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

hadn’t been as much at stake with him. Whatever she and Ned had between them, it was serious—and maybe that was why they were both reluctant to take the next step. But she still wasn’t ready to deal with it head-on. Climb one mountain at a time, Abby, she reminded herself as she drifted off to sleep.
    Ned was gone when she woke up the next morning. She wasn’t surprised, since he had to go home and shower and shave and dress and … all that stuff. She could be ready in fifteen minutes, and at work in not much more than that. She stayed in bed a bit longer, sorting out what she wanted to look for. She had stumbled on the Reeds in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery by accident—literally. She had reached out to steady herself on a tombstone, and a whole lot of unexpected things had happened after that. And then she had started following the Reed family line backward. If it was a family tree she was looking at, she supposed that would mean downward, toward the trunk or whatever. In any case, she—with Ned’s help—had figured out that the Reeds buried there had included her three times great-grandmother, and she’d ended up following that line through various towns back several generations. She’d even “met” several of them, if not in the flesh (which was obviously long gone), but through the places they had lived and their tombstones. She had some genealogical link to the Reeds going way back—and so did Ned. Which went a little way to explaining the extraordinary physical or mental connection they had discovered they had between them.
    But what about the other branch of the family? William Reed had married Mary Ann Corey, who had been the first of the family to be buried at Sleepy Hollow, followed by William and several of their children. She’d been Mary Ann C. Reed there, but Abby had figured out her maiden name. And stopped looking.
    The working theory that she and Ned had arrived at, after a series of strange experiences, was that the gene or aptitude or whatever they shared had passed down to them through the Reed line. Was that the only one? Should she be looking for other Reed descendants so they could all compare notes? Heck, maybe there was already a Reed Association or Club that she could tap into. She hadn’t thought to try, any more than she’d thought to Google “hereditary psychic connections” or “genetic hallucinations” or any of the other absurd terms she and Ned had come up with. But now she had an excuse to do some hunting: find another Concord family line, one that she could legitimately research and even present while at her job. The best of both worlds, right?
    With that idea she bounced out of bed and headed to the shower. She arrived at work early, only to find the place a beehive of activity, since the artifact collection was being moved to its temporary home in a different room, to handle the crowds who wanted to see the Patriots’ Day memorabilia, while allowing other patrons (assuming there were any) to view the other items in the collections in a more sedate manner. Of course she got sucked into helping, and the next time she checked, most of the day was gone, and she still had to review the lesson plans and make copies of the handouts for the classes scheduled for the next day. She would have to shelve the Corey hunt until later—but there was still online research she could do at home, at night.
    Once home, she bolted down a quick dinner and booted up the computer and logged into her (expensive!) genealogy program. She already knew that the Reeds had started out in a different town, farther east, but she knew that William had come to Concord to make his mark, starting out as a laborer and rising quickly to carpenter and ultimately to developer. But there were few records of him in Concord, only that he’d posted the banns for his marriage to Mary Ann Corey in a Concord church. But the marriage hadn’t take place there. Or at least, it hadn’t been recorded, although another