Search for the Dead Read online

  Abby nodded slowly. “You may be right. Why do I get the sad episodes? But that adds one more complicating factor, doesn’t it? Like there’s a filter or something, and different people may get different experiences.”

  “Let’s get the basic stuff sorted out first, please,” Ned said.

  “Right. Thank goodness it’s not everyone who has this kind of reaction to touch. Can you imagine the chaos even if all you did was shake hands with a stranger and got slammed by some random other person’s experience?”

  “It could be unsettling, I’ll admit, but it’s just one more piece of data for an individual to absorb. We already make judgments about new people we meet. How do they look? How do they smell? How loud are their voices? Do they look you in the eye? You do all this subconsciously in the first few seconds, and you combine your impressions to form an opinion of the other person.”

  “But there’s a cultural component to that, isn’t there?” Abby protested. “People learn behaviors that affect what we see, right? Someone from Tokyo would make very different judgments about me than someone from Boston.”

  Ned nodded. “Of course. Different cultures have developed different standards for judgment—but there always are standards. Otherwise people would attack all strangers.”

  Abby thought for a moment. “What about people who are differently-abled? I mean, the ones who are missing one or more sensory ability, like sight or hearing.”

  “They compensate, and usually their other senses become stronger,” Ned said. “What’s your point?”

  “Well, what if this trait of ours that has no name could be used to help them? Or maybe for people with autism too. I don’t have details, but isn’t it generally true that autism makes people kind of overwhelmed by sensory stimuli? Their brain can’t process it fast enough and they shut down or act out. What if this trait could help with that? Or if we could figure out a way to block some of the stimuli? Once you understand how it works, then you can work with it or change it, right?” She knew she was rambling, but she was beginning to see possibilities that she hadn’t considered before.

  Ned looked impatient. “Good points all, Abby, but I’m already late for work. How about this: we give ourselves some time to think about what we’ve talked about, and what we would like to know. You take on the history and which phenomena have been popular and then maybe debunked over time. You say there was a lot of so-called psychic or spiritualist activity in the nineteenth century, but much of it turned out to be fake. The supposed mediums were ripping off people who only wanted to reach their loved ones who had passed on.”

  “That’s what I’ve read,” Abby agreed, “but I’ve only scratched the surface. I’ll look into it, certainly. But, Ned, what if there always have been a small number of legitimate mediums, and they were only trying to use their peculiar ability—and maybe earn a living at the same time? It was a simpler time, and maybe a kinder one.”

  Ned looked troubled. “Can I give you a warning, before you jump in with both feet? Spiritualism, or the belief in life after death, and the potential for communicating with the dead, still exists. The spiritualist churches in this area would probably welcome you with open arms, but as I said, tread carefully.”

  “And I’d be interested in talking some of these people,” Abby said. “Maybe they’re just seekers, or maybe they really have found some contact with loved ones, or people from some other dimension. We’re at the beginning of this research, right?”

  “We are. But . . . how much do you want to know? I know I promised to be an equal partner in this, but it can’t be open-ended. I do have a business to run, even if that business intersects very conveniently with what we’re investigating.”

  “I don’t have an answer yet, Ned. Let’s table that thought and come back to it after we know more. I don’t want to devote my life to chasing woo-woo experiences, and I would like to find a long-term job sometime, maybe after the dust has settled, but right now I have the time and the curiosity, and I want to dig in. Is that all right?”

  “Of course it is. Let’s give this first phase of research a week, and then by next weekend we can sit down again and compare notes and maybe map out a longer-term research strategy.”

  “Sounds good to me. Oh, and before I go whole hog, I’ll look into the storm window thing. We can’t keep getting distracted with trying to, uh, keep warm.” Abby almost giggled: “keeping warm” was a nice euphemism for sex, at least in New England winters.

  “Too bad,” Ned said, smiling.

  He stood up to leave, but Abby stopped him again. “One more thing. What about Ellie?”

  “What about her?”

  “Do you want to test her, whatever those tests turn out to be?”

  “Yes, of course, because of her familial connection. Oh, I see what your problem is: do we tell Leslie?”

  “Well, of course we tell her—I wouldn’t ask Ellie to lie to her mother about what we do together, and in any case it would be wrong. But we have to know what we’re asking, and how to explain it.”

  “Of course. Another topic for next weekend, when we have a clearer picture.”

  “And finally,” Abby added, and Ned groaned, “we never figured out if I’m going to look after Ellie after school this year. I know, she’s getting older, and I’m sure she can find plenty of after-school activities, but I’d be willing to volunteer maybe a day a week. If Leslie wants that. But school’s already started, and she hasn’t asked. I’d do it without this research project of ours. I like Ellie. And I want her to have a real connection with you.”

  “Which I don’t get because I’m at work all day. Let me think about it for a day or two, okay? Unless Leslie brings it up.”

  “Fine. So, you go to work, and I’ll clear off the dining room table”—currently buried under a few months’ worth of construction supplies, ends of wallpaper rolls, paint sample cards, and the like—“and set up my computer there. That way I can spread out. Is there a white board lurking in the house somewhere? Because it might be helpful to have a big surface to write on, one that I can look at and see the big picture.”

