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  And when she’d finished the ceiling—and cleaned up the spatters that she’d warned Ellie about—then she painted the crown moldings. Ellie couldn’t object—they were well over her head, even with a ladder. There were still the moldings around the doors and windows to be done. And the window sashes—painting those, Abby knew from experience, was finicky work and took a steady hand. And the doors themselves—nice authentic four-paneled doors with original hardware. Maybe she should remove the hardware and clean it up. It looked like some of the door handles were really nice, under several coats of paint. Was there any paint stripper in the house? She refused to go back to the store for a third time. If there wasn’t, she could wait—although she should probably take the doorknobs off before she let Ellie loose. The nice old hinges she could mask with tape.

  Would Ellie have the patience to stick to the job? It wasn’t what most kids her age would think was fun, but then, Ellie wasn’t like most kids her age. But she could get bored—something that Abby understood well. The slang phrase for boredom, “watching paint dry,” made a lot of sense to anyone who had tried to paint a room. Even though paint dried a whole lot faster than it used to.

  She ran out of enthusiasm by lunchtime. She threw together a sandwich and took a mug of coffee outside and sat on the back steps, facing the cemetery. It was chilly but not unpleasantly so. Did the ghosts walk year-round? They shouldn’t feel the cold. Did they change clothes to match the season? No, that was silly. She was ready to admit that it was her brain—or any other watcher’s—that dressed them. If someone who saw them could be completely objective and peel off a whole slew of expectations and learned conventions, they’d probably see no more than a fuzzy blob of energy. The clothes, and even the facial features, were added on later, by humans who were more comfortable with things they recognized.

  Were those poor people trapped there forever? In this case, mourning their dead spouses or parents or children? The tombstone that always broke her heart was the one put up by the Childs family, who lost six children in a matter of days in 1778. Abby was grateful that she had no connection to that family, because she wasn’t sure she could have handled the pain they must have felt, burying them all at once. But she had been curious enough to look them up and had found that the parents had left Massachusetts and moved somewhere else, like Ohio, and had additional children. Which place did they “haunt,” for want of a better word? Or could they visit more than one place, since the tragedies of losing their children had occurred at an earlier time in their lives? Were they buried somewhere in Ohio? With other children? Was there any way to find out?

  Life had been so much simpler before she discovered this ability to see the dead. If she’d never left Pennsylvania, would she have remained blissfully ignorant of it all her life?

  Would she have been happier?

  Morbid thoughts, Abby, she told herself. You couldn’t turn back time or selectively erase the memories. Brain surgery? Maybe a surgeon could cut out whatever part of the brain caused or enabled this ability. But nobody knew where that was—yet. Maybe by this weekend they’d have a better idea.

  And even if it could be cut out, would it grow back?

  Abby stood up abruptly, putting her empty mug on the top step. She was getting cold, and she needed to move. She’d done all she wanted inside, and the paint fumes were pretty intense. Then she remembered the flyer she’d seen at the library, something advertising a haunted house tour in Lexington—she’d brought home a copy from one of the bookstores she had visited. She went inside to find it.

  The fact that the event existed didn’t surprise her, as she read the brochure, but it was the first she’d heard of the house, a stately colonial on the eastern edge of town, only recently opened to the public on a limited basis. Apparently it had belonged to somebody special, three hundred years earlier, although Abby wasn’t familiar with the surname. She sent up a silent wish: Please don’t let it be more relatives! She already had more than she could cope with. Reading between the lines of the promotional material, Abby deduced that the building had been neglected and needed a lot of restoration, and this short tour a way to raise money.

  Abby knew nothing about the history of the place. Had anybody important lived there? Passed through there? Somehow major figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin seemed to have gotten around quite a bit. If you added up all the nights they were said to have slept in one house or another, it came to years, and how could they have gotten anything else done if they were racing around the colonies from bed to bed? Still, if someone of that stature had slept in Lexington or Concord it could be a tourist draw, not that the towns needed another one—there were plenty of other sites worth visiting, and for most you didn’t have to bumble around in the dark looking for ghosts.

  Abby’s quick Internet search showed surprisingly few paranormal apparitions in either Concord or Lexington, and most of those had occurred in buildings like taverns that could accommodate large numbers of people, rather than in private homes. (Funny that no one mentioned cemeteries—or was their haunting just a given?) Was there a reason the planners for the haunted house event, whom she didn’t know, had chosen this particular house? Something dire had happened to one or more of the past residents? Or maybe it was simply conveniently empty in October and someone had said, why not try to make a few dollars? Because of course there was an admission fee, although it was printed on the flyer that the proceeds would go to the renovation fund.

  What the heck, Abby thought, why not go? She’d gone to the Psychic Faire and had good results, even if some were negative. A haunted house was more or less in the same category, so why not check it out? But first she would look up who had lived there, and whether there were any connections to her family tree, although that might be a fruitless exercise since there weren’t all that many names in that tree. Still, the excursion would get her out of the house. Her mind made up, she put in a quick phone call to Ned.

