Chasing Rainbow

  Sorrow hovered around her, but it was a familiar sorrow, and she brushed it aside. There was no point, she told herself, mooning over things that would never be hers.

  Paradise Beach was a small community, and the distance between the Towers and her home was an easy walk, even on the sand. They said little, but that didn’t surprise Rainbow. He must feel the gaping distance between them as surely as she did.

  At her door, he bent and brushed a light kiss on her cheek, released her hand, and said good night.

  Rainbow didn’t wait to watch him walk away. She had watched too many men walk away in her life and refused to watch again. Inside, she leaned back against the door, listening to the sounds of the silent house and the faint clatter of palm fronds in the breeze outside.

  Straightening her shoulders, she walked toward the kitchen to make herself some tea. She was alone again except for her family. She ought to be used to that by now.

  Jake walked home, enjoying the balmy breeze and the rustle of the wind in the trees that lined the street. He was used to feeling alone—hell, he had rears of experience at it, ever since he’d taken his first oil job—but he wasn’t used to feeling lonely.

  Tonight he felt lonely, and he knew Rainbow was the cause of it. Oh, she hadn’t intended to be, but she was anyway. First there was her family, so wonderfully close, from what he’d seen of them tonight. He had no family at all anymore, and he missed it more than he wanted to think about.

  And then there was Rainbow, as far out of his reach as if she were cased in glass and living on another planet. He shouldn’t have kissed her. It had done nothing but show him exactly how much was beyond his reach.

  But she had felt so good and so right in his arms. Something inside him had seemed to uncoil and relax into the delicious sea of desire she’d awakened in him, and he’d never had that feeling before, as if he had never before been totally able to let go.

  The feeling was as enticing as the passion she awoke in him, and he was genuinely sorry that he’d never know it again. But to go any further with her would be to trifle with her, because the gaping chasm between them was unbridgeable, and they both knew it.

  He didn’t want to go back to his empty apartment with the chair on the ceiling, and he didn’t want to go back to the feeling of being watched by unseen eyes.

  Much as he hated to admit it, he really was beginning to wonder if Joe were lingering in the apartment, keeping an eye on things.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in an afterlife, because he did. But he had a whole lot of trouble believing that people who had died would bother to linger on earth, disturbing the living and hanging things from ceilings. To his way of thinking, once you moved on, you moved on. There was no reason Joe should want to come back and mix things up, let alone be able to. Life and death were separate universes; and they weren’t supposed to collide.

  Which was maybe a very narrow view, he admitted to himself. If there was life after death, then why shouldn’t the dead be able to communicate with those they had left behind?

  But if Joe was trying to communicate, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. The chair on the ceiling, while being both shocking and fascinating, said nothing.

  Except that maybe Joe was there. And maybe that’s all Joe wanted him to know. Maybe it was the ghostly version of the good-night hug Joe used to give him when he was a child. Maybe it was just Joe’s crazy way of saying, “I love you and I’m still around.”

  He could live with that. Although he could live with it a whole lot better if the furniture would come down off the ceiling.

  He managed to get back into his unit without running into any of the residents, a feat he was beginning to consider a major triumph. Since he had been elected association president, he couldn’t stick his head out the door without being bearded for a conversation or a complaint.

  He shouldn’t feel bad about that, he reminded himself. It was better to know his neighbors than be a stranger in the building, and most of them seemed like genuinely nice people.

  But he was used to a certain degree of mental privacy, and he didn’t feel like he was getting it here. Oh, well.

  Inside the apartment, he stood leaning against the closed door. The light was out. Hadn’t they left it on? It was definitely out now, and the curtains were open. He was sure they’d been closed. Through the uncovered window, he could see his balcony, the shadowy shapes of the furniture out there, and the moon.

  The moon was huge now as it sank toward the water, a silver orb that seemed to hold a smiling face. The Man in the Moon. His uncle said that as a child Jake had talked to the Man in the Moon, carrying on entire conversations with it.

