Revealing the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  • • •

  It was still dark when Abby awoke the next morning, but Ned was already downstairs. She would be at the school for only half the day, but there were a couple of classes she wanted to observe, and she wanted to learn as much as possible so she could mull it all over through the weekend. And Ellie would be around in the afternoon. Spending time with Ellie was always a treat, even if having the chance to see her meant she had to handle Leslie with kid gloves. Abby, have you ever even seen a pair of kid gloves?

  Leslie had known about Ellie’s ability for a while now, ever since Abby had outed Ellie’s ancestral playmate in the cemetery near her home, an ancestor from several generations back. Leslie blamed Abby for connecting Ellie to a ghost, which really wasn’t fair because Ellie had found Hannah all by herself, but somehow Abby had been the one to figure out where Ellie disappeared to regularly. Not that that had been the only connection she and Ellie had made, but they had by mutual agreement decided not to add any more details for Leslie.

  That Leslie allowed Ellie to see Abby at all was a step in the right direction, but as Ellie grew older she was going to need more help with this unusual skill—help that Leslie couldn’t give. And, as Abby and Ned had agreed, Ellie was a very perceptive child who was probably more aware of what was going on than her official parents were—and had the good sense not to mention it. It was a complicated situation, made even more so by the appearance of Danny in the midst of it all. Did Leslie know anything about Danny, beyond that he was a new kid in Ellie’s class? Abby wasn’t sure. She was proud of Ellie for standing up for him, but that could make things even more difficult in the future.

  Still, she wasn’t going to worry about that today. She was going to go to the school and listen and observe and come up with a plan. Funny—she realized now that she hadn’t even questioned whether she wanted to return to the school. Maybe she’d stay at least until the first semester ended. Then she could decide.

  Having made one small decision, she jumped out of bed, gathered up her clothes, and headed to the bathroom for a shower.

  Downstairs Ned once again had breakfast on the table waiting for her. “You’re spoiling me,” Abby told him as she sat down. “You could have slept in this morning. When is Ellie supposed to arrive?”

  “Whenever Leslie drops her off, which should be soon.”

  “Have you told Leslie or Ellie that I may have a job now? Not that I plan to give up picking up Ellie as usual, but if Leslie knows where I’m working, she might wonder, why there? Why not pick any other school, public or private, that doesn’t have kids with challenges?”

  “Is ‘challenges’ a term of art at your place?”

  “No, not as far as I know, but I’m not sure how the public perceives it. Although there’s a lot more public attention on the problem now, but that comes with a lot of bad information too. Like the ‘working mothers are negligent and it’s all their fault’ theory. Thank goodness we’ve moved past that.”

  “I think any parent with a less-than-perfect child wants someone to blame, even if it isn’t realistic.”

  “Such a shame,” Abby muttered and dug into her pancakes.

  She was out the door before eight, and it took only a few minutes to get to the school. As she approached she watched the children arriving, dropped off by one or another parent. Some didn’t even glance at their driver when they climbed out of the car. Nor did they rush to greet friends. It was a curiously silent arrival, compared to other schools she had known. But she couldn’t say they looked unhappy, just very focused, even before the school day started.

  Nobody paid her any attention, which was a relief in a way, and she didn’t try to start conversations with any of them, so she wouldn’t spook them. Take it slow, Abby. Being super-friendly is not the way to go.

  Abby’s good intentions went out the window when, as she approached the steps to the first floor, she saw one girl trying to avoid walking into a cluster of others. The girl somehow miscalculated her distances, or maybe she was just clumsy, but she tripped, falling forward onto her knees, and the result was some bloody scrapes. Abby couldn’t see any other adult in the area, so without thinking she hurried forward through the small group of children, most of whom seemed frozen in place, while others looked frightened or looked away entirely. Abby knelt by the fallen girl as she scanned for injuries—all she could see was some badly skinned knees with trickling blood.

  She reached out to touch the girl without thinking. “Are you all right? Do you hurt somewhere?”

  The girl looked at her and shook her head silently.

  “Do you think you can get up?” Abby asked. The girl looked bewildered. “Don’t worry, there’s no rush. I’m Abby. I’m new here.”

  Then something shifted in Abby’s mind. She heard a voice, and looking down, she realized she still had her hand on the girl’s arm, ready to either keep her in place if the injuries required it, or to help her up if the girl felt ready. What she heard was a faint “Alice.” Which was followed almost immediately by the girl’s vocal response. “Alice.”

  Abby looked up to see Carolyn hurrying down the stairs. To Abby she said, “One of the kids told me someone had fallen.” Carolyn knelt down beside the girl—Alice—and said, “Do you think you can stand up? We should put some bandages on those knees of yours.”

  Alice’s eyes shifted between the principal and Abby. After a few seconds, she nodded toward Abby. “Her.”

  Abby couldn’t understand why Carolyn froze, her gaze shifting between Abby and Alice. Finally she turned to Abby. “Would you mind helping her up?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t.” Abby held out her hand again. “Let’s get you up, Alice.”

