Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Read online

  “Not a problem. As you so astutely pointed out, those ancestors aren’t going anywhere.” Abby stood up and started collecting plates from the table, but Ned reached out to grab her hand. There it was again, that electric shock, that mental current that was almost physical. If she’d been holding a plate she would surely have dropped it. Ned was watching her face, and she smiled.

  “Yes.”

  Dessert could wait.

  • • •

  At the end of the evening Abby and Ned found themselves sprawled on a broad couch in front of the television downstairs, watching the late news. They maintained a discreet distance of six inches between them.

  “You know, the practice part for Patriots’ Day has already started. You might enjoy watching the guys prepare.”

  “Guys? They were the only ones who carried guns?”

  “Just about. There weren’t that many weapons in the colonies, you know, and few people could afford to waste shot on practicing.”

  “So what do these guys do to train?” Abby spooned up some melting ice cream.

  “First of all, they have to learn how to handle an eighteenth-century rifle. Have you ever hefted one?”

  “No, although I know there are a couple in the museum’s collection. Why?”

  “Well, let me back up. The main military weapon—for both sides—was the flintlock musket or long rifle, although most people in the militia used whatever they had—it wasn’t like somebody supplied weapons to everyone who fought, at least in the beginning. Anyway, those things are long—around five feet—and weighed about nine pounds. And loading them is no simple matter. We’re all far too accustomed to popping in a magazine, all neatly preloaded—”

  “Speak for yourself,” Abby interjected. “I’ve never loaded or shot a gun.”

  “All right, let me correct that statement. Most owners of modern weapons are accustomed to easy loading. With a colonial weapon, there were a lot of steps involved, assuming you’ve already got the bullets handy, which you had to mold yourself. So there you are, on the front line. You fire at your enemy. You may or may not hit anything, because a lot of early weapons were notoriously inaccurate. Either way, you have to set down your weapon, find powder and wadding and the projectile, insert it into your barrel and tamp it down before you can even think about firing it again. And you have to hope that your flint is in good shape and provides a spark. Oh, and you also have to worry about whether the whole thing will blow up in your face.”

  “Wow,” Abby said. “I never knew all that. It’s a wonder anybody could manage to carry on in a battle.”

  “It is indeed. That’s why soldiers lined up in rows. The front row took their shot, then swapped places with the back row while they reloaded and the second row took their shot. Repeat as long as your supplies hold out or until you’re overrun by the enemy.”

  “Have you done this? I mean, shot one of these things?” Abby asked. She realized she’d never thought to ask if he’d fought in an actual war, but that seemed unlikely to her. Surely something that important would have come up in conversation at some point?

  “I have, once or twice. Just to satisfy my own curiosity. I have no plans to become a reenactor. But I know some people really get into it, especially if they had an ancestor in the battle, and there are quite of few of those people around.”

  “Do you know when and where they practice? I think I’d like to see this.”

  “I can make some calls. And this way you’d see a lot more than if you wait for the parades. That’s a real mob scene.”

  “They practice on weekends?”

  “Sure. Most of them are ordinary working people who like to dress up and shoot blanks at each other a couple of times a year.”

  Men. Abby shook her head. “It’s getting late. You ready to call it a night?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

  Abby reflected that he didn’t keep a change of clothes at her house, and then had to wonder how they could be talking about living together when they couldn’t even commit to clean underwear. She didn’t recall things being this complicated with Brad—but then, there hadn’t been as much at stake with him. Whatever she and Ned had between them, it was serious—and maybe that was why they were both reluctant to take the next step. But she still wasn’t ready to deal with it head-on. Climb one mountain at a time, Abby, she reminded herself as she drifted off to sleep.

  Ned was gone when she woke up the next morning. She wasn’t surprised, since he had to go home and shower and shave and dress and … all that stuff. She could be ready in fifteen minutes, and at work in not much more than that. She stayed in bed a bit longer, sorting out what she wanted to look for. She had stumbled on the Reeds in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery by accident—literally. She had reached out to steady herself on a tombstone, and a whole lot of unexpected things had happened after that. And then she had started following the Reed family line backward. If it was a family tree she was looking at, she supposed that would mean downward, toward the trunk or whatever. In any case, she—with Ned’s help—had figured out that the Reeds buried there had included her three times great-grandmother, and she’d ended up following that line through various towns back several generations. She’d even “met” several of them, if not in the flesh (which was obviously long gone), but through the places they had lived and their tombstones. She had some genealogical link to the Reeds going way back—and so did Ned. Which went a little way to explaining the extraordinary physical or mental connection they had discovered they had between them.

  But what about the other branch of the family? William Reed had married Mary Ann Corey, who had been the first of the family to be buried at Sleepy Hollow, followed by William and several of their children. She’d been Mary Ann C. Reed there, but Abby had figured out her maiden name. And stopped looking.

