Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  “You have the money to fix that,” Abby pointed out.

  “Yes, I do, but I like to work with my hands. I think carpentry is fun, and relaxing, except that I can never find the time for it. Besides, there hasn’t been any reason to finish it. Until now.”

  His last words hung in the air between them. Abby tried out and rejected several responses. Ned Newhall was thoughtful and considerate and she had thought he really understood her—the real struggling her, not the cheery public her who liked to teach young children. But they’d jumped straight into research into all those dead relatives, just as the rest of her life was collapsing around her. They still hadn’t had a discussion about where their shared life might be going, and now he had thrown a big monkey wrench into the middle of it.

  “Abby? Please? Say something.” He looked so miserable that her heart twisted.

  She took a deep breath. “Ned, I’ve said this before. I want to prove that I can stand on my own two feet—to myself, to my parents, and to you. What you’ve just told me … well, maybe it’s good news, but I need to come to terms with what it means to me. To us. Can you understand that?”

  “I’m trying to, Abby. But I have to say, what we have, what we’ve shared over the past few months, it’s something special. Maybe even unique. I don’t want to lose you, Abby.”

  “Then let me work this out for myself.”

  “What about Leslie? And Ellie?”

  Abby had conveniently forgotten them. “I’ll talk to them with you, if that’s what Leslie wants.”

  “Thank you. You want me to go now?”

  “Yes. Please.” He stood up, and she stood up too, and escorted him to the door, going through the ritual of disarming the electronics. She was careful not to touch him; she even stepped back when he reached out a tentative hand.

  He gave her a long, wordless look, then finally said, “Good night, Abby.” Then he turned and walked out into the darkness.

  Abby shut the door behind him and leaned against it. She was surprised to find tears running down her cheeks.

  25

  I am so stupid! Abby lay in bed, staring at the darkness and wondering what was wrong with her. The man she’d been involved with, dating, sleeping with, whatever, for the last several months had announced, oh, I happen to be a millionaire, and she’d told him to get out. Most people would consider that insane.

  But she felt betrayed. She’d come to trust Ned and to depend on him, and all the time he’d been hiding something pretty major from her. She hadn’t pushed too hard for the details when he tossed off casual comments about going to work, or taking a work-related trip. She knew he had more than one degree and he did something scientific, but that was as far as it had gone. It had been easy not to ask, and she had to admit she thought they were on the same page as far as values and principles went, so why rock the boat? And what they had, it had been good—hadn’t it? Ned was everything she could want in a man—smart, sensitive, supportive—but he had left out some big chunks of who he was. Rich. Famous? No, she probably would have seen that in the paper, or overheard something.

  Which prompted her to get out of bed, turn on some lights, and find her laptop, which she dragged back to bed. She sat cross-legged on the bed and booted it up, then Googled Edward Newhall, and watched as pages of references appeared. If she wanted, she could trace the entire history of his company, which was pretty much as he’d outlined it. He’d founded it with a couple of college buddies, more than a decade earlier; they’d landed some lucrative contracts; they’d issued an IPO a few years back, that had gone very well, with the stock price taking off from the first day and never looking back. The great American success story, right there on the page.

  References to his personal life were few and far between. No society snapshots of Ned in a tuxedo with a gorgeous blonde on his arm at the symphony or an exhibit opening at the MFA. No scandalous gossip tidbits linking him with the wives or exes of celebrities the ordinary person might recognize. No lawsuits. No criminal record. She almost laughed out loud when she found one small reference to “reclusive millionaire entrepreneur Edward Newhall.” And that was all. Okay, so Ned wasn’t living the lifestyle of the rich and famous—that much was pretty clear. Was that his choice? Or was there some fatal flaw that he’d managed to conceal from her until now? He was a serial killer who kept bodies in the basement of that ramshackle Victorian? That idea at least made Abby smile.

