When she had glanced up into his eyes, she saw absolutely no color, only blackness. Or maybe his eyes were comprised entirely of pupils. She had felt the hairs on her arms rise suddenly. It was like looking into an empty abyss, or the night sky without stars. She thought she might sink into those eyes and cease to exist, as if he were some strange hypnotist who could compel her into unknown realms. It was a little terrifying and quite thrilling.
She put it down to the fact that she hadn’t had a relationship in years. She had smiled briefly at the attractive face looking down at her and murmured thanks for his help with the door. She thought fleetingly that maybe he was part Japanese or Chinese with those long slanted eyes, there were lots of racial mixes in Hawaii, but he was so tall one would not think so.
The security guard poised in front of the building didn’t stop him, so she had to believe that the gorgeous dark man was living in the same building.
And here he was again this morning. Looking at something beyond her.
The valet beeped to get her attention. Michelle felt like she was coming out of a trance as she tipped the valet and got in her car. She decided to forget the dark man. He must be hopelessly obnoxious and haughtily arrogant because he had inherited the DNA that makes male gorgeousness. He was probably self-obsessive, narcissistic and a snooty jerk to boot. Probably held women in contempt when they fell all over him, slavering for attention.
Or possibly he was gay. Which would explain why he had seemed to look through her rather than at her. Absolute zero interest in the opposite gender. It made sense. Every man she had ever known who was totally gorgeous had also been gay.
She passed several of her office buildings on the way to work. There was a euphoric, proprietary feeling of pure luck that she had happened upon such a splendid job, Property Manager for Heroshi Corporation.
The feeling of happy serendipity about her wonderful position dissolved when she got to the office.
Susan, the office receptionist, handed her a bundle of yellow messages torn from her pad and said, “Telephone book.” Their code for lots of complaints. She winked in sympathy.
“Good grief,” Michelle muttered as she took them and started sorting through the thick pile.
“Crying wolf?” Susan asked.
“No. These actually look pretty serious. Am I late or something?”
Susan shook her head. “They all came in in the last fifteen minutes.”
“Can you take my calls for a few minutes? I have to get started on these...” Michelle said, frowning down at the pile of messages.
“Shall I tell them you’re in a meeting?”
Michelle shook her head and smiled. “No. They’ll just think I’m trying to avoid them. Tell them I’m on the phone and I’ll get back as fast as I can.”
Michelle hurried to her office and began making calls.
The air-conditioning had mysteriously quit in the Lanai office building (an outrage in a tropical climate where all buildings were aggressively cooled to almost freezing) and she had ten furious messages from the tenants about their suffocating environment. Michelle sat at her desk and cursed the inanimate mechanical systems that went down for no apparent reason.
She started organizing the messages for each of the buildings she managed, calling repair crews and maintenance men before she even started returning messages from irate tenants. A whole sewer system had backed up. A palm tree fell, breaking several windows in another building. That was odd because although their root systems were not deep, there hadn’t been any abnormal wind phenomena, and they seldom fell over. Sprinkler systems seemed to be off timer in another building and had flooded a garage. And the lights in another building were blinking, indicating a malfunctioning electrical system.
When an elevator in her own building quit there was nothing to panic about. Elevators and air conditioners were the bane of her existence. Mechanical failures happened all the time. But a woman trapped in the elevator did panic, and when she was finally freed she was unconscious, having fainted. The engineer who pried the elevator door open took one look and thought she was dead. Paramedics were called. Michelle spent an hour with the woman, apologizing on the management’s behalf, in the hope that Heroshi wouldn’t be sued.
A few minutes later there was an emergency call from another building. A lawyer had stripped all the wall paper off in his entire hallway. Michelle hurried to her car and drove over to the building on Kalakaua. Drywall plaster shards and sheets of wallpaper debris littered an entire hallway, causing ugly chaos and hazard to anyone walking through.
Tenants in the hallway besieged her, outraged by the mess. The lawyer who had caused the mess, sauntered over languidly and said the decorators she had arranged to renovate the building were too slow. He wanted compensation for his own wallpaper, a hideous orange with brown flecks, which would clash terribly with the interior design of the entire remodeling. Michelle clenched her teeth. The lawyer made her feel like squeaking obscenities and running away. Instead, she smiled at the shyster and spent a half hour trying to rectify the situation, pointing out that the hallway was a building ‘common area’ and he had no right to change it. Of course he had to know that, as a lawyer. What was his problem? she wondered. Temporary insanity?
Later, back in her own office, Julio, her maintenance manager ran into her office. He was soaked, dripping water from his hair and all his clothing.
“My God, what happened,” Michelle asked, startled to see him dripping all over the carpet.
“Broken water main. You come.”
Michelle trotted after him to the elevator and they watched the flashing floor numbers until they reached the 22nd floor. She just had time to pull off her shoes as water gushed inside when the doors parted. They waded in. The burst water main came from the Men’s Room. It had rapidly turned into a flood that ran like a tidal wave down the hall of offices, ruining the carpeting in the hallway and several offices on that floor.
As they hurried toward the Men’s Room, there was a sudden piercing, undulating shrieking sound.
They both stopped. “That’s the fire alarm,” Julio shouted over the noisy assault.
“Damn,” Michelle said, after a moment. She realized the water had proceeded down through the ceiling, and into the smoke alarms, setting them off. Tenants started sloshing past them to evacuate into the streets.
Several tenants greeted her, and Michelle had to tell them that since the fire alarm was sounding, they’d have to take the stairs. All the elevators automatically went to the ground floor level and locked when the fire alarms sounded. She yelled at them to be careful, to hold on to the railing. The metal stairs would be slippery if they were wet.
This was turning into a nightmare. She couldn’t tell the tenants not to evacuate until Julio was absolutely certain there wasn’t a fire somewhere in the building.
“Go shut off the main water valve,” Michelle told Julio.
“Gonna cause a stink. Toilets won’t flush, start backing up,” Julio warned as they went into the Men’s bathroom.
Michelle could see why Julio had been soaked earlier. The main water supply pipe for the entire building was situated underneath the sink, behind the wall. It had broken, torn a hole in the wall, and a geyser of water gushed out sideways. “Gotta do it. It’s causing too much damage to the whole building.”
“Hokay Boss,” Julio said. He flashed a smile and they both exited the bathroom. Michelle watched him run for the fire stairs, and yelled after him, “And turn off that fire alarm.”
The valve to shut off the building water supply was in the lower garage. It would be a while before Julio could get to it and stop the flood.
Michelle went into one of the deserted offices off the hallway and went across to a wall of windows. She looked out at the beautiful volcanic mountains in the distance. The sky was a wonderful blue with puffy clouds scudding. Down in the street, the fire department, with blaring sirens, showed up in remarkably short order.
Michelle’s e
ars rang with the sudden silence when the fire alarm stopped ringing. She hurried over to the elevators, which were now working.
Before Michelle left the lobby to go outside and face all the employees of the high rise building, she noticed that she had a shoe in each hand as she reached for the front door. She scrubbed her wet feet on the carpet, put her shoes back on, took a deep breath and went outside.
She stood in front of the crowd, waving her arms and shouting above ill-tempered murmurs, to the tenants standing impatiently in the street, and to the firemen in their helmets and yellow fireproof suits, that the building had a major flood, not a fire.
*************************
You can get the first book, The Necromancer >here<
About the Author
Pamela M. Richter, lives in West Hollywood, California.
She has a degree in Psychology, from Northridge State University, has worked as a property manager for Nansay, Corp., a multi-national corporation, and was a dance teacher for the Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire Dance Studios.
Witchy Woman - Book 2 - The Necromancer Page 24
