Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead Page 4

  Back to genealogy. Assume that the man she’d seen (or his ghost) was an ancestor of hers. If she worked with the opposite assumption—that he wasn’t connected personally to her—she’d go nuts, so ancestor he was. If he was part of the minutemen, he must have lived in Littleton, because towns were supposed to have their own groups, right? So all she needed to do was find at least one male ancestor who had lived in Littleton at the right time and fought in the Revolutionary War. Easy, right?

  She sat down at the desk in front of the window, where she kept her laptop, and for a moment allowed herself to be distracted by the view, unchanged since the morning when Ned had picked her up … Unchanged since the house was built. Better: she didn’t have to judge everything in relation to Ned. She booted up the laptop and looked for a historical society in Littleton. There was one, but the hours it was open were ridiculously limited, as she had feared. She could make an appointment to talk to someone there, but she had better do as much as she could online and get all her ducks lined up before wasting someone else’s time. She should ask the historical society for records only they had, not stuff she could get somewhere else.

  Online she could do evenings. The Littleton Library claimed to have a limited family history collection, but she knew that the Concord Library had a good genealogy section, one that she had used before—and it was closer. She checked their website and found they were open from nine to five on Saturdays, and from noon to five on Sundays—except in the summer. Well, this was April, not summer, and she hoped to find some answers fast. She checked the time: too late to head over there now. She’d do better to fill in the blanks first and go tomorrow.

  So she had a hot date with Ancestry.com. Now, where to start? How about a history of Littleton? Her online search turned up a conveniently short piece on the town, although it was apparently excerpted from a larger book on the county. She spent a fruitful few hours wading through nineteenth-century local history books and downloading the free ones to refer to later. By the end her eyes were sore from trying to decipher the small print, and the sun was setting. But at least now she had a battle plan of her own. Tomorrow morning she would read the relevant portions of those texts and review the list of people who had shown up at the Littleton green, and then go to the Concord Library and see what they had that would add something to her search.

  You could just go to Littleton and drive around. That thought came to her unbidden, and she pushed it away. Even though she had a general understanding of the phenomenon, she wasn’t sure she was ready to go looking for it. At least, not without Ned’s backup.

  No, she couldn’t think like that. She couldn’t rely on Ned to protect her from whatever was going on, or interpret it for her. And he wasn’t connected to these Littleton people, or so it seemed. This was her own search, and she needed to deal with it alone. To understand it on her own terms. And if it proved too much for her to handle, she could move somewhere else, somewhere she thought no ancestors of hers had ever wandered, like Texas or Wisconsin. After all, she had no ties, and she had marketable skills and experience—she could get a job anywhere, right? Weren’t teachers always employable? She could go wherever she chose, whether it was back to Pennsylvania or on to someplace entirely new.

  Chicken! that little voice in her head said.

  With a sigh she logged off her computer, sat up, stretched, and headed for the kitchen to make herself some dinner.

  5

  Abby had grazed her way through dinner and then settled in for an evening of action films, where things blew up and banged-up heroes managed to save the day in the last five minutes. She had steered clear of anything even hinting at romance, and even the hunky guy covered with blood and sweat, often clutching a small child or someone’s pet as he emerged from the flames/rubble/flood, drifted perilously close to that category, but the pint of gelato she had consumed helped to distract her from that. She had gone to bed at midnight and slept well, no doubt exhausted from her emotional roller coaster.

  She woke with the birds and lay cocooned with the blankets and quilts—when was it going to warm up in Massachusetts?—thinking. She felt like she’d been mean to Ned, putting some space between them. He hadn’t been too pushy so far. They hadn’t gotten into an every-day-and-all-weekend thing, so he had in fact given her plenty of space. They were both busy with their jobs. Ned had family nearby, although Abby wasn’t sure how often he saw them. So why had she asked—or more like demanded—time apart?

  She had always thought she was an ordinary person. She was moderately nice-looking, but nobody had ever stopped and stared as she passed. She was intelligent, and she’d done well in school. She had had friends growing up and in college, but hadn’t really dated anyone in particular, although she and her friends had hung out with guys. She’d had one on-and-off relationship in college, but it had ended without anger on either side—they’d just drifted in different directions. She’d met Brad after she’d graduated, at a party, and she was drawn to his ease with other people, his expansive personality, and even to his good looks. They’d connected at the party, and they’d been together more or less since, until she had walked out on him before Thanksgiving the past year.

  Once she had believed they would get married eventually. What had she been thinking? Brad was shallow and self-absorbed; he thought the world revolved around him. And he hadn’t hesitated to jump into bed with a coworker, after he’d dragged her to Massachusetts because of his new job and dumped her in a colorless apartment in a town she’d never seen, and expected her to find a job and entertain herself while he worked, as long as she had his dinner on the table and his laundry finished. Once again, she had to ask, what had she been thinking? That model for a relationship had gone out of fashion a couple of generations ago. Even her own mother had rejected it.