  So why did she feel bad now? Because she thought they had shared everything, inside and out. Instead he’d been making decisions about what she should or shouldn’t know, and he’d withheld a lot. Not just that he clipped his toenails in the living room or was allergic to spinach, but that he was very, very rich. He hadn’t trusted her to react well to that news. What had he thought she would do?

  Probably not what she had done, which was push him away. Her reaction had been immediate and unthinking. Now what was she going to do?

  She had no idea. She wasn’t about to declare that they were finished, but she wanted to let her new knowledge of him sink in, and at least guess at what difference that might make between them. In any case, they’d have to see each other, because they still had to deal with Leslie and Ellie. Abby wasn’t about to walk away from that, for Ellie’s sake. If this seeing the dead thing was real—if she wasn’t psychotic or hallucinating—and Ellie shared it, she would do anything in her power to help Ellie understand it and manage it. And to keep Leslie from freaking out, if Leslie would even talk to her, about which Abby had some doubts. But Ellie needed help, and that was Abby’s first priority—not Leslie’s feelings, not her own job security, not even her relationship with Ned. When she had chosen to become a teacher, it was for the children. Ned was an adult who could flounder his way through any coming conversation as best he could, because he’d kind of failed to fill in Leslie about some important aspects of his life as well. Hmm, there seemed to be a pattern there. He liked to hide things. Or was he in deep denial? He didn’t believe he was different from anybody else? Seeing dead people and making millions were just little quirks. For a smart man, Ned Newhall could be kind of dumb.

  That conclusion made Abby feel better, although she didn’t want to examine too closely why. She shut off her computer, turned out the lights, and managed to go to sleep.

  • • •

  Things did not look brighter in the morning. I have a rich boyfriend, Abby thought. Except he never bothered to tell me he was rich. What a ridiculous problem to have! At least she’d cooled down a bit now, but she thought Ned should stew in his own juices for a short while. He’d probably call when he heard from Leslie, and they could talk after. In the meantime, she could look forward to some precious hours at the Littleton Historical Society, although she didn’t expect to make any startling discoveries. Mostly she hoped to confirm the bare outlines of what she had learned from other sources.

  She was waiting at the door of the historical society when a woman approached, clutching a heavy ring of keys. “Good morning!” the woman said brightly. “Are you here to do research?”

  “That’s what I hoped. I wish you were open more often.”

  “You’re not the only one. But then, we’ve got only the administrator—that’s me, and I’m Helen—and volunteers. If we’re real lucky, now and then we get a grant, but that usually has to go for operating expenses or to patch the roof. Come on in,” the woman said, turning on lights as she went. Abby noticed her nudging up a thermostat on one wall too—the interior felt a bit damp. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m doing some genealogy research on the Perry family that lived here in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I already got a good start a couple of weeks ago—Esther Jewett was helping me. Is she around?”

  The woman was staring at her with a peculiar expression on her face. “Uh, not right now, but maybe I can help you today. What have you learned so far?”

  “Well, I’ve done a fair bit online, and …” Abby outlined what she had discov
ered so far, ending with, “And then Esther showed me the original town record books in the back room.”

  “Oh, dear God,” the woman whispered. Then in a stronger voice she said, “You were lucky, then—the public isn’t usually allowed back there. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I did—lots of Perrys, going back to the Revolution and before. That was all I had time for the one time I was here. I wanted to find out more about Henry and Reuben Perry—they were my lineal ancestors. You know, where they lived, what they did. Where they’re buried. I looked in the cemetery in the middle of town but I didn’t find them there. But then, I know a lot of people never had tombstones made, so they could be there and I wouldn’t know it. What do you suggest?”

  “Let me see what we’ve got in our files. I know there’s a transcription of a nineteenth-century journal here—it’s never been published—and I think we may have some property records too. Give me a second. Oh, sit down and make yourself comfortable.” Helen hurried away toward the back. Abby took off her coat and extracted her notes and printouts.

