Chapter 8

 

Wednesday

 

Why was it that every time she’d managed to focus on one thing with this psychic stuff, another popped up out of nowhere? Abby grumbled to herself as she dragged the old fixtures from the powder room out onto the back porch. I didn’t ask for any of it. To be fair, it had brought her and Ned together, but it had been a bumpy ride so far, and she still had a lot of unanswered questions, and seemed to keep adding more. She went back down the hall to collect the torn pieces of sheetrock and the scuffed and grubby floor tiles in a large plastic bag, and she planned to toss them into the trash or the recycling container—after she’d figured out which pieces were acceptable. When the ridiculously small room—it couldn’t be more than five feet by three feet—had been cleared of debris, she stopped and looked at it critically. The sheetrock had been applied directly over the old plaster, which was in sorry shape after all the digging of holes for the plumbing and the hammering of nails. It was probably beyond salvage now, or not worth the time to patch and smooth it all.

She searched for evidence of earlier use. Was there a shadow of some long-gone shelves? A random coat hook? Nothing leapt out at her. She vacuumed out the intersection where the walls met the floor. There were plain baseboards still in place, but there had been space behind them to hide that wrench. If Jack’s grandfather hadn’t done the plumbing, how could he have left his wrench in the space? Or maybe it had been his last job before retiring, having clearly lost his skills. But why then would Jack have been so upset to find it there?

After Ned had left earlier, she’d done a quick online search of property transactions, and she had found a record of a deed for the property in the late 1890s, when the Foster family had sold it to the Baxters. She logged in to a genealogy program and checked the censuses for 1900 and the next few decades and found, as Ned had guessed, that there was a servant living in the house in 1930—and her name was Mary Maguire. Interesting—odds were good that there was a connection with Jack’s family. If Mary Maguire had been nineteen in 1930, as the census showed, she would have been born in 1911—which would make her the right age to belong to Jack’s father’s generation. But that still didn’t explain Jack’s reaction.

She was startled by a knocking at the front door. She wasn’t paranoid about opening the door to people she didn’t know, since the neighborhood seemed safe enough to her, but she should pay attention. Too bad this “sensing” ability of hers didn’t seem to identify danger, only people who were long gone. She walked down the hallway to the front door and peered through the frosted—original—glass panels and saw a pleasant-looking young man. She hoped he wasn’t selling anything, but she opened the door anyway. “Can I help you?”

“You’re Abigail Kimball? I’m Bill Maguire—you met with my father, Jack, yesterday.”

“Yes, I did. Then he left in a hurry. Is he all right?”

“Yes, more or less, but he wanted me to explain what happened. Do you mind if I come in?”

“Do you have any ID?”

The man smiled. “Will the company truck be enough?” He nodded over his shoulder at the van parked at the curb.

“I guess that will do.” Abby smiled back. “Why don’t we sit in the kitchen? You want some coffee? It’s already made.”

“Sure, that would be great.” He followed her down the hall to the kitchen in back.

When they were seated, with coffee, Abby said, “Did your father have some sort of medical problem yesterday? He looked very upset. Did he tell you?”

Bill stared into his coffee. “This may be kind of hard to explain. No, he doesn’t have any kind of heart condition or anything like that, but the Maguire side of the family has always been . . . different.”

“In what way?” Abby prompted.

“His father’s people were Irish, and maybe you’ve heard that the Irish are big into kind of supernatural stuff, like premonitions. Or hearing banshees when somebody’s about to die. That kind of thing.”

Abby suppressed a smile. “Yes, I’ve heard of that. What does this mean for your family?”

“Let me say up front that the family’s kind of split on that stuff. Some people say it’s a load of crap—excuse my language—but others take it seriously. My great-grandfather—he’s the one who started the company, and he passed it on to Dad, and now Dad is working with me. Anyway, Great-Grampa really believed, so much so that some people thought he was crazy. Dad’s father, not so much, but I think Dad’s got the same bug too. You know, seeing things that aren’t there, knowing something that it wouldn’t be possible to know, that kind of thing.”

