Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  Defending the Dead

  Abby Kimball has slowly accepted her recently discovered ability to see the dead, but none of the harmless sightings she’s experienced could have prepared her for the startling apparition of a centuries-old courtroom scene—where she locks eyes with a wicked and gleeful accuser. Thrown back more than three hundred years, Abby realizes she’s been plunged into a mystery that has fascinated people throughout American history: the Salem witch trials.

  With her boyfriend Ned at her side, Abby digs into the history of the events, researching the people and possible causes of that terrible time and her own connection to them—all the while going more deeply into her connection to Ned, both extraordinary and romantic.

  As Abby witnesses more fragments from the events in Salem and struggles with the question of how such a nightmare could have come about, she’s suddenly confronted with a pressing personal question: Were one or more of her ancestors among the accused? Unraveling the puzzling clues behind that question just might give Abby and Ned the answer to a very modern mystery of their own.

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Sheila Connolly

  Material excerpted from Privy to the Dead copyright © 2015 by Sheila Connolly

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940846-50-7

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Afterword

  Excerpt from Privy to the Dead

  Books by Sheila Connolly

  About the Author

  1

  “I hate stripping wallpaper!” Abigail Kimball said loudly, although there was no one to hear her. She stepped back and studied the mangy-looking wall in front of her, festooned with shreds of several layers of paper, and sighed: she had a long way to go.

  She had to remind herself she had chosen this project. When she’d unexpectedly lost her job at the Concord Museum, through no fault of her own—well, nothing she could have foreseen—and the free house-sit she’d found had evaporated when the owners came back, Ned Newhall had asked her to move in with him. He owned a house near the center of Lexington, Massachusetts, close to the historic green, and she’d said yes. It made sense: they were in love, weren’t they? She wanted to spend time with him, whenever she could. He lived in a lovely town that oozed history.

  She’d seen the house exactly once before she’d said yes. Abigail, learn to think before you speak! she told herself. It was an undeniably handsome and elegant three-story Victorian, but it had suffered from years of neglect, standing unoccupied while caught up in some inheritance battles, until Ned had finally bought it from the squabbling heirs. Clearly it needed a lot of work. But Ned was busy running the small scientific testing company he’d founded, and his business was booming, which meant he never had the time to do much with the house, and when he had any free time, he used it to volunteer to give tours of local historic buildings, which was how they had met.

  Which meant he didn’t spend any time working on the house. The simple solution would have been to hire someone to fix up the place, or at least do the dirty work, but Ned didn’t want that. He claimed he wanted authenticity, using time-honored traditional techniques, and he wanted to do it himself. That explained why after owning the place for a few years he was still camping out in one bedroom with a bare minimum of furniture. At least the plumbing worked—that she had checked before moving in.

  But being without a job wasn’t easy for her. She’d gone to a good college, worked hard, and been steadily employed since. Well, except when she’d moved to Massachusetts with a now ex-boyfriend and had still been looking for a job when she had dumped him. And met Ned, more or less at the same time, not that he’d been the reason she’d dumped Brad . . . water under the bridge. What she had with Ned was so much more intense that it was easy to forget Brad. Anyway, she liked working; she’d liked the job she had, organizing school programs for the Concord Museum. The kids had been great, and she’d always enjoyed history, and now she was living in the middle of it. Then, boom, no job. She hadn’t quite figured out what the next step was, and she knew she might have trouble finding another job without a reference from her former boss. Who she’d also liked, until a very odd combination of circumstances had blown a giant crater in their relationship. So here she was, licking her wounds, feeling sorry for herself, and trying to remove several decades of increasingly ugly wallpaper from the venerable plaster walls (complete with horsehair) of Ned’s—their large house. Which had a lot of rooms that had a lot of wallpaper. Nine-foot ceilings. Lots of fancy moldings—with flaking paint. Shoot, was she going to have to learn to do woodworking next? She hated power saws.

  One wall done. One. At this rate it was going to take a year to get down to bare plaster, and that didn’t even include putting something up on it afterward. Right now she believed that settling for slapping paint on these virgin walls would be wrong, but she knew she might feel different after another four or six rooms. She laid a hand on one of the few bare patches of wall, which still had a lot of dried paste clinging it to. She was feeling for past inhabitants of the place, somebody whose frustration had seeped into the plaster and left its own residue. Nothing: blast them, they must have enjoyed their task, or at least not hated it.

  “Anybody home?” Ned’s voice coming from the doorway startled Abby.