  “I don’t know, but you can go out and buy one easily enough.” Ned grabbed up the messenger bag that he carried for his work materials, and a jacket, and headed for the door. “I’ll let you imagine a good-bye kiss. See you at dinner.” And he was gone.

  Abby continued to sit at the table, staring at nothing. She’d come out ahead in the discussion, since she’d persuaded Ned that they should get serious about looking into this thing in a systematic way, but now she needed to figure out what to do. She liked doing research, but where should she start? Traditionally the local library would have been a good place to begin. What did the Lexington library have in its collections? Or the Concord library? After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his band of intellectuals had lived and mingled there. He had been a transcendentalist, but what did that mean? And where, if anywhere, did that definition intersect with spiritualist? Could she ask a research librarian for tips? Or would they think she was crazy? Maybe she should think bigger, at least as a starting point. Like with the Rhine Institute, as Ned had suggested, or maybe track down one of those spiritualist churches. They’d be eager to recruit new followers, wouldn’t they?

  Which raised another question: was she a potential follower? She knew better than most people that this ability to see the dead was real, although her proof might not stand up in a court of law. Yet she had reservations: usually she saw something that had happened in the past. She wasn’t communicating with these relatives in the here and now, nor assuming they were floating around in the ether waiting to hear from her. It was more like watching an old movie, and there was no way for her to insert herself into the middle of it. What would a spiritualist think of that? Would they push her to try and start a conversation with her great-great-grandmother? That was not something she wanted. She was afraid of breaking the fragile link to the past, or exhausting its energy, so that it just faded away and was gone. Sh
e hadn’t seen any reruns yet—no repetitions of the same scene, or not precisely.

  But what she had with Ned was real. Setting aside the thing most people labeled as “love”—not that she wanted to—there was a specific connection between them when they touched, even accidentally. It was real, and it was mutual. Call it an electrical charge (that was certainly what it felt like), one that kept regenerating. Unlike her visions of past relatives, her connection to Ned kept getting stronger. Thoughts were electrical phenomena, weren’t they? Brain scans of various kinds could create images of what was happening in the brain through electrical impulses. That was tangible, measurable. But it was a very long jump from physical contact to making “movies” from the past, much less creating active images of “real” people. Abby hadn’t known who she was seeing when it had first happened. She had identified the individuals after the fact, and only then had she realized they were related to her. Her family had never had any old pictures of earlier family members, so she couldn’t have seen them at home and remembered them.

  She hadn’t been looking for anyone. It was important to remember that. They had appeared to her, through a particular combination of circumstances. She’d been stressed out about her relationship with her then-boyfriend, and about trying to find a niche in an area she didn’t know, and to find a job. All classic stressors. She’d been vulnerable, her defenses down. (And Ned had been there, although she hadn’t realized the significance of that until later.) Only then had her ancestors appeared to her. Once she knew it was possible, she had started looking—and had found more than she expected. Since the beginning it had happened several times—but only in cases where there was a genetic connection to the people she was seeing. She and Ned saw the same person only when they both were related to that individual. She had seen people that he hadn’t.

  She should really start writing all this down, if she hoped to make sense of any of it. They’d set a limit of five days to come up with a working plan, and the history—and the parts dealing with breathing humans and their personalities—was her territory. She cleared the table, set up her laptop, plugged it in; found paper and markers and sticky tabs, pens and pencils. And then she sat staring stupidly at the screen. Do something, Abby! Okay, call up a search engine and look for anything to do with “spiritualism.” That produced 600,000 or so hits. She had to admit she seldom went beyond the first three pages. There was, as Ned had suggested, a Greater Boston Church of Spiritualism, that met in Watertown weekly and also held special events. There was also a National Spiritualist Association of Churches, whose text sounded very warm and fuzzy, and which had three churches in nearby towns. Plus they were planning a national convention shortly.

  Abby sat back to think about this. She wasn’t looking to hang out with a large group of people, no matter how like-minded and understanding they might be. She didn’t want to prattle on about her meetings with dead ancestors—in a strange way it felt like she was betraying them, by sharing them with strangers. Maybe she should start with some facts, rather than people. She could put together a list of psychic phenomena and see where she (and Ned) fit, and what explanations, if any, were offered.

  She became so absorbed in her computer search that she forgot to eat lunch, and by the end of the afternoon her head was spinning, not just from hunger. She had a stack of printouts beside her, and she went back through them, highlighting different aspects of psychic experience that she had found along the way. It was a bewildering list, including reincarnation, syncretism (which she didn’t quite understand), clairvoyance, genetic memory, past life regression, hallucinations, and more. But she had emerged triumphant with a label for her own personal phenomenon: apparitional experience. It had first been explored in the 1880s, and most of the descriptions seemed to mirror her own observations: she hadn’t been frightened by what she saw, the experiences had occurred in ordinary settings, the people looked solid rather than transparent, and the apparitions seldom if ever interacted with the observer.

