Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) (29 page)

“Don’t forget, you’re male,” Abby added, smiling. “Which means you’re an insensitive lummox. Ergo I will always be better at this than you.”

“You’re not helping your case, Abby,” Ned said drily. “But thank you for including my mother. I realize now how isolated she must have felt all along, with no way to share what she felt—or saw.”

“I like your mother. It’s an added gift that we both have this ability, but I’d hang out with her anyway. Ned, you still don’t look happy.”

He came closer and put his arms around her. “I’m happy for you. But I miss you.”

“I’ve been right here!” Abby protested.

“Your mind hasn’t. I understand that this thing must be distracting, but you’ve been somewhere else in your head lately. Even when I’m with you. And I feel like a jerk even mentioning it. Go ahead, agree with me.”

“No, I apologize. This is all still new for me, and kind of amazing. But I’ve already said I’m going to put it on a shelf for a while. And I want to focus on Ellie, and what she needs to know to deal with this and still be an ordinary kid.”

“And Leslie doesn’t want me to be part of that either. I’m shut out again.”

Abby leaned back to look at his face. “Stop whining. Leslie will come around eventually—she’s not completely unreasonable, just struggling. And I’m not going anywhere, unless you want me to.”

“Never. It’s a miracle we found each other, and I’m not going to let you disappear from my life.”

“I’m sorry you’ve felt left out. How can I make it up to you?” Abby asked, her intent clear.

“I think I can find a way—but only if you promise to focus on me, not someone who’s been dead for three centuries.”

“I think I can manage that.”

• • •

After a last couple of days of intensive research, Abby felt ready to fill in the final part of the Barton witchcraft puzzle. Not that she was finished with her research, but there was no urgency to flesh out the family lines after 1700 or so—they’d all still be waiting when and if she was ready.

Wednesday morning she was waiting in the museum parking lot in Concord when Leslie and Ellie arrived. Ellie hurried over to join Abby by her car, and Leslie followed more slowly. “What’ve you got planned for today?” Leslie asked.

“Nothing special—there’s one piece of my family history I’d like to share with Ellie, and then I thought we might go out to lunch. You like Chinese, Ellie?”

“Sure,” she said promptly. “Can I get chopsticks?”

“Of course you can. You okay with that, Leslie?”

“That’s fine. Thanks for Sunday—it was interesting. You’re a pretty fair historian.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I have a lot of fun doing it, putting the pieces together.”

“Well, I’d better get to work,” Leslie said. “I’ll see you at five.”

When Leslie had gone into the building, Ellie looked up at Abby. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. I don’t want to tell you too much because I want to see what you see on your own.”
If there’s anyone there
.

“Okay.” Ellie didn’t ask any more and climbed into Abby’s car.

Abby took the leisurely route south toward Framingham, avoiding Route 128, which didn’t seem to fit the mood or the mission. It took no more than half an hour to reach her destination: Salem End Road. The neighborhood where in 1693 Samuel had led his extended family group, including his mother-in-law, Sarah Towne, married then to Peter Cloyce, and her daughter Hannah, his wife, and their small child, and others as well. They’d had a shaky start, living in caves for the first year, but Abby knew that the house that the Cloyces had built was still standing, although in serious disrepair. Sarah and Peter had lived out their lives and died in Framingham; years later Samuel and family, and some of the Towne family, had moved on themselves, to Oxford. From what she’d found online, Sarah had died too early to have a stone in the oldest cemetery in Framingham. Her remains would be somewhere there, but Abby didn’t want to drag Ellie around a cemetery hoping to stumble over one person. That was why she wanted to see the house.

“Who are we looking for?” Ellie asked, after a long silence.

“My tenth great-grandmother,” Abby answered. Funny that Ellie had gone straight to asking “who” rather than “what.”

“Why her?”

“We talked about Salem before, right? Well, Sarah was one of three sisters who were accused of being witches. Her two older sisters died, but she survived. She and her family didn’t want to stay around Salem after all that, so her daughter Hannah and her husband, Samuel Barton—my ancestors—gathered a group of the affected families together and moved to Framingham, which was basically not settled then. It was a fresh start for all of them. They settled in a part of town where there’s a road now called Salem End, and they built houses there and lived out their lives. Except my ancestor Samuel got restless again and ended up moving later in his life. But Sarah died in Framingham, and so did her husband. I want to see the house they built. And if you want to tell your mother something, you can say that it’s one of the oldest houses in the country. And there’s one other funny thing: the land they settled on was owned by one of the men who had been a judge at the witch trials. But he got so fed up with the way things were going that he left in May of 1692, before the hangings started. He already had the land in what became Framingham, so he kind of helped the other people who left Salem and gave them a big chunk of land. That’s what we’re looking for.”

“Cool. Abby . . . have you seen the witches?”

“First of all, there is no such thing as a witch, Ellie. People were afraid and made things up, but the people they accused were innocent. The courts even admitted that later.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Ellie said stubbornly.

“Ellie, I saw one of them when she was hanged.” How odd to say that, and to a child. “I was seeing it through my ancestor Hannah’s eyes and she was very sad. And frightened, and angry. It was an awful time. Maybe that’s why we remember it in this country: we don’t want anything like that to happen again.”
Although it does, if in different forms
. Abby sighed. “You don’t find any of the things you see scary, do you?”

Ellie considered. “No, mostly sad. The people can’t hurt me. And they’re not real. I mean, they were real once, but not now. Right?”