  Helen was back in a couple of minutes. “Here’s what I mentioned,” she said, laying some yellowed manila folders on the table. Then she hesitated before saying, “You might want to push the Perry line back a couple of generations, too—there are some interesting stories there. Well, I’ll leave you to it. Come find me if you want more.”

  “Thank you,” Abby called out to Helen’s retreating back—she had left in a hurry. Then she dug into the new material.

  The more she read, the more she was amused by the picture of the Perry family that emerged. Father Henry had been a model citizen, serving in two wars, raising a family, including two sons who had served in the Revolution. His namesake Henry Junior had lived nearby and had followed his father’s model. Reuben, on the other hand, came across as what Abby could only call a loser. He seemed perpetually short of money, to the extent that he had been on the public dole for a while. The town had offered him money to take in his aged mother, after father Henry had died, but that hadn’t lasted long, since the next entry in the town book reported that mother had moved herself out, saying she couldn’t tolerate living with her son. Reuben had died penniless, and the town had had to cough up the funds to bury him, although she couldn’t find where. Was there a potter’s field in Littleton? Her ancestor Reuben was a real charmer. It didn’t surprise Abby that his daughter Mary Ann had left town quickly and married a man from somewhere else.

  All this was fascinating, but it wasn’t contributing anything to the problem she faced with explaining things to Leslie and Ellie. What had Helen said? She was supposed to look further back into the Perry history? That wouldn’t take long. She leafed through the hard copies of the vital records the society kept on hand and found nothing noteworthy. It was only when she returned to the early years of the town records that she came upon what Helen must have been hinting at: the record of the death of Henry’s grandfather John Perry, in a prison in Cambridge in 1692. He had been awaiting trial for witchcraft.

  Oh, boy. Abby swallowed hard. All right, she knew what most people knew about the brief witchcraft frenzy around that time—the accusations, the trials, the hangings. There were a lot of theories about what had really gone on. Suggestions had included mass hysteria (which seemed most likely); some sort of widespread poisoning by a substance that could have been ergot in grain, which caused hallucinations; or even local economics, since most of those accused had been widowed women who were sitting on nice inherited pieces of property that other people coveted. Which didn’t stop a handful of people from believing in witchcraft, or stop modern Salem from selling crystals and candles and going a bit crazy around Halloween, or so she’d heard.

  But … what if John Perry really was a witch? What if he’d passed down …

  “Excuse me?” Abby was jerked out of her reverie to find Helen standing in front of her. “Can we talk?” Helen asked.

  “Uh, sure, fine. What did you want to talk about?”

  Helen glanced around nervously, but there were no other researchers in the room, and it was late enough in the day that Abby thought it was unlikely that any more would be arriving. Helen sat. “I almost didn’t say anything, but the more I thought about it, the more I figured I should. Feel free to laugh at me if you want, because this is really weird.”

  Abby was mystified. “Go on. And I’ve heard some pretty odd things myself.” Particularly in the last six months.

  “Okay.” Helen stared at her hands, which were twisting around as though they had a life of their own. “You said you were here two weeks ago, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. That time I called ahead to make an appointment so I could be sure someone would be here, but I didn’t say what I was looking for. Why?”

  “I remember your call, and I was going to meet you here. In fact, I’d already arrived and opened up, when there was one of those minor emergencies at home and I had to leave in a hurry. Everything turned out fine, but afterward I realized I had left the door unlocked, I was in such a rush.”

  “Okay,” Abby said cautiously. “But Esther was here. I just assumed she was keeping the appointment. Wasn’t she supposed to be here?”

  “Well, that’s the problem, you see. Uh, Esther hasn’t been anywhere for quite a while.”

  Why was Helen having such a problem spitting this out? “You mean, she’s been confined to her home?”

  “No. She died six months ago.”

  Oh. Oh, no. Abby’s head swam, and she noted her own response to that news with interest. Never had that happen before, nope. Wow. “But I spoke to her! We talked. She knew why I was there. I even paid her!”

  Helen, having spit out the worst of her news, eyed her with something like pity. “Can you describe the woman you saw?”