  “You want to do what?” Ned asked.

  “Go on a haunted house tour,” Abby repeated.

  “Here in Lexington?”

  “That’s what the flyer says. Of course, nobody would lie in print, so there must be ghosts there,” Abby said.

  “What do you hope to learn?”

  “Nothing specific. I’m just curious. I want to see if the people hosting this believe what they’re doing.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Ned asked.

  “Do you want to come?” Abby countered.

  “Not really, if I’m honest,” Ned told her.

  “That’s okay. But you must know the house—the old Shepherd place on the Concord Road?”

  “I’m sure I’ve been by it hundreds of times, but I don’t think I ever associated a name with it. Who were the Shepherds?”

  “I have no idea. They must have had money, given the size of the house. Not relatives of mine—that I know of, because I’ve got a long way to go on finding all my ancestors. So, no spooky stories about the house passed among the kids here while you were growing up? No dares issued to see if you could get someone to break in and spent an hour there after dark?”

  “Nope, not that I recall. But I wasn’t one of the most popular kids, you know. They could have been doing who knows what, and I wouldn’t have known it. Who’s running the show?”

  Abby looked at the flyer again. “One Susan Haven. Know her?”

  “I know the name. She’s a big booster for the town.”

  “Paid or unpaid?”

  “Abby, this is Massachusetts. We’re all supposed to take turns doing our civic duty to enhance the visibility of our town. But I assume they’ll be collecting contributions?”

  “She’s unpaid, you mean. And yes, they’re charging for this. What was your gig?”

  “I wrote them a nice check.”

  “Why do you give tours in Waltham but not here?”

  “I could say something corny like, ‘I was waiting in Waltham for you to come along,’ but you’
d see right through that. Mostly because I’d grown up in a colonial house, and I wanted to learn something about Victorians, since I’d bought the Lexington house simply because I liked it. So I had to do my homework, and then I got to spend time in the place, getting to know it. It makes a difference, you know—getting the feel for a space.”

  “I think I can see that. So you’re okay with it if I go on my own?”

  “Of course I am. You expect me to say, ‘No, woman—I want you here serving me dinner at six thirty sharp!’?”

  “Fat chance, pal,” Abby told him. “You can make dinner—I should be home before nine. I’ll give you a report if I find anything interesting.”

  “Do you expect to?”

  “Not really, but I need to keep an open mind, don’t I?”

  • • •

  The event was scheduled to start at six, just after dark. Abby presented herself at the door of the Shepherd house, where she was greeted by a plump woman in colonial dress, who happily accepted her payment for a ticket and directed her into the building. She stepped inside, then stopped, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. Oh, there were candles—or, no doubt for safety reasons, mock candles with hidden batteries—but it was dim inside. How could anyone get anything done in 1760-whatever, with so little light? Reading would be out of the question, unless you held a candle or lantern inches from the page. And the print was tiny in those days.

  Abby scanned the room. Eight other ghost seekers were clustered in what must have been a parlor, a square, high-ceilinged room with large windows and a handsome fireplace—as far as she could see. Two other women about her age stood in front of the fireplace—the ghost guides? One was tall and thin, the other shorter and well rounded, in a good way. Abby didn’t recognize anyone in the room, so she nodded and kept quiet. At ten minutes past the announced hour, the guides looked at each other, then the shorter one said, “I guess we should start now. Welcome to the Joshua Shepherd house. Let me tell you about the history of the place . . .” Abby breathed a sigh of relief: there were not Shepherds in her family, or at least none that she knew of. She listened with half an ear, looking around both at the details of the room—nice complex moldings, and great wide boards for the floor—and watching other people’s expressions. Why were they here? For the same reason she was? That seemed unlikely, but she shouldn’t decide so quickly. Would there be time to talk to any of them, after the tour?

  After a focused five-minute speech, the first guide handed the reins over to her companion, who began, “I’m here to tell you about the evidence regarding the presence of multiple spirits in this house. Some of them are prior residents, and that includes a child. Some of them were guests here at one time or another—including Ben Franklin.” Abby barely suppressed a laugh—she’d been right on the money. “We use various types of microphones and cameras to capture their presence, and we want to show them to you . . .” In spite of herself, Abby drew nearer. There was a small laptop set up on a low table, and the taller woman turned it on and pressed a few buttons. “As you can see—or you will—this is the main staircase outside this room. And just here, at the top”—she pointed at the grainy image—“there’s what we think is a woman’s figure, just starting down the stairs. You can see her skirt between the stair rails. We think she was Hannah Shepherd, the lady of the house when it was first built. She died after only a few years of marriage, during which time she had three children.”