“So what did he see yesterday?” Abby asked.

“He didn’t want to talk about it, but he said something about his grandfather’s wrench—something that scared him. Were you there then?”

“I was. He said when he touched it, it felt like an electric shock, and he dropped it fast. But there was no wiring nearby, and when I picked it up, I didn’t feel anything wrong. Not that I’m doubting that he did.”

“Is it still here?”

“Sure,” Abby said. “I figured somebody would come back for it. Do you want it now?”

“I guess . . . I want to touch it, see if Dad really is crazy.”

“Wait, back up. Do you think you’ve inherited this whatever-it-is from your father’s family?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes I see things or feel things that I shouldn’t be able to, you know? Mostly I try to ignore them.”

Oh, yes, I know, Abby said to herself. But right now was not the time to talk about it. She cleared her throat. “Look, I’m not much into organized religion, and I’m not going to tell you you’ve gone mad or you’re possessed by the devil. I try to keep an open mind. If you say you—and others in your family—see things or hear things or feel things, I believe you. I mean, I hope you all haven’t inherited some kind of brain tumor that causes hallucinations, but you say that you believe that something else is going on.”

Bill didn’t look particularly happy. “Yeah. But we’ve never put a name to it or looked into it scientifically, or anything like that. I do know that Dad was seriously rattled yesterday, and I know that Great-Grampa spent a lot of his later years drinking too much—the family thought that it was to shut out the voices. I thought he’d made up that description. It never occurred to me that he was actually hearing something.”

“Wait here,” Abby said. She stood up and went out into the hallway, where she’d left the wrench on a table. She picked it up—still no buzz that she could feel—and brought it back to the kitchen, laying it in the center of the table. “That’s it.”

“Oh.” Bill looked at if it was going to bite like a snake. “Looks normal. That dab of paint on the end? That’s the way Great-Grampa and then Grampa marked all their stuff, so it wouldn’t get mixed up with anyone else’s. Don’t recall that I’ve ever seen this one, but then, most wrenches look pretty much alike, don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t really know, I don’t use tools much,” Abby said. “Are you going to touch it?”

“I guess,” Bill said reluctantly, and reached out a tentative hand, laying it on the wrench handle.

“Anything?” Abby asked after half a minute.

Bill shook his head. “Feels kinda warm, maybe, but nothing scary. It’s just a wrench.”

There was one more thing Abby wanted to try, though it meant that Bill might leave and never come back. But she had to know. She reached out one hand and laid it over his, which rested on the wrench.

The blood drained from his face as he looked up at her across the table. “What the . . . !”

Abby had felt enough, and withdrew her hand. “Sorry I didn’t ask first, but I needed to know something. You felt something, and I’m going to guess it’s the same thing your father felt yesterday, only maybe not as strong. But before you head for the door, let me say something. You’re not crazy, and I’m not a witch. Some people appear to have the ability to sense or feel some kind of energy from people who are no longer living, but who may have left some residue or charge behind, in objects like that wrench. Is there a story behind that wrench?”

Bill nodded without speaking, his gaze never leaving Abby’s face.

“Look, I know you’re going to need to process this. And to talk with your father. But I’d be really grateful if you’d come back and talk to me, the two of you together. If you don’t come back, I’ll understand. If you do but you tell me I’m crazy, I’ll accept that—not that I’d agree with you. But if you’re interested in learning about this thing that’s been running through your family for at least three generations, that’s a conversation I’d love to have with you.”

The color was beginning to creep back into Bill’s face, and he managed a half smile. “You still need plumbing done?”

“Yes, I do.”

Bill pulled out his cell phone, punched some keys, and apparently pulled up a calendar. “You free tomorrow morning, say, nine?”

“I can be.”

“Let me talk to Dad, and maybe we can swing by then and talk.” He stood up quickly. “This sure has been an interesting meeting, Ms. Kimball.”

