Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4) (24 page)

Ten minutes later she pulled up behind the house. Clearly, new renters had moved in for the long weekend: all the windows were open, and wet towels were draped over chairs and railings. The sun sparkled on the water beyond the house.

Sitting in the car, Abby whispered, “Do you want me to know what happened, Olivia?”

Olivia didn’t answer.

Chapter 24

As Abby pulled in, a thirtyish man stepped out of the back door of the house. “Can I help you?” he called out.

Abby fought off the impulse to burn rubber and disappear. That would be rude, and besides, there was no reason she shouldn’t be there—she wasn’t trespassing. She opened the door and climbed out. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I spent a couple of days here last week, and since then I’ve done some research on the house and I just wanted to look at it again.”

The man broke into a big grin. “You must be Abby! I’m Daniel Eldridge, the owner. Ned told me you’d be here last week.”

“Oh, then it’s great to meet you. I thought this would be prime rental property this weekend.”

“So why am I here? Hey, it’s my house, so I’m indulging myself. You want to come in?”

Abby was torn: she knew she should really get back on the road, since there would be holiday traffic, but at the same time she wanted to look at the house through the prism of what she had learned since she left. “Okay, but I shouldn’t stay long—I’ve got to drive back to Lexington.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t keep you long.” He stepped back and held open the screen door for her to pass into the kitchen.

“You have kids?” Abby asked. “I thought they were all back in school now.”

“Mine are too young for kindergarten, and the preschool schedule is flexible. You want something to drink?”

“Iced tea, if you have it.”

“Coming up.” Daniel opened the fridge and rummaged around. “So, how did you and Ned hook up?” he asked, handing her a cold bottle.

Once again Abby was stymied about how to answer that question without saying too much. “I was living in Waltham last year and took a house tour. He was the docent.”

“Oh, right—he’s into that history stuff.”

“How do you know him?”

“Went to college together. Hey, come on out to the porch so we can sit. My wife and the kids are at the beach, so we won’t have to deal with their fuss.”

“Okay,” Abby said, following him through the house to the porch. When they were seated, she said, “You and Ned kept in touch since college?”

“Hell, yeah. I was one of the original partners in his company, back when it was a start-up.”

“Why aren’t you still there?”

Daniel studied Abby a moment. “You’re living with the guy, right? So I’m going to assume there aren’t a lot of secrets. Ned needed my money in the beginning, and another warm body to fill out the board of directors. He was the idea man. And I didn’t have any better plans, so I said, why not? It was fun for a while, and I like to think we got it off to a good start. He’s done well since. But I decided I just wasn’t into that techy science thing, so we parted ways, but amicably. He was seeing Leslie what’s-her-name back then, so I guess they split up?”

How close were these two guys, if they hadn’t talked about Leslie? “Yes. Like in your case, they decided they were just too different to make a go of it. They’re still friends.”

“How long have you two been together?” Daniel asked, then laughed. “Stop me if I get too nosy.”

“That’s okay. We met about a year ago, but I was with someone else then. So we didn’t really get together until November, maybe. And I moved in this past spring, when my sublet ran out.”

“Great house. Creepy about the cemetery, though.”

“You’ve seen the house?” Abby was surprised. She had thought Ned seldom entertained.

“Yeah, I had to drop something off there once, and he offered me the tour. It’ll take a lot of work to make it right.”

“Tell me about it.” Abby laughed. “I’ve been doing a lot of wallpapering.”

“You working? Or is that a non-PC question these days? Sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain.”

“That’s okay. Yes, I used to work at the Concord Museum, and before that in Philadelphia. Right now I’m taking a break.” How lame did that sound?

“What do you do?”

“Mostly I work in children’s programming for nonprofits, although I’ve done some fund-raising too. But I like working with kids. Listen, can I ask you about this house?”

“Sure, fire away.” Daniel sat back in the creaking wicker chair and grinned at her.

“Did you buy it, or has it been in your family for a while?”

“Door number two. I think it was my grandfather who bought it in the 1940s. It was kind of run down, after the hurricane, you know.”

“I’ve been reading about that. And I saw that binder in the living room.”

“Yeah, Granddad put that together. Gathered up all sorts of news clippings and articles. He was proud that this house had stood up so well. Of course, the Cape didn’t get the full impact. Awful thing, though, that storm. I sure hope it can’t happen again.”