  She had left Brad because she needed to do it. Not because she had met Ned, no matter what Brad had thought. Ned had been careful not to come between them and hadn’t made any moves until she’d dumped Brad. She couldn’t criticize his behavior.

  So what was the problem now? This whole “seeing the dead” thing, the wild card. The thing that completely overturned her own vision of who she was. Ordinary, boring Miss Abigail Kimball was now seeing dead people. She’d tried to explain what was happening to her to Brad and he had refused to listen or to try to understand. At least Ned had believed her. But at the end of the day, it was her problem, not anyone else’s. That’s why she had to work this out for herself. Alone.

  Now she believed that she had stumbled onto a branch of her family tree that was not connected to any of Ned’s lines. This was new. This was ground he hadn’t already tramped over, so unless he had memorized every family in the state and every cemetery, she was going to have to start from scratch to figure it out. He’d taught her enough—and she’d learned enough on her own—to know where to start and how to follow the leads she found. She had all the resources in her backyard, plus the Internet. How could she complain?

  But she did have to laugh at herself, just for a moment: she sounded like a cranky two-year-old saying “me do it!” She didn’t want help. She wanted to prove something to herself.

  Could she? What if she ran into a pack of ancestors all at once and was overwhelmed? Was there such a thing as a MedicAlert bracelet for people suffering from multiple and simultaneous hallucinations? Or maybe she should hope for an episode like that: either she would burn those dead people out of her sight or some doctor would tell her what was wrong with her. Something convenient like a small brain tumor, one that could be removed. Listen to yourself, Abby! Now she’d progressed to asking herself which would be better, a brain tumor or mental illness.

  Today she was going to collect facts. Details about who was who: where they’d been born and to which parents; where they’d married, produced children, lived and died. A lot of that was available online, she knew, but there was more to be had at the library, and she had all too little free time to take advantage of that, so today she
’d go to the library. It was too bad that this current ancestor had popped up just when things were getting extraordinarily busy both in Concord and at her museum, but then, if it hadn’t been for the Patriots’ Day celebrations she might not have seen this ancestor at all. She could have drifted along in happy ignorance, even though she seemed to be surrounded by long-forgotten relatives.

  The Concord library didn’t open until noon, so she spent a couple of hours cleaning up the house (not that it needed much, since it was only her to make any messes), running laundry, and then sorting through the notes she had for this latest spectral appearance. She wished she could start with the Littleton Library, but that wasn’t open on Sundays, although it did offer evening hours a couple of days a week. She could visit there later in the week, but right now she was impatient to get started. Unfortunately she didn’t have much to work with.

  She shut her eyes, trying to visualize the man she had seen. The battle had taken place in April 1775, and the man had looked to be in his forties—no, older. So that gave her a birth date for him in the 1730s. He’d been white, obviously. Brown hair. She’d been too far away to see his eye color, but she would guess they weren’t brown. He had all his limbs and no obvious scars or disabilities. There was nothing to distinguish him physically—not that that would help much with historical research. His clothing hadn’t been noteworthy, not that she knew much about colonial clothing, beyond the fact that most people didn’t have a lot of items of apparel. The best she could say is that he didn’t look tattered or threadbare. He’d had a weapon, a long gun of some sort, but was there any way of learning whether it was his personal weapon or had been provided for him by the town? So that wouldn’t help her much. She knew he’d been married, or at least he had produced at least one child—otherwise she wouldn’t be seeing him now. Whatever triggered her “seeings” didn’t seem to be gender-based: she’d “seen” through the eyes of both men and women. So it had to be something in the genes that was passed down. That persisted, even now. Were there others like her? Did other people “see” their dead relatives? Nobody seemed to talk about it, and Abby was wary of joining any online groups that investigated this kind of phenomenon—her general impression was that they were all too often made up of cranks and weirdos.

  Focus, Abby. You’re going to do some basic genealogy. First up: find one male ancestor who had belonged to the Littleton militia and had marched to Concord on April 19, 1775. Surely there were military records that would include that? After all, someone had put together the list that appeared on that monument on the green, and it clearly did not date back to the Revolution. She called up her Internet program and scanned the categories. Yes, there was one for military service, but the only way to find who had signed up for Littleton was to put in a real person, not just the name of the town. Fine: she had pictures of the monument that listed all the names, and plugging in any one of them should give her access.

  It was a tedious and time-consuming process. She had to look up each man on the list and find out whether he had had offspring. That eliminated only a few of the names. It seemed that everybody back then had produced multiple children (which would further complicate her search when she tried to trace the line from her patriot to herself), and she’d have to work through the records for each and every one. And the online records went only up to 1850 in most cases. But she had Mary Ann Corey, who had been born in 1821, and the line that came after her. Unless, of course, this was an entirely different line and had nothing to do with the man on the green. It was certainly possible, but she didn’t want to contemplate all the complications that would mean. Abby sighed and dug back into the data, and the next time she looked at the clock it was approaching noon and time to head for the library.