  The girl took her hand and rose easily, so apparently there was no damage beyond the skinned knees. But now Abby was staring at her, because what she’d heard, in her head, was a faint “Thank you.” Alice was communicating with her.

  Chapter 23

  Wednesday

  Carolyn made a brief sweep of the small group that had been watching the drama on the steps and she apparently decided there was no immediate crisis. “Kids, you’d better get to your rooms now. Alice will be fine. I’ll take her to the nurse.” Alice was standing without moving, waiting for the next instruction. Apparently bloody knees were not enough to upset her. Maybe she fell often at home? Abby wondered.

  Carolyn glanced toward Abby. “Could you wait in my office while I take Alice to the nurse’s office?”

  “Sure, no problem.” Abby stood back while the other students filed into the building, and waited till they were all inside before going in and making her way to the Principal’s Office. She almost smiled: in her childhood, being sent to that place was always a cause for dread. You knew you’d done something really bad if the teacher in charge sent you there.

  Was she in trouble? She couldn’t think why she would be. She’d gone to help a student, period. She’d touched her only because it was necessary to make sure she was all right. She hadn’t tried to move her before she was ready. But any of those seemingly ordinary gestures could have been completely against the rules here. Maybe moving quickly to help could have caused a mass panic in the group. Maybe the girl was super-suggestible and would have tried to stand up no matter how badly she was hurt. Or maybe her brief connection with Alice had generated a glowing electrical field around them and the jig was up because the whole blinking school had witnessed it. She gave up trying to figure out what Carolyn might be thinking, and instead concentrated on recalling that fleeting moment when she and Alice had connected. If her contact the day before had been ambiguous—just the single word “blue”—this time the voice and the meaning had been perfectly clear. Alice, despite her bloody knees, hadn’t looked troubled or frightened. Maybe she heard a lot of voices, and hearing Abby’s was nothing special.

  Carolyn bustled back after a few minutes and dropped into her desk chair, looking troubled. Abby decided to take the initiative. “I hope I didn’t break any rule
s. I saw a kid in trouble, and I acted.”

  “No, no, that was completely appropriate. We do have rules here, but they’re pretty elastic. And from what I saw, you acted cautiously. That’s not what’s bothering me.”

  “So what is?” Abby asked, although she was pretty sure she knew the answer.

  Carolyn sighed. “When Christine told me you were thinking of going back to work, she said you were really good with children, but when I thought about it I couldn’t figure out how she’d seen you with any children, in the short time she’d known you. Now, I know that Christine is a very honest person, and I trust her judgment. But one thing stuck in my mind: she’d called you sensitive. And I’m not sure what she meant by that, exactly.”

  “How does that relate with what happened today?” Abby asked, stalling, although she suspected that she already knew the answer.

  Carolyn sat back in her chair. “Abby, Alice has been a student here for two years, and in all that time, no one here—staff or student—has heard her speak. Today she meets you for the first time, under what must have been stressful circumstances, and she talks to you immediately. Now, I don’t claim it was any kind of miracle, and I haven’t heard a word from her since we left you in front of the building. So it’s not like that fall jarred something loose in her head all of a sudden. Which means either she’s been deceiving us all for two years now, or it’s something to do with you personally. Would you like to comment?”

  Well, it was nice while it lasted, Abby thought. “It’s me. There’s something I didn’t tell you, because I thought you’d think I was crazy.” Abby swallowed. “I have some psychic powers or talents or abilities—call them whatever you like—that allow me to communicate with other people, mostly dead people that were my ancestors. I’ve been trying to find out if it goes beyond just that group, and if it extends to children, ones I’ve never met. The whole thing is pretty new to me.”

  Carolyn’s expression was hard to read. Anger? Curiosity? Abby went on, “I thought that working with autistic children would be a quick way to test my, well, range, because so many of them are fully intelligent, though maybe in ways most of us can’t understand, but they have trouble communicating with the rest of the world. And I also thought it would be easier to work with young children, because they haven’t closed down their own abilities yet, while most adults have, if they ever had any to begin with. But don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t looking at them as my own private group of guinea pigs, and I certainly wouldn’t do anything to harm them. In fact, I hadn’t decided on any approach—I only wanted to watch and learn.”

  Abby leaned forward in her chair. “Look, I hadn’t ever seen Alice before. I saw her fall and I went to her to help.”

  “And what happened?”

  “When I touched her, to help her up, I heard her name in my head, clear as day. And then she spoke it—after I heard it. I had no way of knowing she never spoke. But clearly she can.”

  “With some rather unusual prompting,” Carolyn said wryly. “Frankly, Abby, I don’t know what to think. I’ve never met anyone with that kind of ability—although I’ve sometimes wondered about Christine—and I’ve always thought self-declared psychics were con artists. I mean, they can say anything, right? They’re bound to be right at least some of the time. And here you show up and tell me you’re the real deal. Tell me, can you bend forks? See the future?”

