“Especially in the heat of the summer.” Rainbow agreed. “It’s like having a private corner of paradise.”
“It seems you’re quite the gardener.”
“I try. It makes me feel so peaceful to tend to my plants, and I get a lot of joy out of watching them grow. I suppose some people would feel overwhelmed by how many I have.”
“I don’t. I like them.” He drank half his glass of iced tea before he spoke again. “I have to admit, I have no idea where to start looking for someone who would want to scare people out of the Towers.”
“Me either,” Rainbow said. “I suppose we could talk to some real estate agents to see if anyone has expressed an interest in the property.”
“That’s a good idea. In fact, that’s a great idea.” He brightened considerably at the prospect of having something useful to do, and Rainbow felt an inkling of genuine liking for him. “If developers are looking around, real estate agents should have heard something.”
“You’d think so.” She hesitated a moment. “Have you heard what’s been happening to Nellie Blair?”
“Something about a poltergeist? I haven’t heard the details.”
“A friend gave her a vase of silk flowers just before she died. Nellie originally complained that she couldn’t keep the flowers in the vase. Every time she turned around, she’d find the flowers had been dumped on the floor, even though the vase was still upright.”
Jake nodded. “That would make anyone uneasy.”
“Considering Nellie’s an elderly woman living alone, she’s handling this remarkably well—better than Í might. Anyway, she put the vase in the closet so she wouldn’t be disturbed anymore.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t call the police.”
“And tell them what?”
He nodded, giving her a rueful smile. “I see your point. Nothing else was disturbed?”
“Not a thing. Anyway, she came home yesterday and found the vase and flowers had been moved from the closet back to her bedside table.”
“Good Lord! We need to check it for fingerprints.”
Rainbow suddenly remembered Nellie taking the vase from her and felt her stomach sink with disappointment. “That won’t work. She took it from me and polished it with the tail of her shirt while we were talking. Neither one of us was thinking about fingerprints.”
“I’ve got to talk to her. If it happens again, she shouldn’t touch it. We’ll get the police to come and dust it.”
“I guess.”
He looked knowingly at her. “But you don’t think the agent was a person, do you.”
Rainbow shook her head. “I felt a presence in that room, Jake. You can laugh at me if you want.”
“I’m not laughing. Remember, I said I respect what you believe.”
She was still finding it difficult to accept that after the vehemence of his initial reaction. Although to be fair, his initial reaction had been born of an admirable desire to protect the other residents of the building. “Well, I felt a presence,” she said firmly. “I even identified it by name, and Nellie recognized it as her friend’s name. She said she wouldn’t be bothered anymore by the flowers being dumped on the floor.”
“We still need to investigate.”
“Of course.” Rainbow met his gaze straightly. “But I’ll tell you right now, Jake, it’s not going to happen again.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Yes I can. The ghost simply wanted Nellie to know she was there, and that she was happy. There won’t be any more trouble in Nellie’s apartment.”
“Well, that’s fine, too. I’m not going to complain if the whole thing just goes away. I don’t care who’s right or wrong about this, I just want to be sure the residents are safe.”
“Well, I’d be more positive of that if I hadn’t felt a different presence in Olive Herschfeld’s apartment.”
She had to give Jake credit. He looked as if he were trying to swallow an apple whole, and about to choke on it, but when he finally spoke it was to say neutrally, “Really?”
Her initial reaction was to call him on his patent disbelief. But then she decided that if he could work so hard to keep their new peace agreement, the least she could do was gracefully ignore the things that danced across his expressive face. She needed a minute, though. Frankly, she had never known anyone to rile her as quickly as Jake Carpenter could. She didn’t at all like this unexpected side of herself.
“It was a distinctly different presence,” she said finally, keeping her own tone neutral. “A male presence.”
“How would you—” He broke off. “No, I’m not going to ask that.”
“Why not?” she asked, a trifle tartly. “You want to know how I can tell if a presence is male or female without seeing the obvious—er—signs.”
“Well, yes.”
She shrugged. “Men and women feel different psychically. I don’t know why.” Nor was she going to go any further than that. What was the point of trying to explain things he wouldn’t believe anyway?
He was looking at her with a kind of perplexity, as if she were an interesting scientific problem—or a bug under a microscope. She had the strong feeling that this was going to be a rocky association no matter how hard they tried to get along.
She repressed a sigh and looked away, wishing it weren’t so difficult to get acceptance. She didn’t ask for belief; simple acceptance would do. But that too often seemed beyond the ability of the doubters.
“Have you ever …” He hesitated as if seeking his words with care, then continued, “Have you ever mistaken the sense of a living presence for a ghost?”
“What do you mean?”
He looked almost embarrassed to be discussing this, and it took him a minute to reformulate his question. “Well… I can almost swallow the possibility that you might sense that someone had been in a room a little while ago. I mean, there are so many ways we might detect that—smells, like perfume, or something moved around. I can easily credit that you might be more sensitive to these things than the rest of us. So I was just wondering if you might have detected that someone other than the Herschfelds had been in their apartment.”
