Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4)

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Book: Watch for the Dead (Relatively Dead Book 4) by Sheila Connolly Read Free Book Online
Authors: Sheila Connolly
Tags: History, Mystery, cozy, Ghosts, cape cod, genealogy, psychic powers, sailboat, shipwreck
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much. Abby wished she could pull over and take a nap too, but she was the grown-up here. They’d had a good day, just like two normal people who didn’t see ghosts. As she drove, Abby wondered idly just how many of her ancestors she was likely to run into throughout Massachusetts. From what little research she had done, it was clear that her families, up the tree, had landed and then spread widely across the state of Massachusetts, with a few excursions into neighboring states, so an encounter could happen anywhere, in theory. But there was one apparent restriction: those ancestors she could see had to be in a place and under great stress to leave a mark that she could perceive. Certainly fleeing a pack of angry Indians shooting arrows at you would be stressful, but unless you stopped to face your pursuers and clung to a tree while they filled you with arrows, you wouldn’t leave a mark. Abby considered whether that tree would have absorbed anything, and then if the tree had been cut down and the wood used . . . She shook herself. She didn’t need to go that far to find those ancestors. It had been bad enough in Salem, where the anxiety level across the town had been extraordinary when her ancestors lived there centuries before. If she walked the streets of Plymouth, would she find crowds of worried ancestors? They’d certainly had some hard times when they first arrived. It seemed absurd, but there wasn’t much she had been able to rule out so far.
    How could she help Ellie deal with this? She herself had been lucky as a child, growing up in New Jersey, since apparently none of her ancestors had lived (or died or suffered) where she had grown up. Of course, that hadn’t prepared her at all to run into them when she moved to Massachusetts. There was no one to blame, since her mother didn’t possess this ability and so couldn’t have warned her. Ellie was here, and there were plenty of family ties for her. But she was still a child, which meant she was open to a lot of experiences and impressions that people generally filtered out as they got older. And what would happen when she reached puberty? Better or worse?
    These thoughts kept her occupied—and awake—all the way back to Falmouth. She was relieved when she pulled up behind “their” house and parked. When the car stopped moving, Ellie roused herself. “Are we there?” she said sleepily.
    “Yes, we are. You had a good sleep. You hungry yet, or would you rather take a walk?”
    “Let’s walk. You think there’s a path to the beach?”
    “Maybe, but I don’t know how far it is. But that’s okay—if we don’t find it in a couple of minutes, we’ll just turn around and come back. Deal?”
    “Deal.”
    Ellie set off at a good pace, and Abby marveled at Ellie’s energy; give her a short nap and she was off again like a wind-up toy. Not that Abby felt old—or only when around children. There was what looked like an informal path, but either the beach was farther than they’d hoped or the path didn’t lead anywhere. “Ellie?” Abby called out to her, since she’d forged ahead. “Let’s save this for another day, okay?”
    Ellie turned to look at her, then trudged more slowly back. “Okay. Tomorrow?”
    “Let’s see what the weather looks like. What do you feel like eating for dinner?”
    “Not lobster!” Ellie said, grinning.
    They turned around and went back the way they had come, this time looking more carefully at the houses along the way. Most of them looked like they dated from around 1900, or not much earlier. Funny to think of this prime piece of real estate being no more than a windswept spit of land a century before. Still, most of the houses were not pretentious, although a couple were—or had once been—kind of over the top. Fancy gingerbread probably wouldn’t stand up too well to the winds and salt spray here, which made the houses seem plainer, less fanciful.
    It was still too early to cook when they reached their

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