  As he stood there, Jake found himself wondering what had happened to that fanciful child. When had he become so mired in realism that he could no longer feel the magic?

  He had felt magic tonight, though, in his embrace with Rainbow. It should have exhilarated him, but instead it scared him to death.

  There be dragons … he felt as if he were standing on the very edge of the world, in danger of tumbling off.

  Shaking off the melancholy mood, he flipped the light switch and stood stunned. The end table was now on the ceiling.

  “Christ, Joe,” he heard himself say, “what the hell are you up to now?”

  Eleven

  Jake was not in the best of moods when he woke in the morning. He had spent the night tossing and taming, and fighting with the bedclothes and his pillow. He felt as if he’d been in a boxing match, with the remnants of a nightmare preying on his mind. He had dreamed of falling down a deep, dark well, becoming smaller and smaller until he vanished.

  The first word out of his mouth was a curse, and that was unusual. He was typically a bright, cheerful riser, but this morning he felt ornery enough to chew nails.

  And he didn’t want to go into his living room. He avoided it for as long as he could, delaying in the shower until the water ran cold, and brushing his teeth until his gums felt raw—but finally he had to face it. Dressed, he put his hand on the doorknob and offered a silent but heartfelt prayer that his living room would be back to normal.

  Ia fact, if he had any wish at all, it was that the whole mess would go away and he could convince himself it had been some kind of temporary mental aberration resulting from jet lag and culture shock.

  Yet he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  With a sigh, he opened the door, then groaned.

  Not only were the chair and the lamp on the ceiling, but the end table had remained from last night still bearing its load of magazines as well as Joe’s pipe rack, tobacco cannister and ashtray. At least nothing new had been added since he’d turned on the light last night.

  He stood in the bedroom doorway, surveying the insanity his life had become, and tried to decide on the best course of action.

  He could always move out, of course, but he doubted he’d find anything on the beach to rent long term. Tourist season was right around the corner, and everything was probably booked from the first of October.

  Or he could stay right here and try to deal with furniture on his ceiling and the increasingly likely possibility that Joe was trying to tell him something from beyond the grave.

  Neither option was palatable.

  He went into the small galley kitchen to make coffee, and froze when he saw Joe’s favorite mug sitting beside the coffeepot, as if waiting to be filled. That mug had been in the cupboard last night. Of that he was absolutely sure.

  He stared at the mug and accepted the inevitable.

  “Okay, Joe,” he said aloud. “You win. I believe it’s you doing this. God knows how or why. So if you’re trying to tell me something, you’d better find a clearer way to do it. And in the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you’d put the furniture back where it belongs.”

  Nothing changed. Of course, he hadn’t expected it to. That was the whole problem with this. Weird things were happening, but they were happening in such a way that he couldn’t re
ally trust them. Now, if the furniture had moved back, he’d have been able to believe beyond any shadow of a doubt that Joe was behind this.

  But the stuff was still on the ceiling, and he was left in his quandary without answers.

  Mentally throwing up his hands, he started to make coffee.

  “You know, Joe, this is spectacular,” he said to the empty apartment. “I’m impressed. Really. And it’s so very much like you to do something spectacular when simple handwriting on the wall would be far more effective!”

  Although, he found himself admitting, he’d have been more likely to dismiss a signed, handwritten note on the wall. He couldn’t dismiss furniture on his ceiling.

  Okay,” he said. There was a knock at the door, and he put down the coffee cannister and went to answer it. “Okay,” he said again to the living room, you have my attention, damn it! Now let me know what you want.”

  He flung the door open and found Trixie Martins standing there. Trixie was one of the residents he had lately come to recognize from encounters in the hallways. She was about seventy and plainly proud of her bustline, since she always wore tight knit tops in loud colors and push-up bras. Jake found himself continually trying not to stare at her remarkable bust, which always preceded her like the prow of a ship.