“I’d like to think not, with all the tracking they can do these days.”

“Still, hurricanes are tricky things, or so I’m told. I’ve been here through a couple of mid-sized ones—not with the kids, thank goodness—and that was plenty for me.”

“We had a pretty good storm while we were here. No damage, though. Just a lot of wind and rain.”
And a ghost
. “Did your grandfather know the people he bought it from?”

“I don’t recall . . . no, I take that back. He used to say he got a real deal for it, because he bought it from a woman who really needed the money. I think it had been her mother’s, and she was settling the estate.”

“That matches what I found,” Abby said.

“You always do a title search on places where you stay for a few days?”

Abby shook her head. “No, but the woman—the mother—who owned it was my great-great-grandmother. I wondered why she decided to buy a place here—she lived in New Jersey, so she couldn’t have just dropped in for the weekend.”

“She must have had money, so she could spend the whole summer here. Sorry, was that rude again?”

“No—most people hear ‘summer home’ or ‘second house’ and they assume the owners are well-off. And she was, until she wasn’t, after the Depression hit.”

“You do a lot of this genealogy stuff? Ned’s into it too, isn’t he?”

“Yes. In fact, we discovered we were related, back six or eight generations. We’ve both got lots of ancestors in Massachusetts. How about you?”

“Maybe some Massachusetts ancestors up the line, but I don’t really pay attention to that stuff. My wife and I, we’ve lived here on and off, I guess you’d say. I worked with Ned for a few years, then took a job in New York for a while. But we decided we didn’t want to raise kids there, so I found something in Boston. We live north of the city, but it’s an easy trip down here. With what we make in summer rentals, the place pays for itself—taxes, utilities and that stuff.”

“Has your family ever found any artifacts here? From when my great-great-grandmother lived here?”

“That’s before my time, and you can’t exactly bury anything in the yard here because it’s so close to the water, which doesn’t stop my kids from trying. Bunch of gophers, they are.” Then Daniel snapped his fingers. “Wait a sec—there was this one thing. Stay there.” He jumped out of his chair and went inside, and Abby could hear him opening drawers and muttering to himself. Then there was an “Aha!” He came back quickly after that.

“Here.” He shoved a teacup and saucer at Abby. “My grandpa wasn’t a tall guy, and his wife was shorter than he was. And nobody in the family ever spent a lot of time here, so I guess most people skimped on the cleaning. Anyway, when we decided to rent it out, we hired this agency—you met someone from there—to make sure it was in tip-top shape. They must have been really thorough, because they found this cup in the pantry, way back on the top shelf where nobody could see it. They saved it for me in case I wanted to keep it. I don’t know why I did, but since it had survived this long, it felt wrong just to pitch it in the trash. You want it? It looks old enough to have belonged to your family.”

“If you’re sure, I’ll be happy to take it.” Abby couldn’t take her eyes off it: she was pretty sure that it matched the one she had bundled up in her purse, that she had just bought at the Whitman yard sale.
Olivia? You here?
Nothing, not that she had expected anything. “Listen, do you have any old pictures of the place? From your grandfather’s time? I didn’t see any in the hurricane binder.”

“There might be some at home. I’ll check when we get back. If I find anything I’ll scan them and email them to you. Give me your email. Oh, wait, I should get something to write on, duh.” He bounced up again, went inside, and came back with a scrap of paper and a pencil. “Go ahead.”

Abby rattled off her email address. “Oh, and my last name’s Kimball. You know where to find us.” She checked her watch, then stood up. “I should be going—I’m told the traffic gets nasty.”

“Yeah, that’s the downside of being here. It’ll be better by the middle of next week. Look, thanks for stopping by—I hope you enjoyed being here. And give my regards to Ned. We ought to get together sometime.”

“That sounds good to me. I’m glad you were here when I dropped in. And thanks for the teacup.”

“Enjoy it. I’ll let you out.” Daniel stood on the back steps while Abby started the car. As she backed out, he raised a hand in farewell.

