“I really can’t explain the watering can,” he said, deciding that was the safest place to start. “God knows I tried. But the other things I saw—well, if the building were to settle suddenly, things would fly around a bit.”
Instead of arguing with him, everyone nodded, even Rainbow. He had believed that she was fully committed to the idea of ghosts, to the point of explaining everything by their presence. But maybe, since he had been willing to admit he couldn’t explain the watering can, she was willing to admit more than one agency might be at work here. Maybe she wasn’t quite as flaky as he’d believed.
The thought gave him no comfort.
“That’s what Harvey Little was saying,” Ellis remarked, “but the building is supported on bedrock.”
“But one of the pilings might be failing,” Jake said. “If it is, we need to know before it gets worse.”
“What a thought!” said Nellie. “I can’t imagine living in the leaning tower of Paradise Beach.”
“Is there anything we should look for?” Ellis asked.
“Cracks in the ceilings, walls, or floors. Cracks in the exterior of the building.” Jake fell silent a moment, thinking about it. “But… it seems to me if the building were settling unequally, the elevators would be having some problem.” He shook his head. “I don’t know enough about architectural stresses. I’ll need to talk to somebody who does.”
“Well, you’re the association president,” Ellis said. “Go ahead and do what you think is best.”
Jake sensed an ally in Ellis, someone else who wasn’t happy with the ghost idea. Maybe there were other residents who also weren’t half daft. Although, he admitted, that wasn’t really a fair characterization … these people were being faced with inexplicable phenomena. Why shouldn’t they seek every explanation, including the most outrageous? After all, most of them probably weren’t scientists.
He turned to look at Rainbow and felt his heart skip a beat. Her green eyes gleamed with the faintest amusement, but that isn’t what made him catch his breath. No, it was the visual impact of a beautiful woman wearing a pretty seafoam green sundress that exposed smooth shoulders and just a hint of cleavage. It was the sight of perfectly formed calves, smooth and satiny, tinted just the faintest gold by the sun. Why, he found himself wondering, couldn’t this woman have been normal?
Normal women didn’t frighten him the way this one did. Normal women were known quantities who yielded to reason. This woman sat there looking mildly amused, displaying the kind of beauty that belonged on an artist’s canvas, and wrapped in a layer of mystery he could never hope to penetrate because he could never share her belief system.
Down, boy, he told himself sternly, and looked quickly away from her.
“Well,” said Gene, “Nellie and I are going to dinner. Do you want to change first?” he asked her.
“Where are we going?”
“Wherever you like.”
“I know a good, casual seafood place up the boulevard,” she suggested. “We can go as we are.”
Gene smiled at her. “My kind of woman. I swore I was never going to wear a necktie again.”
Nellie laughed. “There aren’t many places around here where you need one. The courthouse, maybe.”
He laughed and rose, helping her out of her chair. Over his shoulder he said to Rainbow, “Don’t wait up for me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she answered drily.
“I need to go, too,” Mary said. “I’ve got a bridge game.” She headed for her golf cart, followed by Ellis Webster, who was worried about her brakes and offered to take a look at them for her.
Left alone at the table, Rainbow and Jake exchanged uncertain looks. Rainbow reached for her small purse, getting ready to leave.
“I’ll drive you home,” Jake said.
She shook her head. “I can walk. It really isn’t that far.”
“No, I’d like to take you. But first, would you mind coming up to my place for just a minute? I haven’t checked it yet, and I’m wondering what it looks like.”
“Sure.” She gave him a smile. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll find something there that proves it was all caused by humans.”
Her response, far from reassuring him, seemed like a double-edged sword. Was she implying that he might have rigged something in his apartment to bolster his case, and wanted her there when he pretended to find it?
But he couldn’t tell. And he didn’t feel inclined to endure the wrath that would probably result if he came right out and asked her.
“I wonder,” he said, as they stepped into the elevator, “what gave Colonel Albemarle and his cronies the idea that a Dustbuster would work on ghosts.”
