Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead (7 page)

As they both stood up and tossed some bills on the table, Abby asked, “But haven’t you all been doing this for years? It should be almost automatic by now.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But a year seems to be long enough to forget how it all works, and then there are things that need to be replaced, and then somebody says they saw something on vacation somewhere else that they thought was really cool and maybe we should try it. And so on. You’ll see.”

“I hear it’s a madhouse on the day.”

“It is. But it’s nice to see people who care about their own history. Even if it is only once a year. And who says you can’t combine fun and learning something?”

• • •

When she returned to the museum, Abby had to rush to collect her materials for the school group presentation, and as soon as that was over, and she’d chatted with some of the kids and the teachers, and told them what else they really ought to see, and asked if they’d seen the Alcott House and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home and Walden Pond, it was time for the staff meeting, which went much the way Leslie had predicted. And when that ended, it was time to go home. Somehow Abby had neglected to buy any groceries on Saturday or Sunday, so she detoured to the market on the way home and stocked up.

Back at the house, she ate and tidied up, but instead of going to bed when all that was done, she felt the siren call of the laptop. Logging on, she filled in the bits and pieces of information she’d gleaned at the library, but the results weren’t impressive. Her family tree didn’t have many leaves on it, much less fruit. She knew that some people spent years, even decades, filling such things in, and she also knew that the process never seemed to end, but she was in a hurry.
Why, Abby?
Because she was afraid to meet more of her long-dead ancestors at the reenactment? Because she wanted to understand how it came to be that she was on the same wavelength as people who had been dead for more than a century? Or because she wanted to reach some resolution with it so she could get back together with Ned and work through whatever problems they had? Or to end it for good because this weird ability was just too much to deal with? Yes, to all of the above.

It was approaching midnight when she finally shut down the computer and dragged herself to bed. She fell asleep quickly, but several hours later she sat bolt upright. “I got it wrong.” She said it out loud, to the darkness, not that it mattered. Apparently her subconscious had been chewing away on the genealogy questions even as she slept. Without turning on the light, she punched up her pillows and leaned against them, thinking hard.

The man on the green: she’d seen him clearly. But the question was, through whose eyes? All the other experiences she’d had—at the house in Waltham, at the cemetery there, at the Reed house in Weston—she’d been seeing through the eyes of a particular individual. She hadn’t always been able to identify that person right away, but when she finally had, it had always been a lineal ancestor. At first, touch had played an important part in it—touching something that the other people had touched or held—but more recently she’d gotten better at picking up the signals without a physical trigger.

But at the Littleton green she had seen a Revolutionary War soldier, clear as day. Ned had
not
seen him, which she took to mean that the soldier wasn’t a modern reenactor but someone from the past. Okay, she was getting used to that now. But if she was inside the head of someone else who was seeing that man, who was it? And why did he—or she?—see only that one other person and not a whole crowd? The only conclusion she could draw, at least for the moment, was that they were
both
ancestors of hers. The see-er and the see-ee? Damn, she really needed better terms! But the bottom line was, there were two people at that muster in 1775 who were somehow related to her. Siblings? Or two different and unrelated lines? Ned hadn’t mentioned seeing
anyone
there from the past, so neither of them was connected to him.

She considered her hypothesis but could find nothing wrong with it. But it was the middle of the night and she’d been jerked out of a sound sleep, so she would reserve judgment until daylight. In part her conclusion frightened her: as she had feared, she was running into more ancestors, now that she was more attuned to her peculiar ability. But there might be good news too: if they were siblings, or father and son, who fought at Concord, it might be easier to find them. Or what if it had been a wife or daughter or sister who was watching the men? She shouldn’t discount that, and she might be able to find out if a crowd had gathered to send the men off to battle on that day.

She lay back down and nestled into the warm bedcovers. Her last conscious thought was,
I wish I could tell Ned.

7

As Patriots’ Day approached, Abby’s days became increasingly busy. She knew there would be a lull in her regular responsibilities when school break week arrived, the week following the big event. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have minded being so busy, because she liked feeling useful. But now she wanted to pursue her research into her family lines, and there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

She could see why genealogy became an obsession for some people. She didn’t count herself among the obsessed ones, because she had a real and immediate cause to investigate her family tree: they kept popping up in her day-to-day life. Of course, she had to concede that a lot of other people might—what word did she want? Enjoy? Suffer?—the same phenomenon, only they never talked about it. Not that she talked about it either, except with Ned. Who, following her orders, had not contacted her. He was the only other person she knew personally who shared this particular ability. Surely there must be others? But Abby had no plans to go hunting for them, not until she figured out a few things for herself. Then she could think about forming a Secret Society for Spook Seers.

No, that wasn’t right. The people she saw, or through whom she saw, were hurting, or at least significantly stressed, and that’s what carried forward and made it possible for her to sense them. They were sad or suffering or angry. She could not treat them as a joke, not if their pain had persisted for centuries and was still strong enough to reach her now. She tried to remember if she had seen any happy events, but the best she could do was one instance where a child had died, and the earlier happiness had somehow become muddled with the pain of an infant’s death.

One day she stopped in at Leslie’s office to deliver some documents and found Leslie alone and not on the phone—a rare occurrence. “Can I ask you something?” Abby said. “Work-related, I mean?”

“Sure. I’ve got at least three minutes free. Sit. Talk to me.”

“This is very preliminary, but I wanted to run an idea by you. The more I look into my own family history, the more likely it looks to me like I had at least one ancestor who fought at the bridge here. I won’t bore you with the details, but I was wondering if that might make a good teaching presentation?”

Leslie did not look impressed. “How would you go about it?”

