Rebecca arrived shortly before noon the next day. After frantically cleaning all morning, Abby had been watching for her, and came out onto the porch to greet her. “I found it!” her mother announced proudly. “I didn’t even need that GPS thingie.”
“Are you planning on staying the night, Mom?”
“Hey, I just got here! But, no, sweetie. From what little you’ve told me, the house isn’t quite ready for visitors, so I didn’t want to impose. Although I’ve really been looking forward to seeing what you’ve done with it. You may not believe it now, but I’ve done my share of wallpapering in my day.”
Abby laughed. “I would like to have seen that.”
“You did, but you were in your playpen at the time. Are we eating in or out?”
“In, I guess. Nothing fancy. But I want to spend the time talking with you, not wrestling with menus.”
“Sounds serious. So let me get the obvious questions out of the way. No wedding? You’re not pregnant?”
“No to both, for now, at least. And Ned and I are not breaking up, either, if that’s your next question. This is about . . . the other thing.”
“You mean the psychics in the family? And I guess I have to include myself, after what happened on the Cape. You know, when we all saw Olivia.”
“Yes, that. Why don’t we go inside and I’ll give you the tour, and then we’ll eat?”
“Sounds good to me.”
Abby led the way into the house, stopping in each room to point out what she had done, or what she was planning to do—eventually. Her mother made appropriate noises, although Abby was pretty sure Victorian was not her mother’s favorite style. They ended up in the kitchen. “I’m thinking I’d like to replace the appliances,” Abby told her, “but first we have to figure out what the room should look like. Was Daddy always oblivious to his surroundings?”
“Well, he never said he wanted to do X, Y, and Z with the places we lived. We worked it out early: he was structural, I was decorative. I suppose if I’d put up wallpaper with giant pandas on it, he might have mentioned it, but we pretty much shared the same simple tastes. And of course, we didn’t have a lot of money when we started, so we couldn’t exactly go wild. We had a sort of checklist of things to be done, and we whittled it down when we had the time and the money, which wasn’t all that often.”
Abby smiled, wondering what “wild” would have been for her staid parents. “I think our philosophy is, keep things as historically accurate as possible, but make sure what you don’t see is modern,” Abby said as she retrieved lunch fixings from the refrigerator. “You want coffee? Tea? Something else?”
“Coffee is fine, dear.” Rebecca fell silent as Abby quickly prepared the meal. When Abby finally sat down across from her, she said, “All right, so you’ve promised me that you don’t have bad news. What was so important that you had to talk with me, rather than email or phone?”
“A couple of things, I guess. One, I dumped this whole psychic business on you on the Cape, and we really haven’t talked since, at least, not seriously. I’d like to know what you’ve made of it, now that you’ve had some time to think about it. Like, have you reviewed your life up until now and found things you might have misinterpreted in the past? Or remembered things you heard or saw with your parents, that you didn’t understand at the time? And I’ll fill you in on what Ned and I have learned, and what we hope to do next.”
Rebecca nodded, but she didn’t appear surprised. “I thought as much. I’ll admit it was a bit of a shock when you explained things to me, and to be honest, on the drive home I really wondered whether you were, well, losing your marbles, I guess. But I know you’ve always been pretty well grounded—”
“Except for Brad,” Abby pointed out quickly.
“Well, yes, but that’s a different category entirely. So I kind of let the whole thing rest in some part of my mind and went about my business. But I found soon enough that I couldn’t just put it away and forget about it, so I’m glad you called and want to talk about it now.”
“Good,” Abby said, with some relief. “Believe me, I know how crazy it all sounds, but it really does help to have someone to talk to about it. So, any insights?”
“Not many. You know the family story, probably better than I do since you’ve started doing some of the genealogy. My side of the family produced a long line of only children, don’t ask me why, and there were things we were never allowed to talk about. As an adult, I came to understand why. I’ve always regretted that we have so little in the way of memorabilia—you know, letters, photos, that kind of thing—and you’ve already got the biggest, the chair. But to be fair, a lot of people choose not to keep old family stuff, just because they don’t like clutter. So that doesn’t mean there was anything lost, just that my grandmother and mother never had much to pass on. But at least it’s easier to get official records these days, what with all the computers.”
“Yes, that does make things easier, but the catch-22 is, you have to know what—or who—you’re looking for in order the ask the right questions.”
Abby and her mother hashed over what few facts they had and added a few guesses while they ate. It was frustrating to Abby that she had so little to work with, and her mother didn’t have much to add, but there was nothing to be done about it. “Mom, did you ever ‘feel’ anything or anyone?”
“You mean, like a ghost?” Rebecca replied.
“Well, that’s one thing people call them, although I don’t like the label much. But, yes, a spirit or visitor from the past.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I can’t say that I ever have. Of course, I was never a fanciful child, and as a younger woman most of my thoughts were about young men. I usually had a job, but mostly that was a kind of placeholder until my real life began.”
“With Daddy, you mean?”
“Yes, with Marvin. Those stories I’ve already told you. He was the one and only, from the beginning, and we’ve been happy together.”
“It showed, and you provided a good example. So even up the line, nobody had any psychic tendencies?”
“Well, I had forgotten that both my mother and my grandmother used to read cards.”
So her memory had been right. “Really?”
“Yes. Not professionally, just for friends, when they were in the mood. I have no idea what they said to their friends when they did this, or if anything they talked about was true or would become true. That’s really about the only thing that seemed out of place in their lives, and we never really talked about it. I’ve never tried it—I don’t think I have the knack. Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?”
“Kind of,” Abby told her. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the history of spiritualism, which was very popular in New England in the nineteenth century. It took a lot of forms—spirit rapping, seances, for example. It’s really hard to know now what was fake and what was real, if any of it was. But there was enough of it going on, with enough skeptics watching like hawks, ready to debunk it, that I get the feeling there was something there. So I did a sort of test this past weekend: I went to a psychic fair here in town.”
“What on earth is that?” Rebecca replied, sitting back in her chair.
“Sort of a fundraising event, I gather. Some organizers gathered together a whole bunch of self-proclaimed psychics with a variety of skills, and then sold tickets for people to talk with however many you wanted. A portion of the money went to some worthy cause—I really wasn’t paying attention.”
“And you decided to try it?”
“Yes, just out of curiosity. And I took Sarah—Ned’s mother—along, so there would be a second set of eyes and ears.”
Rebecca nodded. “That’s right, she has this thing too. And what did you find?”
“Well, between us we sampled six different mediums. All women. All different. Most of them weren’t particularly interesting, although they may have had some talent, in varying degrees. But one of them . . .”
“You clicked?”
“Yes, kind of. Enough so that I wanted to talk to her more, so I invited her over on Sunday to talk one on one.”
“And?”
“I found I wanted to believe her, but I wasn’t sure. Until she was getting ready to leave, and she said something I couldn’t ignore.”
“Which was?”
Abby eyed her mother, wondering how she would react to what she was about to tell her. “She said, ‘Samuel says to tell Rebecca he’s sorry.’”
Rebecca’s eyes widened. “Samuel? As in, my wandering grandfather?”
“That’s my guess. And she knew your name too. One lucky guess I can accept, but two?”
Rebecca’s mouth twitched. “Do you think he’s already apologized to Ruth and Patience?”
Abby smiled. “I wondered the same thing.”