Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead (21 page)

“Damn,” Ned said, with something like wonder.

“Exactly.”

21

Abby wasn’t sure how she managed to fill what was left of the afternoon, fiddling with projects on her desk but mostly worrying about the meeting with Leslie later. “Meeting” sounded so cold, but “visit” certainly wasn’t appropriate, and “chat” was too trivial. She couldn’t fault Leslie for the way she’d reacted: to learn out of the blue that your child was either crazy or possessed supernatural powers had to be shocking, especially when you were at your workplace looking forward to nothing more than normal daily tasks. She and Ned had at least had time to get used to the idea of some weird connection to their past, not that either of them could claim to understand it, but that didn’t make it any easier to explain it to somebody else.

This confrontation wasn’t the best way to present what few facts they had, but was there any better one? At least Leslie would be on her own turf, which might make it easier for her. She didn’t know Leslie well, even though she’d worked with her for over six months now. But they’d never actually socialized, apart from a few boss-employee lunches. Plus Leslie was a few years older, married, with children, so they had little common ground. She did like Leslie, and always had. Abby admired her energy, her enthusiasm, her ability to make quick decisions that usually turned out to be the right ones. She was a good employer. But they had never crossed over the line to discussing things like politics or religion—or seeing ghosts.

Abby would have said that Leslie didn’t have a psychic bone in her body, if that quality was embedded in the bones. She had to believe that Ellie’s ability came from Ned, her biological father. Which was something else Abby shied from thinking about. She could understand it, objectively: Leslie had known Ned well, knew he was intelligent and kind and hardworking—and apparently healthy. All good qualities when looking for someone to father your children. Whatever deal they had cut between them, Ned had agreed to stay out of their personal lives, and it looked as though he had barely met his daughter, Ellie, or at least had not seen her recently. Since she was old enough to notice things. Since she had grown into her powers. And Ned hadn’t known about that, because Leslie hadn’t, couldn’t recognize them, and he had never told Leslie because he believed he had squelched them. Obviously denying a reality, no matter how peculiar, wasn’t going to work anymore.

Abby wanted nothing more than to put her head down on her desk and cry, but that wasn’t an option. Ned had stalked out shortly after Leslie left, muttering something like “I need a walk,” and hadn’t returned by five. She felt a bit abandoned, and she was also mad at herself for feeling that way. Dealing with Ellie and Leslie was primarily his problem, but she was involved because she had brought everything out into the open, if inadvertently. She hadn’t meant to upset the apple cart. She hadn’t been looking for anything out of the ordinary. But that had also been true when she moved to Massachusetts with Brad, and then all this mess had happened, so her track record didn’t look too good.

Ellie. She should focus on Ellie. What was done, was done. Ned was her father, and Ellie was old enough to begin to understand the world. From what Abby had seen of her, over a couple of days, Ellie was extraordinarily bright, and surprisingly mature for her chronological age. Abby wondered how well she did in school. Did her teachers recognize anything special about Ellie? Or because she was so smart, did she get bored easily and end up making trouble? Or had she already learned to hide the parts that nobody else seemed to understand? No matter what, Ellie was smack in the middle of this mess, and Leslie couldn’t wish it away or pretend it wasn’t happening. It seemed very clear to Abby that whatever understanding they all arrived at, what was best for Ellie had to be at the center of it. Her job and Ned’s was to try to make Leslie understand as much or as little as they did, and then to help hear deal with her uniquely gifted child.

Ned finally reappeared just as most people in the museum were leaving. “They just let you come and go as you please here?” Abby greeted him.

“More or less. I’m a donor, and they know me. I’ve got a lifetime pass.”

“Do we have time to talk about this whole mess? Before we try to talk to Leslie?”

“We have to, but not here. Let’s go get a coffee and find a place to sit.”

“Okay.” Abby gathered up her things and followed him out of the building—wondering if Leslie would let her back in tomorrow. Of course, if Leslie fired her she could sue, since she’d done her job well. It might be interesting to see Leslie try to explain
why
she had fired her. But that wasn’t the point. Whether or not she had a job after today took a backseat to figuring out what to do with Ellie.