She gave him an amused look. “I take it you haven’t seen Ghostbusters.” He was just unlocking his unit door when another one of the residents stepped off the elevator. The man spied him and came toward him with the look of someone on a mission. He was a plump man with very short legs, and he waddled like a duck as he strode toward them.
“Just a minute, Carpenter,” the man said.
Jake turned and waited.
“You’re president of the association. I want to know what you’re going to do about the mess my unit is in.”
“Why should I do anything, Mr. Hanes?”
“Because this mess isn’t my doing! It’s the association’s problem. There’s something wrong with the whole building. Whether it’s ghosts or settling, I don’t care, but cleaning up should be the association’s responsibility.”
“Considering that everyone is in the same mess, it makes more sense for each of us to do it ourselves,” Jake replied reasonably enough.
“My wife isn’t well! There’s no way she can clean it all up.”
Rainbow opened her mouth, but Jake beat her to the punch. “You look like you have two functioning arms and two functioning legs. Do it yourself.”
The man’s mouth drew into a thin line. “You have no sense of responsibility, do you?”
Jake just looked at him.
“It’s your fault we have this problem.”
“How could it be my fault?”
“It’s your uncle who’s haunting this place! You ought to repair the damage he’s done.”
Jake could feel his jaw setting. He looked down at Rainbow, wondering what she had been saying and to whom. Then he looked at his unpleasant neighbor again and something strange came over him. When he spoke, he had the oddest feeling that someone else had taken control of his mouth.
“If my uncle’s haunting this place,” he said, “then he has a damn good reason. And you’d better be careful, or I’ll sic him on you!”
The man’s eyes widened, and he looked like a boiler ready to burst its seams. Evidently he thought better of exploding, however, because he turned sharply and stormed away to the elevator—if a duck could storm.
Rainbow looked up at Jake, and there was no mistaking the smile that danced in her eyes. “That was brilliant,” she said. “You turned the tables on him beautifully.”
“Which leads me to something else,” he said firmly. “I want a word with you, Ms. Rainbow Moonglow. I want to know just what the hell you’re telling people.”
Turning, he shoved his key into the lock and opened his door.
Then he froze, looking with disbelief at his living room.
Eight
“My goodness!” Rainbow said in a hushed voice.
Jake didn’t say anything at all; he simply stared.
Perched, upside down, in the middle of the ceiling, was his uncle’s easy chair.
The two of them stood frozen on the threshold. Jake finally spoke in a hoarse voice. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“No,” Rainbow whispered, “but I don’t know much about ghosts.”
“No? Then how come you’re supposed to be an authority?”
“You want the truth? My mother talks to ghosts. Me, I just read tarot cards and pick up psychic impressions.”
Jak
e couldn’t take his eyes from the chair, though it was difficult not to turn and look at Rainbow, to see if she was serious. “Talks to ghosts?”
“She’s a trance channeler.”
“Oh.” He’d heard about that somewhere. If Rainbow’s abilities strained his credulity to the breaking point, trance channeling was something he classified in the category of “How Dumb Can People Be?”
“I’d have asked her to handle this, except she’s on a cruise right now.”
“Oh,” he said again. Any other words seemed pointless. “It has to be attached to the ceiling somehow,” he said finally.
“It certainly wasn’t put there by the building settling.”
“Obviously.” He wanted to kick himself. While he’d been running around checking on other people’s units, his own had apparently been wide open to some jokester. That made him mad.
He stepped into the room, approaching the chair, but Rainbow grabbed his arm, halting him.
“We don’t know if it’s attached.”
He looked at her. “Of course it’s attached! I’m sorry, Rainbow, but I just don’t see my uncle bench-pressing his easy chair.”
“It was his chair?” That seemed to have significance for her.
“Purely coincidental,” he said firmly. “Easier to hang from the ceiling than the sofa.”
