Under the Hill(8)

Abby was silent for a few beats. Then she said slowly, “What’s the history of this place?”

Ned lifted the teapot, and when she nodded, he refilled her cup, and his, then sat back. “Well, it’s kind of interesting. For most of the nineteenth century, it belonged to a family named Hawley. They had a nice big farmhouse here. Then in the 1890s, a successful businessman named Flagg bought it and started making some major changes, at least to the way it looked. The structural core is still the farmhouse, but everything that you see, inside and out, is late Victorian.”

“He certainly threw himself into the decorating part—I’ve never seen so much gingerbread in one place!” Abby said, smiling.

“Yes, he was determined to put his stamp on it. I can show you some of the newspaper articles about it. William Flagg brought in woods from all over the country, and if you look around, you’ll see that every doorknob is different. There’s some really beautiful work here.” He took another sip of his tea. “And then something happened—after about ten years, he ups and sells the place to the school next door. After all the fixing up he’d done.”

Abby’s curiosity was piqued. “Did he lose all his money or something?”

Ned shook his head. “He may have—I haven’t done any detailed research. But I do know that he stayed in Waltham—in fact, he ended up living in a smaller house about a mile south of here, for the rest of his life, and he’s buried here.”

“Did he have a family?”

“Yes—a wife and two daughters. The younger one went to the school here. His wife outlived him, but she’s buried next to him. Don’t know what happened to the girls.”

Abby shut her eyes for a moment, trying to remember. “Was one of the girls a lot younger than the other?”

Ned looked at her quizzically. “Yes, I think so. Why do you ask?”

“Because that’s what I saw. There was a man and a woman, and I think they were fighting, or at least they were very angry. And there was a younger woman with a baby. I didn’t think the baby was hers, from the way she held it. Like she wasn’t used to babies.” Was that baby the one they raised as a daughter? And why was the wife so angry?

Ned gave her a long look. Finally he said, “I see. That’s intriguing.”

“You don’t think I’m crazy? Or at least hallucinating?”

He shook his head. “No. I’ve seen—or felt—too many odd things in old houses to brush off experiences like yours. Have you ever had an experience like this before?”

Abby shook her head vehemently. “No, never. In fact, people have accused me of having no imagination. I’m usually the practical one in any group—you know, the designated driver, the one with the maps and all. That’s why this is so weird.”

Ned was silent. Abby watched him anxiously and wondered what was going through his mind—like calling in professional help to take her away. She was relieved when he finally spoke.

“Miss, uh—you know, I don’t even know your name?”

“Oh, right. Abigail Kimball—mostly Abby.”

“I’m Edward Newhall, mostly Ned. Well, Abby, you’ve certainly come up with a pretty puzzle.”

“Why? What do you think that . . . experience was?”

“At a guess, I’d say you stumbled on a past scene that somehow got stuck here. No, that doesn’t make sense. You had a vision of something from the past? Or you have an extremely overactive imagination that filled the room with people, like it was a play. Are you sure you’ve never been here before?”

“Never. I’ve never even been in this state before, or at least not since I was a kid, and then it was just passing through on the way to somewhere else. I’ve only been here a few weeks, and I’ve been so busy getting settled that I haven’t seen much of the neighborhood, much less Boston.”

“What brought you here, if you don’t mind telling me?”

“I came with my boyfriend. He got a job offer, and in a couple of weeks, here we were.” Was it her imagination, or did Ned look a little disappointed when she mentioned the “boyfriend”?

If he had, he recovered quickly. “Well, Abby, do you want to explore this phenomenon a bit further, maybe find out who you were seeing, or would you rather just go home and try to forget the whole thing?”

Abby thought for a moment, teetering in indecision. And then it seemed as though she heard her own voice: No, I’m not just going to forget about this. I want to know what happened, and why. “If I wanted to learn more, what would I do?”

He smiled. “Well, first of all, you could go to the library in town here, find out as much as you could about this place, and about the family. You should talk to Jane Bennett. She runs the local history section, and she’s very good. And there are a lot of local records—microfilms, city directories, that kind of thing. Unfortunately only a portion of it is online, but the library’s a nice place to spend time. There might even be pictures of the people who lived here—maybe you’d recognize someone.”

Abby shivered. “And if I found pictures and they really were the people from my dream? What then?”

“Well, at least you’d know something, that what you saw was real. Look, why not stop in at the library and see what you can find—if you have the time, that is. Do you have a job yet?”