  The working theory that she and Ned had arrived at, after a series of strange experiences, was that the gene or aptitude or whatever they shared had passed down to them through the Reed line. Was that the only one? Should she be looking for other Reed descendants so they could all compare notes? Heck, maybe there was already a Reed Association or Club that she could tap into. She hadn’t thought to try, any more than she’d thought to Google “hereditary psychic connections” or “genetic hallucinations” or any of the other absurd terms she and Ned had come up with. But now she had an excuse to do some hunting: find another Concord family line, one that she could legitimately research and even present while at her job. The best of both worlds, right?

  With that idea she bounced out of bed and headed to the shower. She arrived at work early, only to find the place a beehive of activity, since the artifact collection was being moved to its temporary home in a different room, to handle the crowds who wanted to see the Patriots’ Day memorabilia, while allowing other patrons (assuming there were any) to view the other items in the collections in a more sedate manner. Of course she got sucked into helping, and the next time she checked, most of the day was gone, and she still had to review the lesson plans and make copies of the handouts for the classes scheduled for the next day. She would have to shelve the Corey hunt until later—but there was still online research she could do at home, at night.

  Once home, she bolted down a quick dinner and booted up the computer and logged into her (expensive!) genealogy program. She already knew that the Reeds had started out in a different town, farther east, but she knew that William had come to Concord to make his mark, starting out as a laborer and rising quickly to carpenter and ultimately to developer. But there were few records of him in Concord, only that he’d posted the banns for his marriage to Mary Ann Corey in a Concord church. But the marriage hadn’t take place there. Or at least, it hadn’t been recorded, although another Vital Record that she found, from Newton, said that they’d been married in Concord. But errors and omissions—and garbled transcriptions—were rife in genealogical records, so that didn’t discourage her. In fact, now she knew that William had come f
rom Newton. But what of Mary Ann? Was she local?

  A search on her surname produced several pages of names in multiple towns, some of which she recognized as near to Concord, others of which she was unfamiliar with. She was ashamed that she hadn’t spent much time driving around the area acquainting herself with her surroundings, but first there had been getting used to a new job, and then it was winter, which had dragged on and on and she really didn’t like to drive in ice and snow, particularly with no other purpose than sightseeing, and … Abby, stop making excuses! Now she had a goal, and she would put together a plan. Ned could go with her—or not. She wasn’t going to be one of those clingy women who insisted on an escort to go anywhere, although he was good company, and a second set of eyes was helpful. But the Coreys weren’t even his family, or at least as far as she knew. She had quickly learned that people in Massachusetts showed a surprising range of connections, some of them hard to explain—like how people from opposite ends of the state managed to meet and marry each other. With a sigh, she started searching for early maps of Concord and the surrounding towns. She supposed she could go to the library to look, but this way she could print them out and look at them side by side, and see how and when the towns had evolved.

  She’d just finished that task when Ned called. “One of the regiments is practicing on Saturday. Want to go watch?”

  “Sure. Will this be full dress, or just a field of guys wearing jeans and carrying sticks?”

  Ned laughed. “No, this is a dress rehearsal, so they’ll have the duds and the gear. I know a couple of the guys, and they’ll be happy to talk to you and tell you the kind of research they’ve done. Want me to pick you up?”

  “Thanks—I’ll give you breakfast. What time do they start?”

  “Ten, maybe. Whenever they’ve got enough people assembled. How are things going?”

  “Good. Crazy. I hadn’t realized what a big deal this Patriots’ Day thing was. Are there any other ones that I should know about?”

  “No, this is Concord’s big moment each year. I think you’ll enjoy it, as long as you don’t mind the crowds.”

  “I hope so. See you Saturday.”

  • • •

  Saturday morning Abby was up early to make pancakes and bacon, and was setting the table when Ned knocked at the front door. She hurried to let him in, then backed away quickly when he came through the door. As soon as he’d entered, she shut the door behind him.

  He cocked his head at her. “What’s the rush?”

  “You know very well that if I don’t shut the door within a certain time, the alarm goes off. If I’d stopped to greet your properly, the police would show up in about three minutes.”

  “Ah, I get it. Do we have time now?”

  “We do.” They came together like magnets, and it was a good few minutes before either came up for air.

  “I see the problem,” Ned said, his voice hoarse.

  Abby peeled herself away. “Let’s get some breakfast into us and get going. Otherwise we’ll be here all day.”

  “There are worse fates,” Ned said wryly.

  “Later,” Abby told him. A half hour later, fueled by coffee and carbohydrates, they set off. “Where are we going?” Abby asked as he backed his car out of her driveway.

  “Littleton. Their minutemen marched to Concord for the battle, but they assembled first on the green in Littleton—there’s a marker there now. I can show you the route they took to get to Concord.”

  “We don’t have to walk it, do we?”

  Ned kept his eyes on the road, but Abby could tell he was smiling. “If I were going to be a stickler for authenticity, I’d insist you put on three layers of wool clothing and carry one of those ten-pound rifles as well as powder and shot for it. But I guess you can take a pass this time around.”

  “Thank you sooo much. Maybe I’ll start training now. Are we there yet?”

  Actually it didn’t take long to arrive at Littleton’s green, surrounded by parked cars. A group of about twenty men milled around aimlessly in the middle, some in full costume, others struggling to pull on wrinkled woolens.