  Like the first guide, the second knew not to bore her audience with a dry list of facts: she was following the “show, don’t tell” approach. “We’ve got a few handheld devices here that you can borrow. They register electric or magnetic fluctuations, and if the signals are strong enough, they’ll beep. Don’t worry—they’re pretty much unbreakable—so it you see a ghost and happen to drop it, no problem. We want you to spread out and search for yourselves—unless you’d rather have someone else along, just in case.”

  “Are these friendly ghosts?” a quavery older voice asked.

  “Neither friendly nor unfriendly, I’d say,” the taller docent said. “We’ve had people—visitors like yourselves—who’ve seen or heard something, but that’s as far as it’s gone. These spirits are mainly ordinary people, doing what they did when they lived here. And if you’re worried, there’s no history of any murders or other violent events taking place in this house. But don’t be disappointed if you don’t see anything—most people don’t. It’s not like the spirits are waiting here to entertain you. So now you can roam around at will—except you can’t go beyond the second floor, and the basement is off-limits for now. Take your time. By the way, many of the furnishings and pieces of artwork are original to the house, or of the period, all donated to our nonprofit organization. You should get a real feeling for what the house was like in its heyday. If you want to use one of the sensors, come get one.”

  While some people approached the table, Abby headed in the opposite direction. She knew she didn’t want any mechanical devices, and she definitely wanted to be alone with whomever might be in the house. Both docents appeared to be sincere, and Abby was prepared to accept that they believed there was someone—or several someones—in this house. In the hallway she looked around, then headed up the stairs; it would probably take the others a few minutes to spread out in that direction. At the top of the stairs she reconnoitered. The house was not particularly large, but all the major rooms were spacious, with multiple windows. There were a few smaller spaces tucked between them, and Abby guessed they might be a nursery and/or space for servants, for surely a house of this size and status would have had servants.

  It was hard to see much in the dark, and Abby hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight, but some dim lights had been left burning in each room. Abby drifted into one of the back bedrooms and found herself looking at architectural details rather than sniffing out spirits. Lovely construction, with some delicate and detailed moldings, even in the private upstairs rooms. Handsome fireplace. Original glass in the windows. A few shreds of wallpaper still clung to aging plaster. There had been some modern improvements—the flyer had said that the house had been occupied continuously by one or another of the original family members until quite recently. There were some reasonably modern bathrooms shoehorned in, and electric lights.

  Focus, Abby! She felt foolish actually looking for ghosts, but there was no one to see her making a fool of herself. She could hear voices downstairs, and thumps and bumps as people tripped over sills and such in the dark, but no one else had ventured upstairs yet. She centered herself in the room and shut her eyes, then rotated slowly. “Hello?” she whispered. Nothing. She moved silently toward the fireplace and laid a hand on the shallow wooden mantel. Again, nothing. The tree had once been a living thing, and a man had hewn and carved it, but he had left no trace. Or none that she could sense. She took a couple of steps to the side of the mantel, and laid her palm against the plaster wall. It was cool and surprisingly smooth to the touch; somebody had done nice work, and the walls had survived for over two hundred years in surprisingly good shape, with few cracks. To her eye, the window hardware looked like it dated to the nineteenth century.

  She was beginning to feel a trickle of disappointment. Had she really hoped for more? She could hear people walking up the stairs, talking in low voices, so she slipped across the hall into another bedroom. This one was plainer, with only one window and ordinary moldings. Again she walked to the center of the room and turned around, trying to sense anything, and again she felt nothing. She shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed, she reminded herself. Even if this place was the Grand Central Station of spirits, her abilities seemed to work only with relatives, and apparently none of her ancestors had hung out here. She simply couldn’t see the “others,” if there were others. She smiled when she wondered what she would have said to Ben Franklin if he’d suddenly popped up in front of her. At least she would most likely have recognized the man.

  The little covey of ghost seekers see
med to be heading her way, so she went back to the hall, looking for the stairs. It was easy to get disoriented in an unfamiliar place, especially in the dark. After a wrong turn or two, she managed to locate the front staircase, and it looked like the coast was clear. Then from the corner of her eye she thought she saw a flash of movement, and it took her a moment to register that it had looked like the swirl of a floor-length skirt. None of the attendees had been wearing a skirt of any sort—the women, like her, had been wearing blue jeans. Abby held still, trying to penetrate the darkness in the direction that the person—no, skirt—had taken, but she couldn’t see anything. Another tentative “Hello?” didn’t produce a response.

  Abby sighed and started down the stairs. She comforted herself with the idea that no results were a result in themselves: she couldn’t sense anybody in this house.

  Chapter 23

  Ned had dinner waiting for her when Abby arrived home at eight thirty. “How’d it go?” he asked as he dished up dinner and poured her a glass of wine before sitting down opposite her.

  “I wish I could say I had some stimulating conversations with dead strangers, but that didn’t happen. Not that I expected it to, but I guess I always hope.”

  “How were things set up?” he asked.