  She whirled to face him. “You’re early! It’s not even dark yet.”

  “No, this is when I usually get home. How long have you been doing that?” He waved vaguely at the wall.

  “Since, uh, lunch? You know, if I add up the amount of time it takes to clear this stuf
f off on a per-square-foot basis—I don’t want to know what the answer is!”

  Ned wrapped his arms around her and she forgot the wallpaper, and the walls—and everything except the man. This is why I’m here, she said to herself—and stopped thinking.

  “Better?” he asked softly, looking down at her.

  “Much. I can see now why you’ve been avoiding doing this for so long.”

  “Really? I’ve never tried stripping walls. How do you know I wouldn’t like it?”

  “Fine, you can try it, maybe over the weekend. We can race each other to see who gets the most done. And I want to rent a steamer—this nonsense of spraying water at the walls isn’t working, and it’s making a huge mess.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll figure out who rents them, or maybe we can buy one. There are plenty of walls to do, so that might be more cost-effective.” He paused a moment. “What I said earlier . . .”

  “You mean, was anyone home? Like in the walls?” He was asking whether she had sensed any prior residents in the house—a skill she’d only recently discovered. “No, not that I’ve found. It would appear that either the paperhangers were very happy people or they’re definitely not my ancestors, or both. Now, if somebody had been killed here, it might be different. Are you disappointed?”

  “No, not really. Just asking. We’ve still got the cemetery out back if we want company.”

  “Yes, we do. But we can’t expect to ‘see’ people all the time, everywhere,” Abby told him. “Thank goodness. Can you imagine it? Like standing in the middle of an airport at Thanksgiving, with all those people rushing by in different directions. Only, they’d be in different times too. Would they run into each other? Or run through each other? It would be kind of overwhelming, wouldn’t it?”

  Abby was still struggling to get used to an ability she’d discovered less than a year earlier: she saw dead people. Ghosts, some would say, although they seemed real when she saw them. She could hear them talk, but she hadn’t dared try to touch one of them. She’d found early on that touching something that had once been theirs gave her a sort of electrical jolt, but only if they had possessed it during times of high emotion. At first it had only been the times like that, when the owners had been under great stress or in emotional pain, that had come through to her, and, as she had discovered after a little research, only if they had been her lineal ancestors, back up the line somewhere. Since she hadn’t lived in New England until recently, she’d never crossed paths with them before, but now she was finding them all the time, it seemed.

  And Ned shared that ability. He shared a few of the same ancestors as well, about nine generations back, and their working theory was that that connection played a part in it. He’d known about the gift—or curse?—for most of his life, but he’d tried to ignore it, and had never talked about it with anyone else. He’d even managed to ignore the fact that his mother felt and saw the same things. It still made Abby sad that those two had coexisted in the same house for years and never discussed this other thing that was going on. Abby and Ned’s mother, Sarah, had recognized their shared bond immediately, the first time they’d touched, shaking hands. Well, Ned couldn’t hide from it anymore. Luckily he had decided to jump in and explore it more systematically, applying his own scientific slant. At least he was open to the experience now. Neither of them had done a detailed history of the owners of the house, so Abby wasn’t sure if she’d be running into anyone, but they both recognized a few relatives in the old cemetery that lay behind the property. Cemeteries were always places of high emotion, so the people there weren’t hard to see.

  Abby was also trying to explore whether she could see people who weren’t related to her, at least after some practice. Ned was curious to find out if there was some genetic component to this ability, like seeking like, sort of. Abby wanted to know if it was a more general ability, one that could be used to locate other lingering spirits. But so far it was the strong emotional component that seemed to carry them into the present—she wasn’t seeing happy people going about their daily business. Sadly, most of what she saw was related to death and pain. Abby compared it to an electrical charge that kind of lingered—and might even be dissipated by repeated use. Or not: she suspected that some people, particularly children, could see these lingering spirits again and again, once they’d figured out it was possible. Maybe. Abby still wasn’t sure that science was going to be any help in understanding all this, but if Ned wanted to try, she wasn’t going to stop him.

  “Are you ready to call it a day?” Ned asked.

  Abby looked around. Shadows were creeping into the corners, and she could see the sun setting over the cemetery behind—currently clear of anyone current or past. “I guess. I need a shower—I think I have paste just about everywhere.”

  “At least back in the day it was wheat-based, so it’s just annoying, not deadly. Why don’t I pick up a pizza?”

