Read Sheila Connolly - Relatively Dead 02 - Seeing the Dead for Free Online

of decision in the next month or two, but now she resented having a deadline imposed on her. As if there wasn’t enough chaos in her life—she’d have to pack up and move again ?
    If she had met Ned without all the other baggage she was dragging along, would they have clicked? Or would they have passed by each other without even noticing? He was a good guy, of that she had no doubt. But he did withhold part of himself—how big a part she wasn’t sure yet. He had been secretive about her experiences— damn it, Abby, can’t you decide what to call these things? —and while she understood why he had done it, she still resented it, just a little. As for the physical side of things—which, to be fair, had come late in the game—well, he was a guy, wasn’t he? Maybe he’d been putting her on; maybe she’d been the only one to feel anything unusual.
    She didn’t really believe that. But she knew she had to back off for now and figure out what was going on. And thinking about the man on the green in Littleton was better than wondering how she was screwing up what had promised to be a great relationship. All right, she had research to do. Where to start? She ignored the little voice inside that kept saying “coward.” She had to admit that she was avoiding looking too hard at whatever she had with Ned. Was that so wrong? If it was real, it wouldn’t go away just because she took a little time off. And she wasn’t required to apologize to anyone for that, least of all herself.
    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