The Chair

by James L. Rubart

  It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be dragging Shasta to the table inside the restaurant of Hope-U-Get-Healed. If God wanted that done, He would have to do it Himself.

  But maybe Corin would sit in the chair again.

  Maybe tonight.

  CHAPTER 32

  Corin strode through his front door, tossed his keys onto his couch, and stared at the door to his basement.

  Should he? Shouldn’t he? An old football injury stiffened up his knee a few times year. The forefinger on his left hand ached sometimes due to breaking it when he was in the sixth grade. That was it. Sit in the chair for those things? No. And certainly not for his fears.

  Healing for those? Sorry, Nicole, I’ll get through my mental torments on my own. He’d learned to live with his kryptonite.

  No you haven’t. You need to sit again.

  The thought flashed through him with such clarity, Corin’s head snapped back and he blinked.

  No, he didn’t need to.

  He needed to sell the chair to Mark and use the money to get Shasta that operation.

  He didn’t need healing.

  He didn’t.

  But the lie kept sticking halfway down his throat and refused to be swallowed.

  He paced in his living room, trying to decide whether to face the truth or build himself a web of self-deception. After three minutes he admitted the real reason he didn’t want to sit in the chair. He was just like his brother.

  For twenty-four years Corin had tried to get healed of his claustrophobia and fear of water. Through hypnosis, acupuncture, counseling . . . And just like Shasta, he wasn’t willing to release even a sliver of hope that would once again only be obliterated.

  Come sit.

  The impression was stronger this time.

  Great. Now he was hearing voices.

  Come.

  Corin strode over to the basement door and yanked it open.

  Fine. He would sit in the chair. And he would believe. And prove to himself the chair wouldn’t heal anything inside him.

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he went to turn on the lights, hesitated, then left them off. He could use the light from his cell phone to unlock the padlock on the door.

  Corin slid his cell phone into his pocket as he eased the door open and stepped inside. He could almost feel the chair ten feet in front of him. One more step. Then another.

  What was he thinking? He was sneaking up on an inanimate object. But the next moment he smiled as a faint light emanated from the middle of the room.

  No question. The chair was glowing. The faintest of lines ringed its outside edges and the light seemed to be creeping counterclockwise.

  After two more steps the glow faded and vanished.

  Darkness enveloped him as he stepped forward and felt for the chair. There. He had it. Its surface wasn’t hot. Wasn’t cool. It felt normal.

  He slid into the chair without hesitation, closed his eyes, and waited for . . . what? Corin didn’t know. What had Avena said? A. C. had seen a light show, a feeling of warmth and peace.

  After a minute Corin still felt nothing.

  Two minutes. Still nothing.

  “God? Did Your Son make this chair?”

  Silence.

  “Did He?”

  Then a tingling in the chair, so soft he couldn’t tell if it was real or imagined, but at the moment he decided it was real, it vanished, and again he wasn’t sure if it happened only in his mind.

  Five minutes later he still felt nothing.

  Maybe he needed to concentrate on what needed healing. Isn’t that what Tori and he had talked about? As Corin let the emotions of the lake rise around him, he swallowed and his breathing grew shallow.

  “Take me,” he whispered the words, then louder, “take me!”

  He clenched the seat of the chair till his fingers ached, as if he could squeeze a reaction out of the ancient artifact. “Heal me. Please.”

  Cynicism gave over to hope and he tried to imagine a heat coming from the chair or a great peace. A comfort. Anything.

  “Do something!”

  The only alteration was the seat growing slightly cooler.

  He closed his eyes again and tried to relax.

  Corin glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. How long had Brittan sat in the chair? A. C.? He couldn’t remember—as if it would matter.

  “Change me.” The words were almost inaudible.

  Again, an impression filled his mind.

  Call him. Offer healing. Not through the surgery of men.

  Corin gave a slight shake of his head.

  Impossible. Shasta wouldn’t come.

  Call him.

  The thought lit up his mind like lightning; there for an instant then gone, and afterward his mind felt darker than before the idea had come.

  Twenty more minutes of sitting in the chair didn’t bring any light and something told him the next day wouldn’t get any brighter.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Corin grabbed a cup of straight-drip java at Jade Shot Coffee, made sure the lid was on tight, and half jogged toward his store. He was already late.

  Sixty seconds later his progress was thwarted by three men who looked like the NFL’s version of the Hells Angels. Each of the four men towered over Corin by at least five inches. In the middle, with his arms folded, black sunglasses on, stood Mark Jefferies.

  “Good morning, Corin.”

  Corin took a sip of his coffee as his eyes bounced from one end of the line to the other. Mark motioned the man on the end with a flick of his head, and the four linebackers eased around Corin till they encircled him. Great. He would be even later thanks to this religious whacko.

  “What a pleasure to bump into you, Mark. With you up here so much lately, who’s preaching back home?”

  Mark motioned with his head again. The mountain men moved two steps closer.

  “I see you flew in some of your congregation.” Corin took another sip of his coffee. “What do you want?”

  “To talk. To see if you’ve made a decision on my offer.” Mark glanced at his watch. “It expires in a little over thirty-nine hours.”