Again she felt a flare of impatience and quashed it. She could be offended by his determination to believe there was a logical, ordinary explanation for her extraordinary ability, or she could choose to accept it as honest inquiry. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—for now.
“No, I wasn’t mistaking it. But I can’t explain to you how I know the difference.”
She could see him mentally throwing up his hands, but after a moment all he said was, “All right.”
Just then her doorbell sounded. Rainbow was surprised to hear it, since it almost never worked. The salt air was forever corroding the electrical contacts and shorting them out.
“I guess I’d better be going,” Jake said, rising. “I’m sure you have plenty to do. I’ll nose around and see what I can find out, and let you know.”
Rainbow was at once relieved and disappointed to end their conversation. The worst thing about Jake Carpenter, she decided suddenly, was that he made her feel so many contradictory things, not the least of them a strong sexual attraction.
Jake followed her to the door, standing to one side as she opened it.
Miss Mary Todd stood there, just about to press the bell again with the tip of her cane. “Ah, there you are,” she said, her dark eyes gleaming with satisfaction. “And Jake Carpenter, too. My, my. Have I interrupted a powwow for peace?”
“I was just leaving,” Jake said, leaving the pointed question unanswered.
“Good,” said Mary. “Because you both have to come to the Towers at once. The ghosts have flipped their wigs!”
Six
« We can all ride over on my golf cart,” Mary suggested.
Jake looked at it. “Let’s just go in my car. It’s air conditioned.”
Rainbow agreed. “It’ll be cooler, Mary.” Indeed, the humidity was almost stifl
ing.
Mary shook her head. “I don’t want to be without my wheels. You never know when you might need to make a quick getaway.”
Rainbow grinned at her. “What have you been up to?”
Mary assumed an expression of innocence. “Absolutely nothing, gal. Remember who you’re talking to. At my age, one never gets up to anything.”
“Yeah, right,” Rainbow said. “And the moon is made of green cheese.”
“Have you been there?” Mary demanded. But there was a twinkle in her eye that prevented Rainbow from taking her seriously.
Rainbow suspected that Jake had difficulty restraining his amusement when Mary donned a custom-painted lavender motorcycle helmet with a dark visor over her snow-white coiffeur. He stopped looking amused when Mary accelerated her cart to thirty-five miles an hour, the highest posted speed limit in Paradise Beach.
He grimaced when she took a corner on two wheels, scattering some seagulls who had been dining on a pile of discarded french fries. The birds shrieked angrily as they took to the air, and a couple of them followed Mary down the road as if they wanted to attack the cart.
“Why didn’t she just telephone?” he asked, as they rounded the corner after her. “She could get herself killed, driving that cart at this speed.”
“I don’t know,” Rainbow replied. “Mary has her reasons, although they’re not always clear to anyone else.”
He shook his head. “If she rolls that thing, I don’t think the helmet is going to be much help.”
“At least she’s wearing one.”
The parking lot of the Towers was filled with residents, clustered together as if they were afraid. Mary rolled into their midst, scattering senior citizens in every direction before she came to a stop.
“The woman needs a keeper,” Jake said, as he wheeled his Explorer into an empty spot safely away from the milling residents.
Rainbow climbed out of the car to hear someone saying, “For God’s sake, Mary! You could have killed someone.”
Mary, pulling her helmet off, shook her head. “Whether that would be a tragedy remains to be seen. But I do need to get my brakes checked. If I’m going to hit someone, it ought to be on purpose.”
Nellie Blair spied Rainbow and called out to her. “Thank goodness you’re here! The place is going haywire. The phones don’t even work.”
“What’s happening?” she asked.
Nellie shook her head. “Things are floating all over the place! We must have a whole crowd of ghosts!”
“I wonder,” said Bill Dunlop, “if there’s a word for a crowd of ghosts. Gaggle? I think I like gaggle of ghosts.”
Olive Herschfeld frowned at him. “This isn’t funny, Bill.”
“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” he told her. “I was trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich in my toaster oven, but the damn thing wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to get the sandwich into it.”
“You don’t make a grilled cheese sandwich in an oven!” said a small woman in a muumuu. “You make it in a frying pan!”
Bill looked at her. “That wouldn’t hold still, either!”
“I was trying to water my flowers,” said another woman. “Every time I reached for it, the watering can danced away, and twice it spat at me!”
A chubby woman with a black streak of mascara running up her heavily rouged cheek complained, “It grabbed my makeup right out of my hand and smeared it on my face!”
Rainbow looked at Jake and read a mixture of doubt and curiosity on his face. “Is it happening all at once?” she asked.
A chorus of voices answered her: “Of course!” “Yes!” “You’d better believe it!”
“It seemed to start all at once,” Ellis said, taking the role of spokesman. “We all came running out into the halls at about the same time, complaining that things were flying around our apartments.”
“Is it still going on?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s wanted to go back in and find out.”
Rainbow looked at Jake. “I guess that explains why Mary didn’t just call me.”
“Apparently. Well, I’ll go in and take a look.”
“Not without me, you won’t.” He shook his head. “It might be dangerous.”
“Somehow I doubt it.”
“Rainbow, if someone really is trying to scare the residents out of the building, they won’t care if someone gets hurt.”