  “That sounds good. I know you keep telling me the stove is safe, but I don’t trust it. I checked the model number online, and I think it dates to the 1940s.”

  “They made things to last in those days—you shouldn’t worry.”

  Ned left in search of pizza, and Abby made her way to the bathroom, which sported a wonderful deep claw-footed tub—a blessing when she was aching from all the stretching and bending and climbing up and down ladders that she had been doing lately—with a massive showerhead above. She could live with the bathroom, even work to repair the original fixtures and replicate the tiling. Later. She really had to make a list and set some priorities: what did she need to do first? “Everything” was not an answer.

  Ned was back in under ten minutes, and she joined him at the kitchen table, where he’d set the pizza box in the middle and found a stack of paper plates. Not one but two pantries in the house, and neither of them had anything to fill them. Ridiculous for two adults! “You really need to overcome your fear of that stove, you know,” he said amiably, helping himself to a couple of slices.

  “Why? Only half the burners work, and I don’t know what’s going on with the oven. It’s not really big enough for much anyway. Heck, the thing is older than I am. Maybe older than the two of us put together. You really like it?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t say I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s been okay for what I wanted to do, and there’s always the microwave.”

  “Hey, don’t I get some say? I like to cook, but I don’t want to do it if I’m worried that the stove will blow up any minute or the flame will go out and the gas will get to me. Or us.”

  “Okay, fine, I hear you. New stove it is. You want a new refrigerator? Dishwasher?”

  “Of course I do. And some cabinets and countertops. But I don’t need hand-whittled ebony or marble. Just stuff that works. Is that okay?”

  “Of course it is, Abby. I want you to be happy here.”

  “I hate that I have to ask you to pay for things like this.” And she hated that she sounded like a sulky child as she said it.

  “Why? I have money. I want to share it with you. Is that a problem?”

  “I like to be independent. And I like to work. I enjoyed my job, before the stuff with Ellie started. Is Leslie ever going to forgive me? Or at least figure out how to get along with me? Because I was only the messenger, sort of. I didn’t turn her daughter over to the dark side or anything.”

  Ned had been instrumental in getting Abby the job at the historical museum where Leslie was president, because he had been engaged to Leslie close to a decade earlier. Abby had worked there for barely six months when one afternoon Leslie had asked her to keep an eye on her seven-year-old daughter, Ellie, and Abby had discovered that Ellie too shared the ability to see the dead. Leslie had not been too happy to hear about that, and Abby had found herself out of a job very quickly.

  “I know, I know,” Ned said. “Look, Leslie’s an intelligent woman, so in her head she knows she can’t blame you for bringing Ellie’s abilities into the open. It would have happened sooner or
later. But in her heart she’s a mother, and she’s scared for Ellie. And Ellie’s brother too. And she needs somebody to blame, at least for now.”

  “What, you don’t come into the picture? You’re their father! And you’ve got what I’ve got. Jeez, that makes it sound like a disease!”

  “I didn’t know that when I helped her have her kids, and I certainly didn’t know it could be passed down. I was only trying to help her out.”

  “Gee, I wonder how many times that excuse has been used?” Before Ned could respond, Abby held up a hand. “Just ignore me, will you? This is not your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. And I’m tired and maybe a little bored and definitely frustrated. I have no idea where my life is going, or what to tell people, like my parents. Why did I leave a job I liked? Was I fired—or exorcized? What am I doing, camping out here in this house?”

  Ned was watching her face, his expression an uneasy mix of compassion and concern. “Abby, give it time—all of it. Us, whether you’re going to work again, where and how we live, what to do about Ellie. You can’t decide everything according to some timetable. What we’ve been going through is kind of monumental, and new to us both.”

  “I know. But it’s hard. At least you can go to work and keep yourself distracted. I can’t.”

  “True. And I won’t feed you some dumb line like ‘find yourself some girlfriends’ or ‘volunteer at some do-gooder place.’ That doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?”

  “Nope. Because I couldn’t talk about this ‘seeing’ thing. Ned, I want—no, I need to know more about it. It’s not just a parlor trick, and I haven’t been possessed by demons, and I don’t have a brain tumor, and I don’t take drugs that cause hallucinations. So, what is it? Why is it?”

  “I wish there was something I could tell you, Abby.” Ned reached out his hand and took hers, and she twined her fingers with his. “I’m struggling with it too. But at least I’m in a position to look at the science of it, if there is any. That’s a luxury. What kind of research would you like to do?”