“For me too, Bill. And I’m Abby. Let me show you out.” Abby was careful not to touch him as they walked toward the front door. She watched as he went out and climbed into the van in front, then she locked the door behind him. It was only when she got back to the kitchen that she realized he had left the wrench behind on the table. Deliberately? She wasn’t sure. She cautiously laid a hand on it: nothing. Whatever was going on with it, it seemed to be specific to the Maguire family. Now the question was, was there some event generations back that had left its mark on this prosaic tool, which had been stashed behind a wall? She was beginning to think that was no accident—someone had hidden it.

Why? Was there some important event back then that had started all this? And then been picked up by the “fey” Maguires? Unless it was a murder, Abby doubted that it would have made the news. That left the family: what did they know? Was the Mary Maguire from the census a member of that family, and had something happened to her? If so, who had she told, and what?

And what was she supposed to do with this information? Talk with Ned, for a start. Without warning she had introduced class and ethnicity into their already messy theories. Of course, she could be completely wrong, and there was nothing here except some drunken retellings passed down through the family, about some event that might have happened before most of the tale-tellers were born.

Well, Abby, if this was easy, people would have figured it out a long time ago. Now it was time to go make dinner and figure out what the next step would be.

She decided to distract herself with a complicated recipe, and was whisking a sauce in a sauté pan while keeping an eye on a different pan that threatened to boil over, when Ned walked it. “Need a third hand?” he asked.

“Hey, if Julia Child could do it, I can. Dinner in thirty.”

“Days or hours?”

“Minutes, idiot. You going to watch and make snide comments?”

“I’ll pass. I’m going to change clothes.”

When he returned fifteen minutes later, Abby had managed to subdue the food rebellion and was collecting plates and cutlery. Ned sat down at the table—at a safe distance—to watch. “Are we celebrating something?”

“Not exactly. Mostly I’m working out my frustrations.”

“Do I dare ask, what frustrations?”

“Wait till the food’s on the table and I’ll explain.”

“I think I’ll pour us some wine,” Ned said thoughtfully.

“You do that.”

Food on the table, wineglass in hand, Abby began to feel calmer. When Ned quirked an eyebrow, she said, “It’s about the plumber.”

“The one you talked to yesterday, who had an issue with the wrench? Which I notice is still sitting on the table here.”

“Yes, it is, and for all I know it’s cursed. Jack—the dad—sent his son Bill over to apologize or try to explain or something. We had an interesting talk. It seems like whatever this thing is, it runs in the family. Great-Grampa, who founded the company, used to hear voices, or so he said. He was born in Ireland. Jack, his grandson, grew up hearing about Great-Grampa’s stories. Bill, Jack’s son, doesn’t think either one of them was exactly crazy, but he doesn’t know what to believe. By the way, he touched the wrench, and nothing happened. But when I put my hand on his, he got it.”

“So now you’re a spare battery for psychic powers?”

“Don’t laugh at me,” Abby said. “I just wanted to see what happened. It worked, but I think I scared Bill—he cleared out fast, leaving the wrench behind. I don’t know if he or his father will ever come back. But if you want me to take a wild guess, I think it’s possible that something happened to Mary Maguire when she was working here in this house, and it may have involved violence as well as the wrench, or else that charge or whatever it is wouldn’t have lingered this long.”

Ned looked confused. “Wait—a Mary Maguire worked in this house?”

“That’s what the 1930 census said. And given the circumstances, I’m willing to guess she was a relative. Maybe Great-Grampa’s sister or daughter.”

“So you looked up who lived here.”

“Of course I did. It was your idea, remember?”

“So it was. I just figured that if you and I weren’t picking up anything here, it didn’t matter. It never occurred to me that a stranger would make a connection. What are you going to do now?”

“See if there’s any more online information. I don’t feel right asking Bill or Jack, unless they volunteer. Look, let’s eat while this is still hot, okay?”

“A good idea. And then I’ll need to digest—pun intended—what you’ve told me, as well as dinner.”