  This morning she was wearing a shocking pink T-shirt over her impressive bosom, tight white leggings, high-heeled white sandals, and enough makeup to have decorated the entire female population of the building. Her hair, as usual, was lacquered into a high champagne blond beehive, reminiscent of a long-ago fashion trend.

  “Hi, Jake,” she said. For all her odd looks, Trixie was a genuinely nice person, as far as he could tell. She gave him a warm smile that went a long way toward canceling her tawdry fashion taste. “Do you have company? I heard you talking.” She tried to peer around him.

  “Oh, I was just talking to myself,” he said, trying not to open the door wide enough to let her see how matters had progressed in his living room. “Bad habit.”

  “Oh.” She gave a nervous little laugh and backed up a step, which gave him room to breathe without bumping into her prow—er, bust.

  “How are you?” he asked, holding the door so that little more than his head was visible. He felt like a jerk doing it, because it seemed so unfriendly. “Is something up?”

  “My neighbor. All night.” She rolled her eyes dramatically. “He was pounding on the walls. In fact, it sounded like he was throwing things. Anyway, he kept me up most of the night, and when I complained to him this morning, he slammed the door in my face.” She rose on tiptoe, trying to see past him into the living room.

  Jake straightened a little, blocking her view. “Not very nice.”

  She shook her head. “Anyway, I thought you could have a word with him. We have strict rules about noise, you know. And while I can live with his TV and stereo in the daytime, banging on walls and shouting in the middle of the night just can’t be overlooked.” Now she crouched a little, trying to see between his ear and shoulder.

  He lifted his shoulder toward his ear, doing what he thought was a passable imitation of Quasimodo. “No, of course it can’t.” He stifled a sigh, feeling more like a school principal than a condo association president. “I’ll have a word with him, Trixie. Who is it?”

  “Harvey Little. Thank you, Jake.” She started to mm away, then paused to ask, “Have you learned anything more about what’s been going on around here? The haunting, I mean?”

  He shook his head and banged his cheek on the edge of the door. “We’re still looking into it. I have engineers corning today.”

  She nodded. “Well, I hope you get the furniture off your ceiling.”

  Jake watched her sashay away, realizing glumly that the whole building knew about the mess in apartment and he needn’t even have tried to conceal it.

  He closed the door and stared at his ceiling. ‘Come on, Joe. Cut it out!”

  But nothing moved. And everybody, Trixie included, seemed to be a lot more blase about the tableau on his ceiling than he was. Maybe he should just learn to shrug it off.

  After he had a cup of coffee and a bagel, he went to speak to Harvey Little, resigned to feeling like a jerk yet again. All the building’s occupants were adults, he told himself. Why did they need him to handle things like this? What he should have done was tell Trixie to call the cops the next time Harvey decided to hold a boxing match in his living room.

  Well, it was too late now.

  He had to pound on Harvey’s door three times before he finally heard the lock turn.

  Little poked his head out through a narrow crack. The man looked awful, Jake thought. Bleary-eyed, as if he’d just come off a binge, with dark circles under his eyes.

  “Whaddya want?” Little demanded truculently.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Jake said, as pleasantly as he could manage, “but I had some complaints about noise from your unit last night.”

  The shorter man scowled at him. “I wasn’t making no noise!”

  “That’s not what I hear. Something about it sounding like you were banging on walls.”

  “It wasn’t me!” Harvey said furiously. “It was them! All freaking night long—bang, bang, bang! I figured Al was beating that damn broad up!”

  Jake felt the corners of his mouth turn down with distaste. “Let me see if I have this straight. You thought your neighbor was beating his wife, but you didn’t call the police?”

  Harvey’s frown deepened. “Ain’t none of my business. Besides, I got no use for cops. Anyway, that bitch deserves it! Always poking her nose in where it doesn’t belong, ya know? Always sticking them damn bazoombas of hers in a guy’s face. Now, maybe I’d’a wanted to look at ‘em fifty years ago, but the broad’s at least seventy if she’s a day!”