“Kind of like a look at an ordinary guy who lived in Concord or nearby, going about his business—farming or whatever—marrying, having kids. And then this war comes along and a lot of things change. There are lots of ways to approach it—what the farms and industries produced around here, what the population looked like. How people moved around a lot, mostly connected by family ties that might not be obvious today. How they dressed. Whether they had weapons of their own. How the militia was organized, and how that led to the army. But all of it linked by one local soldier and his family. What do you think?”

Leslie looked at her speculatively. “It’s ambitious, I’ll say that. I can’t recall that it’s been done before at the museum. You looking to focus on somebody famous?”

Abby shook her head. “No. I think it should be an ordinary person, caught up in extraordinary events. I think kids could identify with that.”

“So could adults, if you present it the right way. But that’s a different story.” Leslie cocked her head at Abby. “You think our school materials are getting a little stale?”

Abby shook her head. “I didn’t mean to criticize them—they work fine. And I’m not thinking about throwing them out. I just thought maybe a different slant might be interesting. I’m not talking about in-depth coverage, just an hour’s presentation—which is about the maximum attention span for most of the kids. We’ve already got plenty of physical materials in the collections.”

“Why are you looking to do this now, in this particularly crazy time?”

“I’m not saying it’s going to happen fast, and I’m not in a hurry. But it seemed to me I could kill two birds with one stone: when I do research on my own family—on my own time, not at work!—I can collect anecdotes and interesting small facts that don’t usually make it to the textbooks—the things that make history come alive. I’d keep a running file of them, and when I think there are enough I could pull them all together. Maybe in time for the next school year? Something like, ‘A day in the Life of John Doe in 1775’?”

Leslie nodded, once. “Okay. I can see where you’re going with the idea. How about this? You collect your entertaining facts, and at some point—after this month is over, please!—you put together a draft of your presentation, and I’ll look it over. I do like the local angle. You have somebody specific in mind?”

“Not yet, or only hints of possibilities—I haven’t found anybody here for certain. I’m really a novice at all this genealogy stuff, but if I stumble over something interesting, it seems a shame to waste it. And I like to do this kind of research—it makes the people so much more real than a list of vital statistics.”

“Okay, go for it. And your three minutes are up.”

“Thanks, Leslie.” Abby scrammed before Leslie could ask any more questions that she couldn’t answer. She felt a little guilty, because now she’d obtained what could be interpreted as permission to spend time on her own genealogy on working time. She didn’t plan to abuse it, and she would pull together anything interesting that she found. She thought the idea had potential as a teaching tool, whether or not she found her elusive Corey family in the neighborhood. And she didn’t want to let Leslie down.

But there was never enough time. Sure, images from the original nineteenth-century vital records were available online, but where was she supposed to look? She did enough research to know that once, back when it was first created, Concord had been a much bigger place, in terms of geography. Ever since then, bits and pieces had been peeled away to become new towns. Sometimes the lines between towns were not set for years or even decades after that. So where to look for vital records kind of depended on what era she was looking at: early on, in the seventeenth century, it would be in the Concord records, but later it could be in any of nearly a dozen surrounding towns, each with its own records. And that didn’t take into account marriages in which the woman wanted to be married in her own town, which could be somewhere else. Local records were kind of inconsistent about noting where one of their men might have been married.

And then there were the misspellings! The same name could be spelled four different ways on the same page. Was it all one family, and the name had been mangled by one or more illiterate clerks? Or were they different lines that had split and chosen to change their spelling? The funny thing was, she had seen the same thing on adjacent tombstones in local cemeteries. She had to conclude that people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren’t so hung up about the correct spelling as modern people.

None of which made her task any easier. Sure, she could print out all the relevant names in all the relevant towns, but then she would have to cross-check them. Worse, people within families often used the same first name, over and over. As a result, she could find three Jameses or Lucys with the same surname, all born in the same place within a couple of years of each other. Or, if there was a father named James and he sired multiple children, the wife’s name sometimes differed. Were there two father Jameses or one James with two sequential wives?

Worst of all, she was trying to fit all this cross-checking in after a long day at work, and it was easy to make mistakes or transpose the lines she was reading on a blurry printout or on-screen.

If she looked at older histories, were they likely to be accurate? On the one hand, it seemed as though the writers in the nineteenth century were closer to the actual events, but on the other, she’d seen more than one instance where a single story was repeated for years, with no verification. Not unlike a YouTube video going viral these days—and it was very hard to erase. And sometimes there was no way to prove whether it was true. If once there had been evidence, it was long gone. Or the information had come from a conversation with a person, rather than a written document, and that person was also long gone.

Maybe she needed a change of scene. Maybe she needed to take a look at some original records, compare them with the printed or published versions and see what errors might have crept in. Littleton would be the best place to start, because that’s where she’d seen the man on the green. Nobody else had “visited” her since. But the Littleton Historical Society’s hours were so limited!
Abby, it’s stupid to let that hang you up. You’re a colleague by way of the museum, and a legitimate researcher. Call them and make an appointment!
So she did, for the following Saturday.

Which then spurred her to redouble her efforts to narrow down the focus of her search. She started at the beginning again. She had seen the man on the green in Littleton, so it seemed logical to assume he was part of the militia there. After all, he’d been holding a weapon, so it was unlikely that he was just an onlooker. She had the list of men who had marched to Concord from the green. There was a slim possibility that “her” man had had a brother or son watching him at the green; would he have been a minuteman too? And how the heck was she supposed to link any of this to the one name she had, Mary Ann Corey, who had married into the Reed family? There were no Coreys on the Littleton monument, although there were Coreys in the town, as well as adjacent towns. Finally she gave up: she’d have to ask the person at the historical society what his or her recommendation was.