  “She introduced herself as Esther Jewett—that was the first time I heard her name. She was old, short—kind of hunched over, with osteoporosis. But her voice was strong. I remember thinking she could have been a hundred.”

  Helen nodded. “Esther was ninety-four when she died. She’d lived in Littleton all her life, and generations of her family before her. She volunteered here for years, and knew more about the history of the town than anyone else I’ve met. Strong woman, knew her own mind. But she’s dead.”

  “Would someone have impersonated her?” Abby asked, grasping at straws.

  “I can’t see why. And there aren’t that many women of that age in town, and none who would know our collections well. I can’t explain it.”

  Abby thought for a moment. What the heck—by now Helen had probably already labeled her either crazy or a liar or both. “Has anyone else seen Esther since she … passed?”

  Helen’s eyes widened, the whites showing. “You mean, you think she’s a ghost?”

  “Helen, I don’t know. What I do know is that I talked to an elderly woman, and she pointed me toward the right documents. Other than that she left me pretty much alone. Do you happen to have a genealogy for her family here?” Abby said, surprised that she managed to keep her voice steady.

  “Of course. Esther did one decades ago. You want to see it now? I mean, you look kind of pale. If you want to leave and come back another day, that’s all right.”

  Abby suspected that Helen would be happy never to see her again. “I’m fine, really. I’m just trying to make sense of what you’ve told me. I talked to Esther here two weeks ago, but Esther couldn’t have been here. Did she have children? A sister?”

  Helen shook her head. “No, Esther was the last of her line. She’d outlived every relative she knew about.” She stood up. “Let me get you her family tree.”

  Abby was glad to have a moment to sort out her chaotic thoughts. It couldn’t be. She was used to seeing the dead now, but had she really had a conversation with one of them? She tried to remember the details of her visit. The door had been open when she arrived—Helen had said she left it open by accident, so Esther hadn’t had to open it. Could ghos
ts move objects? Esther had certainly looked solid—but where was it written that ghosts had to be transparent? Then Esther had directed her to the town records—in a part of the building usually off limits—but the books had already been on the table, so Esther hadn’t needed to move them either. Abby had paid Esther—but Esther had asked her to leave the money on the table, rather than taking it from her. So as far as Abby could remember, Esther had not touched or moved anything while Abby was there. But they had talked to each other; they had carried on an actual conversation. This was not an echo of the past, this was here and now. And Esther was dead.

  “Here we go,” Helen said, laying a sheaf of papers in front of Abby. “I’ll give you a minute to look it over, and if you want, I can give you a copy. But then I really should be closing up.”

  “Sure. I’ll be quick.” Abby was pretty sure Helen wanted to get rid of her. She wondered if she would be allowed back in the building.

  She pulled Esther’s genealogy toward her and started leafing through the pages, but she was pretty sure what she would find, and it didn’t take long. Esther was descended from Thomas Perry, son of “her” Henry, by his first wife. And Henry was the grandson of a witch.

  “Did you want a copy?” Helen interrupted her yet again.

  “Yes, please. Oh, can you tell me where Esther is buried?”

  “Certainly—the cemetery just across the highway, outside of town. I’ll get you those copies now.”

  The cemetery she hadn’t seen, not the one she had. It figured. And she’d have to go directly by the property where Henry and Reuben had lived. It all made sense, in a crazy way.

  26

  After accepting the copies from Helen and paying her for them, Abby went out the front door of the building—which Helen slammed shut behind her—and sat down on the granite steps, her legs suddenly weak. Two weeks ago … after she’d seen Henry Perry on the green. Was that what had brought Esther out? Out from where? Of course, Esther didn’t have any sort of schedule, so she could have popped out whenever Abby showed up. Had she been waiting for her? Would she have tracked Abby down if Abby hadn’t visited the historical society? What was Esther’s range? Could she go anywhere she wanted, or was she somehow tied to Littleton? What were the rules for this ghost business?