“That’s about it.” Abby slowed and started reading road signs, and turned onto Salem End Road. She drove a few hundred feet down the two-lane road, then pulled over. “I think that’s the one.” She pointed toward a fairly large colonial house, sadly shabby, with shutters dangling and heavily overgrown with vines and weeds. “I’ve read that there are people who are trying to raise money to save it.” Maybe Ned could help, if she asked him. She’d have to think about it.

“Are we getting out?”

“Sure.”

There were no cars around on a weekday morning. Abby could hear the sound of traffic on the highway, not far distant, but in the old neighborhood there was only birdsong.

“What do we do now?” Ellie asked.

“I . . . really don’t know. It doesn’t look like there’s any place to sit down. I don’t know the whole history of the house, like how long Sarah and her family kept it. I only know she and her husband were the first owners. You know, Ellie, I don’t expect you to see anybody here—it’s not your family. Or at least, not that I know of.”

Ellie just shrugged and started working her way closer to the house. Abby hurried to follow, worried that Ellie might trip, or might stumble into a patch of poison ivy.
Abby, why don’t you have a first aid kit in the car?
But Ellie stopped well short of the house, and when Abby caught up with her she realized she was smiling.

“There,” Ellie said, nodding her head toward the house.

Abby looked up at the building and saw it like two superimposed images: the decrepit current one and one that was bright and clean and whole—with a woman standing in front of it, talking to someone. The woman turned and pointed—not at Abby, because Abby knew the 1700 Sarah couldn’t see her—but surveying her property, her land, her safe haven. And what Abby read from her was, for once, not pain or sorrow: Sarah was happy. Sarah had found a home.

“You see her too?” Abby asked Ellie in a quiet voice—fearful of startling the ghosts?

“Uh-huh. Does that mean I’m related to her?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.” Abby turned back to the house, where the figures seemed to be fading in the bright sunlight. And then they were gone.

Good-bye, Sarah. I’m glad I found you.
Abby felt . . . peaceful. Finding Sarah here was an antidote to the grim scene of her sister’s hanging. The Salem refugees had moved on and prospered, and here she was, the latest in a long line. She hoped some of their strength had come down to her.

She looked down at Ellie, who was proving to be a very patient child. “You hungry yet?”

“It’s not lunchtime,” Ellie told her.

“I know. Maybe there’s a bakery or something in town. You want to go look?”

“Sure. As long as we can get Chinese later.”

“Deal.”

As they made their way back to the car, Ellie said quietly, “She was happy, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, Ellie, I think she was. She deserved some happiness.”

Afterword

Everybody thinks they know what happened at Salem in 1692—but do they? Authors and academic researchers have been proposing theories—biological, psychological, sociological—for over three centuries now, but none of them is truly satisfying. The original records for the Salem witch trials are extensive, and now available online as both images of the original documents and as transcriptions, so we have access to all the primary evidence. So what is the real story?

For the
Relatively Dead
series, I’ve borrowed a lot of my own family tree. I’ve spent decades doing research on them, especially since I moved to Massachusetts in 2003. But I was startled to find that I’m a direct descendant of one of the three Towne sisters of Salem—all accused of witchcraft in 1692. Two of them were hanged that year. My ancestor, Sarah Towne, survived and abandoned Salem once she was released from prison, with family and friends around her.

As a mystery writer, with a personal stake in the history, I was eager to review the evidence from a modern perspective. I applied a bit of amateur profiling, and did some forensic analysis based on what we know—and came up with even more theories, or combinations of theories. Since I am writing fiction, and my protagonist, Abigail Kimball, possesses the unusual ability to see fragments of the past through her own ancestors’ eyes, I could send her back to that time and have her look both the accused and the accusers in the eye. It was a stretch of the imagination, but I tried not to alter the major players or the events they took part in, given what we know of them.

In the book, Eliza Barton—Abby’s ancestor—is a fictional character. But Eliza’s family tree is my own, and accurate, as are the locations and the timetable of events in which my ancestors participated. I didn’t have to change the story because there’s plenty of dramatic tension there already.

Samuel Barton was my eighth great-grandfather. I am proud to be descended from him: he stood up before the magistrates in court in Salem to defend Elizabeth Proctor, who had been arrested together with his mother-in-law, Sarah Towne, at risk to himself and his own family, against many of his neighbors who testified against her. And when he saw what happened during the trials, he gathered together not only his family but others who had suffered under the accusations, and together they moved to a new town, where they prospered. They lived together in a part of town
there that is still known as Salem End, on land given to them by one of the judges who came to regret the role he had played at Salem.

I hope you have enjoyed the book, and that it has given you a new perspective on what might have happened in 1692. The story isn’t over yet.

Keep reading for a sneak peek

at the next book in the

Museum Mystery series

by Sheila Connolly,

Privy to the Dead

Nell Pratt, president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society, has something to smile about thanks to a generous donation from a major Philadelphia developer who’s willing to help update their museum. But renovations have barely begun when a man is struck by a car in front of the building and killed.

The victim is a construction worker who found a curious metal object while excavating an old privy in the museum’s basement. Nell thinks the death is somehow connected to the Society, and her suspicions are confirmed when an antiques expert reveals a link between the objects from the cellar and a fellow staff member’s family.

Now Nell must unearth a mystery with ties to the past and the present. Because when someone is willing to kill over scrap metal, there’s no telling what they’ll do next . . .