’s deliberate—it’s kind of a by-product, a genetic ‘I was here’ marker, rather than a message.”

  “Which still brings me back to what happened with Jack. If his grandfather wasn’t leaving a message for him, since Jack hadn’t even been born at that time, what was Jack’s reaction all about? I still want to find out what happened.”

  “Go right ahead, though I hope there aren’t any bodies buried in the backyard—well, none that weren’t supposed to be there, like in the cemetery.”

  “I second that!” Abby said firmly. “Is dinner ready?”

  “Two minutes.”

  Chapter 8

  Wednesday

  Why was it that every time she’d managed to focus on one thing with this psychic stuff, another popped up out of nowhere? Abby grumbled to herself as she dragged the old fixtures from the powder room out onto the back porch. I
didn’t ask for any of it. To be fair, it had brought her and Ned together, but it had been a bumpy ride so far, and she still had a lot of unanswered questions, and seemed to keep adding more. She went back down the hall to collect the torn pieces of sheetrock and the scuffed and grubby floor tiles in a large plastic bag, and she planned to toss them into the trash or the recycling container—after she’d figured out which pieces were acceptable. When the ridiculously small room—it couldn’t be more than five feet by three feet—had been cleared of debris, she stopped and looked at it critically. The sheetrock had been applied directly over the old plaster, which was in sorry shape after all the digging of holes for the plumbing and the hammering of nails. It was probably beyond salvage now, or not worth the time to patch and smooth it all.

  She searched for evidence of earlier use. Was there a shadow of some long-gone shelves? A random coat hook? Nothing leapt out at her. She vacuumed out the intersection where the walls met the floor. There were plain baseboards still in place, but there had been space behind them to hide that wrench. If Jack’s grandfather hadn’t done the plumbing, how could he have left his wrench in the space? Or maybe it had been his last job before retiring, having clearly lost his skills. But why then would Jack have been so upset to find it there?

  After Ned had left earlier, she’d done a quick online search of property transactions, and she had found a record of a deed for the property in the late 1890s, when the Foster family had sold it to the Baxters. She logged in to a genealogy program and checked the censuses for 1900 and the next few decades and found, as Ned had guessed, that there was a servant living in the house in 1930—and her name was Mary Maguire. Interesting—odds were good that there was a connection with Jack’s family. If Mary Maguire had been nineteen in 1930, as the census showed, she would have been born in 1911—which would make her the right age to belong to Jack’s father’s generation. But that still didn’t explain Jack’s reaction.

  She was startled by a knocking at the front door. She wasn’t paranoid about opening the door to people she didn’t know, since the neighborhood seemed safe enough to her, but she should pay attention. Too bad this “sensing” ability of hers didn’t seem to identify danger, only people who were long gone. She walked down the hallway to the front door and peered through the frosted—original—glass panels and saw a pleasant-looking young man. She hoped he wasn’t selling anything, but she opened the door anyway. “Can I help you?”

  “You’re Abigail Kimball? I’m Bill Maguire—you met with my father, Jack, yesterday.”

  “Yes, I did. Then he left in a hurry. Is he all right?”

  “Yes, more or less, but he wanted me to explain what happened. Do you mind if I come in?”

  “Do you have any ID?”

  The man smiled. “Will the company truck be enough?” He nodded over his shoulder at the van parked at the curb.

  “I guess that will do.” Abby smiled back. “Why don’t we sit in the kitchen? You want some coffee? It’s already made.”

  “Sure, that would be great.” He followed her down the hall to the kitchen in back.

  When they were seated, with coffee, Abby said, “Did your father have some sort of medical problem yesterday? He looked very upset. Did he tell you?”

  Bill stared into his coffee. “This may be kind of hard to explain. No, he doesn’t have any kind of heart condition or anything like that, but the Maguire side of the family has always been . . . different.”

  “In what way?” Abby prompted.

  “His father’s people were Irish, and maybe you’ve heard that the Irish are big into kind of supernatural stuff, like premonitions. Or hearing banshees when somebody’s about to die. That kind of thing.”

  Abby suppressed a smile. “Yes, I’ve heard of that. What does this mean for your family?”

  “Let me say up front that the family’s kind of split on that stuff. Some people say it’s a load of crap—excuse my language—but others take it seriously. My great-grandfather—he’s the one who started the company, and he passed it on to Dad, and now Dad is working with me. Anyway, Great-Grampa really believed, so much so that some people thought he was crazy. Dad’s father, not so much, but I think Dad’s got the same bug too. You know, seeing things that aren’t there, knowing something that it wouldn’t be possible to know, that kind of thing.”

  “So what did he see yesterday?” Abby asked.

  “He didn’t want to talk about it, but he said something about his grandfather’s wrench—something that scared him. Were you there then?”