She looked dubious. “Even if it is attached,” she said finally, “we don’t know how it’s attached. It could fall on you. We need to get help.”
He had to admit she was right. That was a heavy chair, and if it fell on his head, he’d probably spend a good, long time in a body cast.
“I wish my mother were here,” Rainbow said. “Well, not really. I mean, she can be difficult and embarrassing. But she’d find out what’s going on here, even if it is just some lunatic prankster.”
“She deals in living people, too?”
“Well, of course! Her guides answer people’s questions all the time. They see more than we do, so the information is often useful.”
“Really.” He hoped the word was sufficiently noncommittal. With that chair hanging in the middle of his living room, he was suddenly reluctant to piss Rainbow off. He had the creepy feeling that maybe he was mistaken about what was going on here. And if he was, he didn’t want any psychic getting angry enough to bean him with a La-Z-Boy.
Which was an absolutely insane thought for him to be having, he realized, but he was rapidly getting to that point. The peaceful life he’d envisioned having in Paradise Beach had yet to materialize. Putting out a well fire was beginning to sound like a picnic by comparison. There, at least, he would be in control.
“Look,” he said after a moment, “I’m going to go stand on the couch and see if I can tell how that chair is attached.”
She nodded. “Just don’t get anywhere under it. Please.”
He wanted to kick himself for saying it, but he said it anyway. Giving her a big grin, he said, “Aw, gee, you really do care!”
Her cheeks colored. “Of course I care!” she snapped. “I’d care about anyone!”
“Right.” He let his smile say otherwise, even though he was acting like a jerk. What the hell. Everyone around here was acting like a jerk. Why shouldn’t he?
He edged around the chair and stepped up onto the sofa, trying to see if there were bolts or something else holding the chair to the ceiling. And of course, he couldn’t see a damn thing. The legs of the chair seemed to be sitting as comfortably on the ceiling as they would have sat on the floor.
He reached out to give it a test push, but Rainbow stopped him with a cry.
“Don’t!” she said. “If that thing falls off the ceiling it’ll be damaged. It might even damage the floor.”
He drew his hand back, acceding to her wisdom.
“I wish we had Colonel Albemarle’s men right now. Four or five people ought to be able to handle that chair without too much trouble.”
“Well, let’s go get some help,” Rainbow suggested. “There’s a whole bunch of people down on the patio.”
Jake jumped down from the couch and paused to look up at the chair. “They better not have put bolts in my ceiling,” he grumbled.
“Well, like I said, there’s one thing we can say for sure—that chair didn’t get up there because the building settled.”
He looked at her and saw again that faint glimmer of amusement in her gaze. She was enjoying herself, he realized. He wished he could say the same about himself.
Lucy looked at Joe, who was chuckling over Jake’s response to the chair.
“Bolts!” Joe said, chortling. “As if I need to use anything like that.”
“Maybe you should put the chair back down, Joe,” Lucy said. “You’re going to drive Jake nuts.”
“That’s exactly what the boy needs! Besides, I don’t want him sitting in my favorite chair. Nobody sits in that chair but me.”
“But you can’t leave it on the ceiling forever—can you?”
Joe grinned at her. “Watch me, sweetie.”
In spite of herself, Lucy started to laugh, too. It was funny, she thought. Besides, she was developing a real fondness for Rainbow, and it would be nice if they could help the young woman convince Jake that there was more to the world than met the eye. Getting into the spirit of the thing, she put the newspaper on the seat of the chair.
“Let him explain that one away,” she said.
*
Rainbow and Jake returned to his unit with Ellis Webster, Zach Herschfeld, and Abe Levinson. Their three companions had been warned that the chair was on the ceiling, but that didn’t keep them all from gaping as they hesitantly entered the apartment.
That’s when Jake saw the newspaper. “How’d that get up there?” he asked. “Beats me,” said Rainbow.
“Well, enough is enough,” Jake said. Striding forward, he stopped to one side of the chair and reached for the newspaper. It came free at his touch and he turned it over, trying to find some sign of glue. Nothing.
