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

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