That had been interesting. Ned seemed to like people and to get along well with them, but until this past week he had never mentioned Daniel. For that matter, he seldom mentioned any of his work colleagues by name. Why was that? Did he have no other friends in the area? Of course, she wasn’t one to talk. Brad had dragged her up to unfamiliar Massachusetts, and the only people she had met had been some of his work acquaintances—and that hadn’t turned out well. She hadn’t had any opportunity yet to meet people in Lexington. She had barely started to get to know the other employees at the museum when Leslie had fired her. Well, she knew Leslie, but Leslie wasn’t exactly a friend. Of course, there was Ned’s mother. But the fact of it was, she probably knew as many dead people as living ones in Massachusetts. That didn’t seem right. She and Ned would have to do something about that.

She pointed her car northward, back to Lexington.

Chapter 25

Once back on the highway, Abby had to force herself to pay attention to the road. Until a year earlier, she had not believed in anything remotely resembling a paranormal phenomenon, much less that it could apply to her. She didn’t read minds, she had no premonitions about the future, and she couldn’t make objects move around without touching them. She was what she would have called psychically normal, until she’d encountered the Flagg family at home—in 1880-something. And at the cemetery. And then the Reed family in various places. A single event she could have dismissed as a dizzy spell, but when it kept happening she had to take it more seriously. Clearly Ned did, and had before he met her. She still had no idea what she would have done if he hadn’t been around to guide her—probably gone into denial and/or found a prescription to suppress whatever it was.

But now there were other odd things happening. Like Daniel’s renters suddenly canceling at the last minute, and Daniel offering the house to Ned for that slot, out of the blue. It could have just happened, couldn’t it? And neither he nor Ned had known that Abby’s however-many-times great-grandmother had owned the house before Daniel’s family had bought it. Daniel hadn’t even known Abby’s surname, and that wasn’t the same as Olivia’s in any case. Fine—call the house coming vacant at that particular time a random coincidence. They happened, didn’t they?

But now she’d been hunting for Olivia’s adopted sister’s descendants, trawling through phone books, and when she found one local example of the Whitman name on Cape Cod and decided to check it out, a total stranger told her that Isabel was actually William Flagg’s daughter, and therefore related to her. Not by the Reed line, which was the one that was proving the most fruitful in terms of psychic connections. But that total stranger, Edna,
was
a Reed descendant, just not through the Whitmans. And Abby had just
happened
to encounter Edna at a yard sale. One coincidence, no problem. Two very specific coincidences? Statistically unlikely. Abby was beginning to think that she had to reexamine her concepts of unseen forces in the universe. She smiled wryly to herself: as she had seen all too clearly at Salem, in another time and place she would have been called a witch. People were terrified of the kind of thing she was experiencing right now. At least she’d managed to keep her mouth shut about it—most of the time.

Her fingers itched to dig into those boxes and see what Edna had managed to save. She had said there were answers in there. What did that mean? And how, out of all the yard sales on a holiday weekend in this particular place, had she and Edna come together? Yesterday Abby hadn’t even known the sale was happening.

Ned was already back from work when Abby arrived, and she bounded out of the car, eager to tell him about her find. “I don’t see a car full of junk,” he greeted her.

“But the trunk is full! Wait until I tell you what I found! You’re not going to believe it. Come see.” She grabbed his arm and dragged him to the back of her car and popped the trunk. “Look.”

“I see boxes. Old boxes. Have you opened them?”

“No, not yet.”

Ned raised one eyebrow. “Do you know what’s in them?”

“Not specifically, but generally. Help me get them inside and I’ll tell you all about them.”

They each hefted a box out of the trunk and carried it into the house, depositing them in the dining room, then made a second trip. “I’ll get the last one,” Ned volunteered. Abby stood looking at her fabulous find, beaming. However these boxes and their contents had come into her hands, they were hers now. Unless—a stab of anxiety pierced her—Edna was totally gaga and enjoyed making up stories to entertain hapless strangers who took the time to talk to her, and the boxes contained nothing but old newspapers. Abby quickly peeled long-dry tape from around one and pulled off the top: the box was stuffed with a hodgepodge of papers, file folders, letters, journals, and lumpy things wrapped up in yellowed tissue. She spied the name Whitman on one letter and sighed with relief. Not that she’d ever really believed that Edna had been lying to her. There had been that indefinable connection that Abby was beginning to recognize. Edna had Reed blood, somewhere up the line, as did Abby and Ned. And now Ellie. That link gave a whole new meaning to the term “family.”