And again he felt the uneasy prickling at the base of his skull, the one he’d been having all too often since moving into his uncle’s condo. He passed the newspaper to Rainbow, who examined it, too.
“Nothing,” he said.
Her eyes wide, she looked at him and shook her head. “Maybe I need to see if I can get a hold of my mother. She knows a lot more about this than I do.”
“Sure, why not?” said Jake, who was beginning to feel unreal. “The more the merrier. A few extra fruitcakes will only add spice.”
He wanted to snatch the words back as soon as they escaped his mouth, but it was too late. It didn’t matter anyway. Rainbow didn’t look offended.
“She’s a fruitcake, all right,” she said. “But she’s a knowledgable fruitcake.”
The other three men were edging closer to the chair, all of them looking uneasy. Actually seeing a recliner on the ceiling was a little different from hearing about it, Jake supposed. They circled around it, looking at it from all angles, considering the problem.
“We’d better get some ladders,” Ellis said.
Jake shook his head. “Not just yet. We don’t dare try to pull it down while we’re standing on ladders. If it won’t come away, then we’ll climb up to examine it more closely.”
Everyone agreed with him, so the four men each grabbed one corner of the chair and pulled. It didn’t budge. Jake and Zach, being the tallest of the crew, reached up to grab the chair at the bottom, but no matter how hard they pulled, it didn’t start to come loose … not even when Jake did a pull up, adding his own weight to that of the chair.
“Well, if that doesn’t beat all,” said Abe Levinson.
“It has to be bolted up there,” said Ellis.
“Try moving it to the side,” Rainbow suggested. “If it’s bolted it won’t budge.”
Jake shrugged and reached up, pushing on the chair. And as easily as if it were sliding over smooth ice or ball bearings, it moved. “Great,” he said. “There goes the bolt idea.”
Rainbow read the disgust on his face. She thought this was really exciting, but he obviously found it extremely annoying.
Jake pushed on the chair again, this time from a different direction, and it moved easily. “Maybe if I push it far enough, whatever is holding it up will give way.”
“Maybe,” said Ellis. “But we’d better help you, in case it starts to fall.”
The men grabbed the chair again at the corners and started moving it around. It went everywhere they pushed it: to the side, around in circles, and all the way to the other side of the room. Nothing they did seemed to be working it free.
“Well, hell,” Jake said finally, “I guess I’m just going to have to live with a chair on my ceiling.”
Abe studied the chair. “I guess you could call it modern art. It kind of makes a statement, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Zach. “The statement that ghosts are real.”
Jake scowled. “I’m not ready to accept that.”
“Maybe you aren’t,” Ellis answered, “but I’m getting closer to it with each passing minute.” He looked at Rainbow. “That was Joe’s chair. God help anyone else who sat in it.”
She nodded in agreement. “I can feel the impression of Joe all around it,” she said. “He’s here right now.”
“Then I’m getting out of here,” Jake said. “Right now. I’ve had about all of the cockamamie crap I can take. The chair can stay there until hell freezes over.”
“At least put it where it won’t fall on anything,” Rainbow suggested.
He obliged, giving the chair a shove that sent it into the corner across the room. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “I need air and I need to be someplace where the earth is solid.”
The three other men left them, talking among themselves and shaking their heads. Rainbow waited while Jake checked the rest of the apartment and found nothing amiss. Then, leaving the chair behind them on the ceiling, they went down.
“How about dinner?” Jake said, as they reached the parking lot. “My treat. I need somebody to tell me I’m not really losing my mind.”
Rainbow hardly hesitated. Going home to eat dinner alone didn’t sound half as interesting as dining with Jake, despite all his wrongheaded notions. Besides, she had the sneaky feeling he was beginning to come around to her way of seeing things, however reluctantly. Chairs on the ceiling could have that effect.
Chasing Rainbow Page 11