  “I was. He said when he touched it, it felt like an electric shock, and he dropped it fast. But there was no wiring nearby, and when I picked it up, I didn’t feel anything wrong. Not that I’m doubting that he did.”

  “Is it still here?”

  “Sure,” Abby said. “I figured somebody would come back for it. Do you want it now?”

  “I guess . . . I want to touch it, see if Dad really is crazy.”

  “Wait, back up. Do you think you’ve inherited this whatever-it-is from your father’s family?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes I see things or feel things that I shouldn’t be able to, you know? Mostly I try to ignore them.”

  Oh, yes, I know, Abby said to herself. But right now was not the time to talk about it. She cleared her throat. “Look, I’m not much into organized religion, and I’m not going to tell you you’ve gone mad or you’re possessed by the devil. I try to keep an open mind. If you say you—and others in your family—see things or hear things or feel things, I believe you. I mean, I hope you all haven’t inherited some kind of brain tumor that causes hallucinations, but you say that you believe that something else is going on.”

  Bill didn’t look particularly happy. “Yeah. But we’ve never put a name to it or looked into it scientifically, or anything like that. I do know that Dad was seriously rattled yesterday, and I know that Great-Grampa spent a lot of his later years drinking too much—the family thought that it was to shut out the voices. I thought he’d made up that description. It never occurred to me that he was actually hearing something.”

  “Wait here,” Abby said. She stood up and went out into the hallway, where she’d left the wrench on a table. She picked it up—still no buzz that she could feel—and brought it back to the kitchen, laying it in the center of the table. “That’s it.”

  “Oh.” Bill looked at if it was going to bite like a snake. “Looks normal. That dab of paint on the end? That’s the way Great-Grampa and then Grampa marked all their stuff, so it wouldn’t get mixed up with anyone else’s. Don’t recall that I’ve ever seen this one, but then, most wrenches look pretty much alike, don’t they?”

  “I wouldn’t really know, I don’t use tools much,” Abby said. “Are you going to touch it?”

  “I guess,” Bill said reluctantly, and reached out a tentative hand, laying it on the wrench handle.

  “Anything?” Abby asked after half a minute.

  Bill shook his head. “Feels kinda warm, maybe, but nothing scary. It’s just a wrench.”

  There was one more thing Abby wanted to try, though it meant that Bill might leave and never come back. But she had to know. She reached out one hand and laid it over his, which rested on the wrench.

  The blood drained from his face as he looked up at her across the table. “What the . . . !”

  Abby had felt enough, and withdrew her hand. “Sorry I didn’t ask first, but I needed to know something. You felt something, and I’m going to guess it’s the same thing your father felt yesterday, only maybe not as strong. But before you head for the door, let me say something. You’re not crazy, and I’m not a witch. Some people appear to have the ability to sense or feel some kind of energy from people who are no longer living, but who may have left some residue or charge behind, in objects like that wrench. Is there a story behind that wrench?”

  Bill nodded without speaking, his gaze never leaving Abby’s face.

  “Look, I know you’re go
ing to need to process this. And to talk with your father. But I’d be really grateful if you’d come back and talk to me, the two of you together. If you don’t come back, I’ll understand. If you do but you tell me I’m crazy, I’ll accept that—not that I’d agree with you. But if you’re interested in learning about this thing that’s been running through your family for at least three generations, that’s a conversation I’d love to have with you.”

  The color was beginning to creep back into Bill’s face, and he managed a half smile. “You still need plumbing done?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Bill pulled out his cell phone, punched some keys, and apparently pulled up a calendar. “You free tomorrow morning, say, nine?”

  “I can be.”

  “Let me talk to Dad, and maybe we can swing by then and talk.” He stood up quickly. “This sure has been an interesting meeting, Ms. Kimball.”

  “For me too, Bill. And I’m Abby. Let me show you out.” Abby was careful not to touch him as they walked toward the front door. She watched as he went out and climbed into the van in front, then she locked the door behind him. It was only when she got back to the kitchen that she realized he had left the wrench behind on the table. Deliberately? She wasn’t sure. She cautiously laid a hand on it: nothing. Whatever was going on with it, it seemed to be specific to the Maguire family. Now the question was, was there some event generations back that had left its mark on this prosaic tool, which had been stashed behind a wall? She was beginning to think that was no accident—someone had hidden it.

  Why? Was there some important event back then that had started all this? And then been picked up by the “fey” Maguires? Unless it was a murder, Abby doubted that it would have made the news. That left the family: what did they know? Was the Mary Maguire from the census a member of that family, and had something happened to her? If so, who had she told, and what?

  And what was she supposed to do with this information? Talk with Ned, for a start. Without warning she had introduced class and ethnicity into their already messy theories. Of course, she could be completely wrong, and there was nothing here except some drunken retellings passed down through the family, about some event that might have happened before most of the tale-tellers were born.