  The problem was, “apparitional experience,” while accurate, was a mouthful. She needed a nickname or something short and simple to use in ordinary conversation, with Ned and Ellie and anyone else who came along. The “experience” part was pretty nonspecific, even though the sources she found agreed that it was visual—that’s where the “apparitional” part came in. Would “seeings” work? “Sensings”? And where would her reaction to touching something, which seemed to trigger the “seeing,” fit? She needed to talk to Ned about this.

  She had reached a good stopping point for her efforts. Abby wasn’t sure why she felt relieved to have a label, clumsy or not, to put on her own experience, but at least she knew she was not alone.

  Chapter 3

  Abby was cooking dinner when Ned arrived home. He walked into the kitchen and kissed the back of her neck, and she almost dropped the skillet she was holding. This connection thing was a mixed blessing, she had to admit: any ordinary demonstration of simple affection was instantly amplified, and sometimes led to some major detours. There were certainly worse problems to have, but sometimes it made it hard to get anything done.

  Ned went upstairs to change clothes, then reappeared in a pair of ratty jeans. He helped himself to a glass of wine, waving the bottle at her and raising an eyebrow in question.

  “Not while I’m cooking, but dinner’s almost ready,” Abby said.

  “Okay. Can I keep you company, or will that distract you?” he asked, leaning on a counter on the far side of the room.

  “As long as you stay on that side of the room,” Abby told him, laughing. She added some chicken stock and chopped parsley to the sauteed chicken she was making, turned down the heat to a low simmer, and set the lid on the pan. “Now wine.”

  They took their glasses and settled on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Abby wasn’t sure she wanted to nag Ned about getting started on their research project, so she figured she might as well go first with the results of the research of the day. “I think I’ve made some progress on our—what should we call it? Project? Psychic search? Unfortunately psychic sounds a lot like psycho.”

  “Ghost hunt? We’ll have to work on a title. What’ve you found?”

  Abby described the preliminary outline she’d cobbled together. “First of all, I’ve got a name for our thing. It’s called an apparitional experience, and the descriptions I’ve found sound a lot like what we’ve run into. What’s interesting is that it seems to have little to do with ghost sightings—most of the time people aren’t particularly afraid of what they’re seeing, and the people they see look ordinary, like three-dimensional people in the same room, except we know they really aren’t there. Does that make sense?”

  “That people aren’t frightened by suddenly seeing phantom people? In a way, I guess I’m surprised. Were you frightened, when it first happened?”

  “No. Startled, certainly. But I never thought that the people I saw could hurt me. I was just a spectator, watching them. I wasn’t an actor in whatever they were doing. What about you?”

  “Johnnie showed up when I was pretty young, and at that age everything is new. He was just, well, there. It didn’t occur to me for a while that nobody else could seen him, but I was always kind of a loner as a kid. I’d have to guess that if I’d been playing with other kids, he wouldn’t have showed up. Do you feel better, having a name for it?”

  “Kind of,” Abby admitted. “It’s nice to know we’re not alone. Not that I’m going to go out hunting for other people like us. Can you imagine what kind of a conversation starter that would be? ‘Hello, do you see dead people?’”

  “We could have some really interesting discussions over dinner with them,” Ned said amiably. “If we got that far. They’d probably be looking for the nearest exit before that.”

  “Let’s get the whys sorted out first, okay?”

  “Fair enough. What’ve you found so far?”

  “More than I know what to do with, and we should talk about how to narrow it
down or we’ll be doing this for the rest of our lives. That won’t work because you have to keep your job so you can support me in the style to which I’m becoming accustomed.”

  “Glorified construction site? Is that your style?”

  “Well, it’s getting better. Slowly. It’s a great house.”

  “I always thought so. You have to look past the surface.”

  “I know. I think I have the surface embedded under my fingernails.”

  They were halfway through dinner when the landline in the kitchen rang—an old wall-hung phone with a curly cord that Ned hadn’t had the heart to discard. “You want to answer it?” Abby asked. Few people she knew, apart from her parents, had the number at the house.

  “Sure.” He pushed back his chair and walked over to the phone. He checked the caller ID, then said, “Hi, Leslie. What’s up?” After listening for a moment, he handed the phone to Abby. “She wants to talk to you.”

  Most likely the Ellie after-school question she had envisioned, Abby thought. She took the phone from Ned. “Hi, Leslie. How’s everything going?”

  “As well as can be expected for October—things are always crazy this time of year. Look, I hate to impose, but do you mind picking up Ellie, say, one day a week? She’s got other activities planned most days, and I thought we had a schedule worked out, but one of those got canceled for lack of interest.” Leslie hesitated, in an odd way. “And, well, Ellie asked if she could spend time with you.”

  So Leslie was still reluctant. “Sure, I’m happy to have her. Do you want me to keep her through supper, so she can see Ned too? He could drive her home, after.”

  “If you want.” Leslie sounded less than enthusiastic about the whole arrangement, but Abby knew by now that working out day-care or aftercare arrangements for children could get complicated, and Leslie had another child—Ellie’s brother Peter—at home to deal with too, not to mention a full-time day job at the Concord Museum.