  On another fine spring day, the library wasn’t crowded. She made her way downstairs to the local history section and was greeted by the librarian she’d met before. “Hi, there. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I have,” Abby told her. “But not for a while. I’m amazed that you remember.”

  The other woman laughed. “We don’t get that many people who are seriously looking for information down there. More this time of year, of course. But most of them just go straight for the obvious stuff, about the battle, and then they’re done. By the way, I’m Louisa Emerson. No relation.”

  Abby smiled. “To Ralph, you mean? What about the Louisa?”

  “That I’ll cop to. My mother loved Little Women. So what are you looking for today?”

  “I hate to do the obvious, but I wanted to learn more about the people who were part of the Littleton militia and took part in the battle. I would have gone to the library there but the hours aren’t as good as yours.”

  “I understand. You know you can do a lot of this online these days?”

  “What?” Abby replied in mock dismay. “And you a librarian, sending me to the electronic monster?”

  Louisa raised her hands. “Mea culpa. I will be delighted to show you what precious, fragile, paper-based documents we have here. I don’t have to give you the lecture on proper handling?”

  “No, of course not. I work at the museum now.”

  “Oh, of course! You replaced Stephanie Thomas, right? But that’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Just over six months now.”

  “And you haven’t visited us since?”

  “I’ve been kind of busy, what with a new job—and a lot of catching up to do, on local history. I’m not from around here.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Why don’t you start with the nineteenth-century histories? The guys who wrote them—and yes, they were almost exclusively men—were a lot closer to the facts back then, and very methodical about including everything they knew or learned. And I do mean everything! Which is why the books are three inches thick in tiny print.”

  “I know,” Abby said, “but the details are so charming. Like, Farmer Brown’s pig farm obscured any evidence of the Indian burial ground on his property.”

  “But at least you know there was an Indian burial ground, right?”

  “Right. So, lead me to your histories!”

  Abby followed Louisa to a tier of shelves in the middle of one wall. “Wow! I’ve got my work lined up for me!”

  “Well, yes and no,” Louisa said. “Each one should have a section on military history from the town or county, but reading all the rest of the details is up to you. You don’t have to wrap this up in one day, do you?”

  Abby shook her head. “No, that’s not going to happen. This is just the start.”

  In the quiet basement room, Abby once again lost track of time. Reading the old histories was as close as she could come to traveling back in time. As Louisa had told her, there was a wealth of detail, of varying relevance, but it all contributed to the picture of a lost time and place. The world had been so much smaller a hundred and fifty years ago! Especially in small towns, where everyone seemed to know everyone else plus their history. But there was nothing mean-spirited, nothing that smacked of gossip. The authors, usually local residents themselves, had apparently believed that everything was important, large or small.

  What she didn’t find was a lot of information on the military units. She’d already noticed that participation by any one individual could be patchy. He might sign up for something but serve for only three days or a couple of weeks. And of course the military divisions themselves kept changing rapidly during the very unsettled period she was interested in. She would guess that people from one town kind of stuck together and were led by people from that same town. But then she realized she needed to know the evolution of the towns around the area. Again, she had learned that boundaries kept shifting, so records for one family might show up in more than one town. And this was in Massachusetts, which had kept relatively good records! Abby shuddered to think how any researcher managed to accomplish anything in states that had been less meticulous in recording everything. They had probably never tho
ught that later generations would be combing through them, or they’d been too busy moving westward to bother.

  After a few hours Abby decided she’d done enough. Her eyes were glazing over, and worse, skipping lines on the page. She’d collected a lot of information, but now she needed to organize it and figure out how it all fit together. It was a respectable start, and if there was something else she wanted to follow up on immediately, she could come over in the evening during the week. Or look online.

  As she stretched her tired muscles before standing up, it occurred to her that maybe she should be worried about attending the parade and the associated events. Not that she disliked crowds particularly, but what if more of her family members decided to show up, just as the Littleton one had? After all, a lot of militias had come together for the battle, and more had joined them as the British retreated toward Boston. Was she prepared to process that, or would it be too much to handle? But heck—on the plus side, maybe she’d see Paul Revere. She couldn’t prove she wasn’t related to him, could she? The thought made her smile and gave her the energy to stand up.

  On her way out the door, she stopped at the desk to say good-bye to Louisa. “It’s okay if I leave the books on the table there?”

  “Please!” Louisa said. “I’d rather reshelve them myself than have you misplace them. No offense intended. Did you find what you wanted?”

  “Yes and no. I found more things that I wanted, so you’ll probably be seeing more of me. But I can’t say when. This reenactment stuff sounds crazy.”