  Jake had heard enough. Smiling coldly, he said conversationally, “You’re a jerk, Little. And don’t make any more noise at night, or you’ll have to deal with me.”

  Little glared at him and slammed the door loudly. The crack sounded almost like a gunshot in the carpeted hallway.

  Just then, the door of the Martins’ unit opened and Trixie looked out. “What did he say?” she asked Jake.

  “He claims you were the ones making the noise.”

  She shook her head. “You can ask Al. All we were doing was trying to sleep.”

  “I believe you, Trixie.”

  She leaned out further and gave Little’s door a sour look. “I can’t imagine why he moved into a condo. He should have found himself a mountaintop here and become a hermit!”

  Jake didn’t answer; he didn’t want to get involved i taking sides in a disagreement between owners. “Well, let me know if there’s any more trouble. Or better yet, call the police when it’s happening. I’ll straighten him out.”

  “I think I will!” With that, Trixie closed her own door with a bang. This second crack caused the two doors on the other side of the hall to open, and curious faces peered out.

  “It’s nothing,” Jake said. “Did anyone hear any noise from over here last night?”

  Both residents shook their heads.

  “What kind of noise?” asked one, a small elderly with a face like a bassethound. “

  Banging,” Jake answered. “Banging on walls.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe,” said the man. “I thought it the water pipes. They do funny things sometimes.”

  “I’m deaf,” said the other resident, a plump, grandmotherly woman in a pink housecoat. “I don’t hear a thing without my hearing aids, and I don’t wear them to bed.”

  “Well, if any noise bothers you, will you let me know?” They both nodded agreeably. “Say,” said the elderly man, stepping further into the hallway, “when are we going to have the seance?”

  “Seance?” Jake was surprised. “I didn’t know we were going to have one.”

  “Well, I thought that was the whole idea of bringing in this Moonshine woman.”

  “Moonglow,” Jake corrected him automaticall
y. “Her name is Moonglow.”

  “Silly name.”

  “It’s a lovely name!” said the woman in the pink housecoat, leaning further out of her door. “Rainbow Moonglow. And she’s a very nice, pleasant young woman. I go to her all the time for readings. She told me once that my cat was starting to get sick and I ought to take her to the vet. I’m so glad I listened. Buttons had a kidney tumor, and the vet was able to remove it before it did any damage.”

  Jake listened to this with reservations, figuring that the woman had subconsciously suspected something was wrong with her cat, and Rainbow had subconsciously picked up on the concern. Nothing paranormal in that.

  “That’s nothing,” said the man dismissively. “When my wife died fifteen years ago, the day after the funeral, I saw her standing in front of me as plain as I see you!” He gave Jake a challenging look. “And I didn’t imagine it!”

  “Of course not,” said the woman in pink. “Lots of people see their loved ones after they pass on. I’m quite sure they come back to let us know they’re all right.”

  The old man cackled. “I think Martha came back to let me know she was watching me. She always used to say that if I ever married again, she’d haunt me.”

  Jake spoke. “Did you marry again?”

  Another cackle. “Hell no! Do you think I want that woman haunting me?”

  Almost in spite of himself, Jake grinned.

  The old man’s eyes were bright with humor. “Wasn’t a woman ever born who could take old Martha’s place, and that’s a fact. Martha wouldn’t let her.”

  The woman in pink clucked disapprovingly, but Jake laughed.

  “About this seance,” the old man continued, “I have my doubts about these things. I mean, it’s one thing for Martha to come back to tweak me, but it’s another to think some total stranger could communicate with her at will, you know?”

  Jake nodded; indeed he did. “Well, we’ll just have Id see if it comes to that. I have an engineering firm coming to look at the building today to ensure we aren’t having some kind of physical problem that i be causing the events we’ve seen.”

  The old man shook his head. “The building might shake, son, but I don’t think it’ll throw things all over the place—not without falling down around our heads.”