“Scare us out?” This appalled question came from Abe Levinson. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
“Real estate,” Mary said, tapping her cane on the ground for emphasis. “Amazing, what people will do for a piece of beachfront property. My own nephew tried to have me committed.”
“But it’s a ghost,” said Nellie. “It has to be. No human being could make all of that happen at once. In one unit, maybe. But not in all of them.”
“Ghosts!” said the man Rainbow had met on the elevator with her uncle. Harvey Little, she seemed to remember his name was. His tone was scornful. “What’s the matter with you people? Are you all senile?”
Sixty pairs of eyes glared at him. Harvey was one of the youngest residents, but he was still old enough to know better.
“I think we should all go in there together,” Zach Herschfeld said. “That way, if anyone is in there, we’ll catch him.”
“If he doesn’t get out the door while we’re all looking inside,” Jake pointed out.
“We can watch the doors,” a man said. “We only need a few of us to keep an eye out. But you won’t be able to get in our units without keys.”
“Oh, no,” a woman in red said, “I didn’t bring my key. I was so scared I just ran out!”
Jake looked at Rainbow. “The doors are like a hotel. “ They lock automatically.”
Within a few minutes it was ascertained that a good quarter of the residents had abandoned ship without their keys.
“Senile,” said Harvey Little. “What did I say?”
“Shut your damn mouth,” shouted a tall man at the rear of the crowd. “Senility has nothing to do with it!”
“What would you know?” Little shouted back. “Your brain is so old it’s got cobwebs!”
“What an obnoxious little man,” Mary said loudly, poking him in the stomach with her cane.
“Don’t you lay a hand on me,” Little said. “I’ll call the police.”
Mary raised her cane until it was right between his eyes. “Yes, they’ll certainly believe that an eighty-year-old woman attacked you.”
“I have witnesses!”
“I didn’t see a tiling,” said a man in a fuschia shirt and slacks.
A chorus of “Me neither” rose from other onlookers.
Mary Todd smiled. “You see? No one would believe it. Now, close your mouth and mind your manners. Children should be seen and not heard.”
Laughter greeted her sally. Harvey Little turned so red that Rainbow feared he might be having a stroke, but he didn’t say another word.
“Look,” Ellis said, “while we’re standing here squabbling, we don’t know what’s going on inside. Maybe everything’s stopped. But if we don’t get in there soon, we might never discover what’s happening.”
Rainbow turned and headed for the lobby doors. She wasn’t afraid of ghosts, and she didn’t particularly care whether anyone followed her. In fact, she thought it might be easier to detect what was going on if she didn’t have nearly sixty people running around and gabbing.
Jake apparently had the same idea. He asked everyone to remain outside until he and Rainbow had had a chance to look around. Apparently the residents, who had already been treated to the ghosts’ hijinks, weren’t really all that eager to go back inside.
“I told you,” said an anonymous man’s voice behind them, “that we ought to have a master key for all the doors in the complex.”
“There used to be one, back when the building was first built,” someone else said. “But so many people have come and gone and changed the locks…”
“I don’t like the idea that just anyone could get into my unit if they got hold of the master key,” said Nellie Blair.
“It would have to be locked up, of course. But look what it’s going to cost us now for a locksmith …”
Jake and Rainbow exchanged glances.
“Maybe,” said someone else, “we can get a volume discount from the locksmith.”
“Add that to your senior citizens’ discount, and the locksmith would probably have to pay you to come out here,” Mary said drily.
Jake and Rainbow stepped into the lobby and, the doors closed behind them.
“They’re going to be arguing the key issue for a while, it sounds like,” Jake remarked.
“It’s easier than talking about what they saw in here.”
“Maybe so.”
Rainbow paused in the lobby and closed her eyes, trying to let the atmosphere of the building seep into her. Everything was quiet now. Unusually quiet. If anything was still happening, it was happening silently.
Having Jake beside her made her feel edgy. She wanted to reach out and feel the building’s silence, to find whatever might be inhabiting it, but all she could feel was the heat of Jake’s presence, the awareness running along her nerve endings like a faint anxiety she couldn’t shake. Somehow the man seemed to exude sex appeal with every breath he took, and she seemed to have receptors that were determined to note it.
Finally, feeling exasperated, she opened her eyes. “I need to walk around.”
He nodded. “Me too. You might be able to sense what’s going on from here, but I need to see it.”
She gave him credit for managing to say that without sarcasm.
Just then the doors behind them opened. They turned to see a small squad of men entering the lobby, led by Colonel Jeremiah Albemarle.
The colonel owned a small cottage on the beach which hunkered between the Towers and the Sunset Hotel. Retired from the Welsh Fusiliers, he was a familiar sight to local residents because, in the early mornings he could always be found marching along the dunes with ramrod straightness as if in time to the tune “Men of Harlech.”
He was a tall, slender man, with a bald head and a glorious white Spitfire mustache. Right now he was wearing khaki shorts, a safari shirt, and a pith helmet and looked ready to lead troops into the jungle. Tucked under his arm was a swagger stick.
Chasing Rainbow Page 8