  Obviously Carolyn didn’t get it yet. “No, I can’t do tricks. Look, you of all people should understand about different abilities—you work with these kids all the time! And they communicate using a wide range of mediums. Why am I any different? Be honest—if I’d walked in and said I wanted to try to communicate with the children here using my psychic powers, what would you have done?”

  Carolyn sighed. “Exactly what you would have expected. I would have been polite, and then I would have sent you home with a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ and given you no more thought. And I would now, except that I saw what happened between you and Alice, and I heard her speak to you. And now I don’t know what to do.”

  “I understand. When I first discovered this, completely by accident, I didn’t know what to think, much less what I should do about it. In some ways I would rather it had never happened. But it did, and it doesn’t seem right to ignore the ability, now that I know about it.” Abby paused for a moment to think. “Carolyn, I know this is a lot to digest quickly, but I have an idea. Let me at least spend some more time with the children here. I’m not going to do any experiments, or wire the children up with electrodes. I simply want to watch and listen to them. I don’t have to talk to them, beyond being polite. I don’t have an agenda. I’ve already told you I’m pretty new at all this—nothing in my life prepared me to meet my long-dead great-grandfather face-to-face, but I have. I often can’t control when it happens, but then, I keep stumbling over ancestors I didn’t even know I had and there they are in front of me. It’s not like I have a tracking device—it’s more like I go to a cemetery where I know certain families were buried and see what happens. And it’s not evil. Nobody’s telling me to go out and do harm to anyone. None of them ask me to do anything—they’re just there.” Carolyn still didn’t look convinced. “Oh, shoot, I don’t know if I can explain it. But what I want from you and this place is to find out how common it is. I’ve already made a connection with two of your students, in less than two days.”

  “Two?” Carolyn interrupted.

  “Yes, two. There was a boy in art class yesterday, and I was wondering what to call the color he was using, and I heard—in my head—‘blue.’ I wasn’t looking for it, and he didn’t seem to think it was anything unusual. He answered a question I hadn’t spoken. And then there was what happened with Alice today. Look, can we cut to the chase? Am I harming these kids in any way? Or can you see the possibility that I might be able to help? Just let me hang around the fringes here. If you think I’m overstepping the limits, you can send me home.”

  Carolyn didn’t answer immediately. Finally she said slowly, “I like you, Abby. I think you believe what you’re telling me, but I’ve had more training in education, especially with students with challenges, and what you describe really does sound pretty close to crazy, for lack of a more scientific word. You come in here and tell me you’re hearing voices and you talk to the dead. What am I supposed to make of that? What happens if any of the staff learns about this? What you do reflects on the school and on me, because I brought you in. The school and its students are my primary responsibility, and I can’t take risks with flaky theories. But . . .”

  Abby felt a spurt of hope. Everything Carolyn had said was true and reasonable. She’d met that reaction before from other people, like Leslie. But Carolyn had said “but.” Abby waited.

  Carolyn looked down at her hands in her lap. “Abby,” she said softly, “this is more than just a job to me. If I only wanted a paycheck, I could have become an educational administrator. But these kids need help to function in the world as best they can, and just training them to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and take a bath now and then isn’t enough. I can see why your skills could be useful, but I’m not sure I believe in them. Not even after what happened with Alice. So let me propose this. I want some time to think about what you’ve told me, and we have the long weekend ahead. Why don’t you come back on Monday and we can talk again? That’s not exactly like telling you to ‘get lost,’ but I can’t take you on in any capacity without considering it from all sides. Does that work for you?”

  Abby nodded. “I think that’s fair. I know it’s a lot to take in.”

  Carolyn looked relieved. “Can I ask you, how much does Christine know?”

  If she told the truth, would that damage the friendship that Carolyn and Christine shared? But she wasn’t about to lie. “All of it.”

  “Ah, I see. She’s been my friend for quite a while—since my mother died. And I’ll be the first to admit that she had a special way with those who are dying, something th
at goes beyond ordinary kindness. Maybe what you’ve told me explains that.”

  “I met her at a psychic fair here,” Abby said. “Neither one of us expected anything from the whole event, but when she touched me, it was like an electric shock, and she felt it too. And as far as I know, we aren’t related, so that was one step forward in my experience. It had never happened to her before, and I’m sure she’s touched a lot of people. But once you know about something like this, in yourself, you can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle.”

  “So there was a whole group of so-called psychics, all gathered in one place?”

  “I’m not saying they were all legitimate. Anyone can watch facial expressions and body language in someone sitting across the table from them and make reasonably good guesses about what that person wants to hear. It’s even easier if that person is looking for something. Then there are a few people who may actually see or feel something, but they kind of embroider that for a client. I’m not selling anything. I just pay attention, and don’t dismiss what I see or hear. There are a lot of people who just can’t handle that, so they pretend it doesn’t exist. I understand that, but I wish I could tell them they weren’t possessed by the devil or anything like that.”

  “Let me guess: you had an ancestor at Salem,” Carolyn said.

  Abby had to smile. “Yes, I did—one of the first women accused. Her two sisters were hanged. Does that change anything, in your mind?”