She and Ned found a coffee shop, nearly empty at this time of day. They ordered coffees, then sat at a table away from the few other customers.

Ned spoke first. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Abby burst out. “You didn’t ask for whatever you have. And I’m just as guilty, because it looks to me like you’d been getting along just fine with whatever-it-is, until I showed up and stirred up trouble.”

“Well, that wasn’t exactly your fault, either. And during the house tour I could have handed you that cup of tea, waited until I thought you were steady enough to go home, and forgotten all about you. I was the one who prodded you to look further.”

“And here I thought it was because of my big blue eyes, not my visions of dead people.”

Ned smiled into his coffee. “Well, that was part of it. But I knew there was something else. Look, if I’d thought you and Brad were happy and well matched, I would have stayed out of the whole thing.”

“But you listened to me for like fifteen minutes, and took one look at Brad and me together, and you decided it wasn’t going to work. I would be a lot angrier if I didn’t think you were right. Although I really did have to wonder then why some woman hadn’t already snapped you up. You looked like a good catch. Did you deliberately avoid close relationships, after Leslie?”

“Maybe. Look, I’m not comfortable talking about all this”—he held up his hand before Abby could protest—“but I know we have to, for Ellie’s sake.”

At least they agreed on that. “How do you think Leslie will take it?”

“I don’t know. But we need to be clear about what we think is happening with each of us.”

“But we don’t want to sound like this is rehearsed, because like I said, I’m worried that it will look like we’re ganging up on Leslie. It’s not like we have to get our stories to sync up—all we can do is tell her what we
think
is happening.” Abby hesitated before going on, “If what we believe is true, does that mean you’ll have to be more involved in Ellie’s life? You haven’t been up ’til now, right?”

“That was the agreement that Leslie and I reached, and I accepted that. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t spent time lurking around Ellie’s school or her home, hoping to catch a glimpse of the child, or Peter either. I agreed that I would play no role in her life or Peter’s. Whenever Leslie tells Ellie the truth, then Ellie can decide what she wants to do.”

“Well, it looks like that moment will be here pretty quickly. I almost wonder if Ellie has an old soul parked inside her—she knows and sees more than a child her age should. You might want to be prepared: she may take one look at you and throw herself into your arms, crying ‘Daddy!’”

Abby took a sip of her coffee, mainly to give herself time to gather her thoughts. “What’s Leslie’s husband like?”

“George? Good guy, works hard, loves the kids. It’s not like we discuss him a lot.”

“How is he going to take this news about Ellie?”

Ned shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve only met the guy once or twice and that was a while ago. We don’t exactly socialize, given the situation. How does anybody take this kind of thing? Disbelief? Denial? Anger?”

“All of the above. At first, at least. We’re not going to settle anything tonight. We’re just going to explain how we got to this point. Right?”

“Right,” Ned said, looking unconvinced.

Abby checked her watch: still too soon to leave. “How did you do in school?” she asked Ned.

“Huh? You mean grades, or how I got along with the other kids?”

“Both. And don’t forget teachers.”

“I did well, but wasn’t pushy about it. I got good grades, and teachers loved me, but I didn’t volunteer to answer every question, because that would have been obnoxious and all the other kids would have hated me.”

“Did you have many friends?”

“A few. Never a lot. I mean, I didn’t like clubs or group activities. I wasn’t into sports, at least not competitively. What can I say? I liked to read. I watched television. I did my homework. If I was a kid now, I’d probably spend a lot of time playing high-end video games.”

“Or designing them,” Abby added. “You noticed that in Ellie’s story, the protagonist—the star—seemed pretty much like Ellie, except Ellie called her Annie, but she was part of a group of girls. When she saw the man, she tried to share that with the other girls, but it didn’t take her long to realize nobody else was seeing him, so she clammed up. But she—the character—took it in stride, didn’t make a big thing about it. And then this Annie got her parents to take her back to where she’d seen the man, to make sure she’d really seen him, and to check if her parents saw him too, which was pretty smart and pretty subtle for a child. But she didn’t tell them that’s what she was doing. And she learned that they didn’t see anything, and she accepted that. If Annie is a proxy for Ellie, then Ellie’s probably more well-adjusted and smarter than I am.”

