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

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