  “Is anybody in charge here?” Abby asked.

  Ned scanned the crowd. “I don’t see my friend Jack Butterick yet, but it’s still early. They do get more organized than this.”

  “I hope so!” Abby’s eye was caught by one man who had finished dressing. He stood apart from the others, leaning on his rifle, just watching the rest. “He looks like he’s into this.”

  “Who?” Ned asked.

  “The guy over there on the right. He’s standing by himself.”

  Ned looked at the crowd, sweeping from one side to the other, and then back again.

  “Abby, I don’t see anybody in costume over there,” he said carefully.

  “But he’s right there—the clothes look right, and he’s even let his hair grow out. He’s—” And then she realized what Ned had said. “Uh-oh.”

  “Yes. Exactly. Another one.”

  3

  “You really don’t see him?” Abby asked, still incredulous. And troubled.

  “No, I don’t. But that’s no reason to panic.”

  “I’m not panicking!” Abby insisted. “It’s just that he looks so real, which usually means it’s a close connection to me, I guess. And that’s been something I’ve wondered about. Does it happen to me every time I cross paths with a lineal ancestor? Or only sometimes? What have you found?”

  Abby’s eyes never left the figure on the fringe of the group of modern minutemen. The man shifted his weight now and then, so he wasn’t like a single photograph. But he made no move to join the group, and it didn’t look to Abby like anyone—living—saw him. Could he see her? she wondered. More important, was she really seeing what she thought she was seeing? Her however-many-greats grandfather standing on the green on the day of the battle at Concord, waiting to march to the bridge? Or maybe he was watching a militia training exercise from a couple of hundred years earlier. Either way, she was having trouble wrapping her head around that. She barely heard Ned’s response to her question.

  “Abby, I kind of stopped looking. Life got in the way. College, and work, and … other stuff. So I can’t say whether it might happen under the right circumstances, but it hasn’t yet.”

  She forced herself to look away from the man on the green. Maybe she was hallucinating; maybe she had created some projection of something—someone—she’d like to see. Did she? But Ned’s statement somehow made Abby feel better. So far he’d known more about this phenomenon than she had, and she’d felt like a slow student, almost begging for his approval. She didn’t like the way that skewed the balance of their relationship, if he was always the teacher and she was the ignorant student. But if what she suspected was true, then she had something he didn’t. Abby, this is not a competition! she reminded herself. You’re not looking to see which of you can collect the most ancestors, like trading cards.

  “Abby?” Ned’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “What do you want to do now? Do you still see the man?”

  Abby looked around quickly. More men had arrived, but “her” man wasn’t visible. “No, not now. Can we talk to the guys, see who they’re representing?”

  “Sure. We’d better do it now, before they get involved in the battle part.”

  She followed Ned dutifully toward the group of men, several of whom raised a hand or greeted him personally. She tried to pretend she wasn’t rattled by seeing someone who wasn’t there—well, that wasn’t the problem, because she’d kind of gotten used to that. It was seeing someone that Ned did not see. But now was not the time to explore that. She put on a social face and went to greet the minutemen.

  Up close they turned out to be a mixed crew: a combination of older men, most wearing wire-rimmed glasses, plus a few twenty-somethings who were very pumped up by holding such big weapons. Abby guessed that they had never served in the military, or they might not be so excited.

  “Hey, Jack,” Ned greeted a
man about his own age. “Looks like a good turnout.”

  “Yeah. Good thing the weather’s cooperating—we need the practice. When you only do this once a year, you kind of forget.”

  “This is Abby Kimball,” Ned introduced her. “She’s working at the museum in Concord now, and she has plenty of local ancestors. But she’s kind of new to the area, and she’s never seen a Patriots’ Day celebration.”

  “Well, that’s easily fixed!” Jack declared. “Nice place, your museum.”

  “I think so,” Abby replied. “So, tell me what your group does. Who’s in it, to begin with? Does each of these people represent a real minuteman, or are they here just to make up the numbers?”

  “Some of each. Anyway, what you’re seeing is Lieutenant Aquila Jewett’s militia company, which at the time included four officers and over forty men, with a few volunteers thrown in, who marched to Concord and then probably followed the enemy to Cambridge—record-keeping got a little murky in there. Here, let me show you the monument.” Jack led Abby over to a stone marker in the middle of the small green. Abby hadn’t even noticed it when the men had been milling around it.

  “These are all the guys who made the march to Concord on April nineteenth,” Jack told Abby.

  She scanned the names on the stone. No sign of any Coreys, or any other names she recognized from her family tree. So who had she seen? “How’d they get the news to show up for the battle?” she asked, interested in spite of herself.

  Jack clearly enjoyed his subject. “For a start, the sound of gunfire travels a good way, so they might have known something was happening. But there was a system of riders set up for just that kind of thing, so somebody would have hopped on a horse and ridden fast. In this case, Edward Weatherbee of Acton carried the news to Simon Tuttle’s house on the road to Littleton, and that’s when the militia gathered.”

  “You really know your local history, Jack,” Abby said with admiration. “Were there casualties at Concord?”