“Which is why she needs someone in her life who understands what’s going on.”

“Agreed,” Abby said. “You don’t want to imagine what’s going to happen when her hormones kick in a few years from now.”

Ned held up both hands. “Please, can we not go there right now? I hope we’ll all have a better handle on things by then.” Now it was his turn to look at his watch. “We’d better go. It would be a bad start to this whole thing if we showed up late.”

The ride to Littleton was brief, as Abby knew. They parked in front of a well-maintained contemporary house in a tidy development that looked like it had been built in the 1950s. “Are you ready?” Ned asked.

“Do I have a choice? I’m not going to wimp out and hide in the car.”

“Then let’s do this.” They both climbed out of the car, but Leslie had opened the door before they were halfway up the front walk. She didn’t say anything, just stared at them as they approached, then stepped back to let them into the house and closed the door behind them. “In there,” she said tersely, pointing toward the dining end of the living area. So she was treating this like a business meeting. They sat around the table, with Leslie at the head.

“George and the kids are out for maybe three hours,” Leslie began, “if they get ice cream after the movie. I have a feeling that this little talk may take longer than that, but we have to start somewhere.” Leslie’s voice was tight, and Abby guessed she was trying hard to remain calm and reasonable.

“What does George know?” Ned asked.

“Right now, nothing. I haven’t decided what I’m going to tell him. Or Ellie. But right now, I want to know what the hell is going on.” A brief flash of anger. Leslie turned to Abby. “How did you end up in the middle of this? Was that story that Ned fed me when I hired you true? Any part of it?”

Abby cleared her throat. “Leslie, I think we have to start at the beginning. When Ned suggested me for the job, neither of us had a clue about what was going on. He was doing me a favor. He’d only known me a couple of weeks by then. Hear us out, will you? Because we don’t have many answers, but we’ll tell you all that we know.”

Abby started off, once again explaining how she had ended up in Massachusetts, and her tour of the Oakes mansion in Waltham, and Brad—all things that Leslie had heard at one time or another. Leslie sat stone-faced, but at least she was listening.

Then Ned picked up the thread, explaining how he had directed Abby to sites he knew about where ancestors might be lurking, and what had happened to Abby there. Which of course prompted Leslie to ask, how had he known about them, which in turn led to a whole discussion of Ned’s odd ability to see dead people, and how he had ignored it for so long, and how Abby had somehow ripped the bandage off and precipitated a whole new series of events. And how they had discovered that mainly they were seeing the same ancestral family, so there might be some genetic component. When they had run out of words, the three of them sat in silence for a time.

Finally Leslie spoke. “Ned, you’re telling me that you believed you had this, uh, thing, but you never mentioned it when we were together?”

“I thought I had erased it. If it was ever real.”

“And when we were talking about—”

“I told Abby about your request that I help you … make Ellie. I had to, because she’d already sensed something about Ellie.”

That didn’t make Leslie look any happier. “Something about
my
child, who I’ve raised since her birth, and Abby noticed this in about fifteen minutes?”

“But only because she shares it!” Ned protested. “Most people would never notice anything unusual.”

“Right. Anyway, you never thought to tell me about this ability of yours when we were making Ellie?”

“Leslie, I’m sorry. I thought it was gone. And I had no idea then that it could be passed on. It’s only recently that we’ve figured out that Abby and I share common ancestors. And my mother has it too, but she never told anyone, not even my dad. Certainly not me. She and I didn’t talk about any of this until last week. When Abby insisted.”

“And do you have any idea about what I’m supposed to do now?” Leslie demanded. “Now that you’ve told me all this crap that I’m supposed to swallow? Sorry—is that disrespectful to you psychic types, calling your talent ‘crap’?”

“Leslie,” Abby began quietly, “I wouldn’t have believed any of it either, except it’s happened to me. I can’t undo it. But from what little I’ve seen, I think Ellie is already way past where I am. I think she can handle it, but she’s going to need help.”