  “I’d love to chat, but I’m late.”

  “This will only take a moment.”

  Corin glanced around the circle. “It looks to me like you’re getting ready to threaten me. Or something maybe a little bit grander than that.”

  “Not at all. I only want to know if I’m going to write you a check or not.” Mark pulled a set of papers out of his back pocket. “We could sign everything right now if you like. Since we haven’t talked in the past two days and you haven’t responded to my e-mails and phone calls, I simply thought it would be good to have a little chat.”

  Corin motioned toward the men who surrounded him. “Do they chat?”

  “Sure. But do they need to? Or do you understand their body language?” He glanced up and down the street. If any of the pedestrians thought their gathering looked odd, they didn’t express it.

  “I suppose this is the part where you tell me if I don’t accept your offer, you still want the chair, won’t take no for an answer, and your buddies here will use their body language on me in a way that is universally understood.”

  “Once again you’ve misunderstood me.”

  “I keep doing that.” Corin offered his finest plastic smile and gave a quick nod. “No idea why.”

  A condescending smile rose on Mark’s face and quickly faded.

  “The chair is yours to do with as you want. And always will be. This isn’t a TV show. I simply want you to understand how serious I am about my beliefs and about giving you the money.” Mark cracked his knuckles. “We want to understand; we want to help you. And if you don’t accept my offer, I will still continue to help you in any and every way I can.”

  He suspected accepting assistance from Mark would be like living in that old Eagles song “Hotel California.” He’d be able to check out any time he liked, but he’d never be able to leave Jefferies’s
clutches. “And if I don’t want help?”

  Mark smiled his half smile, part of this teeth showing, most covered by his Elvis-sneerlike mouth. “You need my help.”

  “To protect me.”

  “Yes.”

  “From . . . ?”

  “Everyone.” Mark held his palms up to the brilliant October sun and spun a slow 360 on his heel.

  “And why would you extend your generosity to me even if I don’t agree to your helping my bank account grow?”

  “I’m not.” Mark zipped open his black leather jacket. “I’m doing it because I want to see the chair remain safe.”

  “In other words, you’re not losing sleep over me.”

  Mark nodded with his whole body. “I still care about you. Just not as much as the chair.”

  “I appreciate your honesty.” Corin looked at his watch. “I have to go.”

  “Tell me about the lady who gave you the chair.” Mark paced, two slow steps right, then two back to the left.

  It made Corin feel like he was in a courtroom cross-examination during a high-profile trial. He wasn’t the lawyer. “Why?”

  “Because I suspect she can tell me much about it.”

  The guy wouldn’t take a hint even if it was grand piano-sized and landed on his head. Corin stepped to the side of Jefferies and up to one of his bodyguards. “I have to get to my shop. Now.”

  “Are you going to allow me to give you the money that can help your store and your brother?”

  “I’ll let you know by the end of the deadline. But I should tell you, the answer is probably going to be no.”

  The mountain man shifted back a step and Corin slid through the opening and strode down the sidewalk.

  “That’d be a mistake,” Jefferies said.

  “I’m so grateful for that penetrating spiritual insight, Pastor Mark. I’ll be sure to meditate on it all day.” Corin considered the wisdom of making the comment. It would undoubtedly tick the pastor off. Corin smiled. Exactly.

  THAT NIGHT AS Corin slumped at his desk and attempted to balance the books, his gaze kept falling on the papers describing the results of the experimental spinal-cord surgery. Sixty percent success rate. Sixty. It was far higher than the success rate from the two delusional doctors from Mexico Shasta had gone to in the first year after the accident. The ones promising immediate healing.

  Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And Mark was offering him eight hundred thousand.

  The decision was simple, wasn’t it? He’d be able to offer Shasta the surgery and have enough left over to save the store, pay off his house, and still have enough to take that trip to the Swiss Alps he’d been promising himself forever.

  So why did he hesitate to make the call?

  No idea.

  Corin picked up his phone and tapped in Mark’s cell phone number.

  He stared at Mark’s card taped to his computer monitor and flicked it with his finger. He wouldn’t give him the chair till the money was in his account.

  As the phone rang a second time, the sound of shattering glass pierced through Corin’s thoughts. “What the—?” He lurched to his feet and staggered out his office door and onto his showroom floor.

  Broken glass was strewn across the desks, tables, and chairs at the front of the store, the fluorescent light making them sparkle like diamonds. A cold wind meandered through the spot where his storefront’s picture window had been.

  Corin glanced around the room. Had someone shot the window?

  On his second visual sweep of the floor, he spotted a rock just smaller than a baseball resting next to the leg of a burr walnut wine table from the late 1800s. He stared at it as if he expected the rock to move. Finally he strode over to it and picked up the almost perfectly round stone.

  On one side were three words: We want it. On the other it said: The old Tahmahoe barn. Leave it just inside the door. Tonight after midnight. No heroes. No hurt. We both live happily ever after.

  Twenty-three minutes later the police pulled up in front of Corin’s store.

  The cop nodded hello, then studied the window. “When did it happen?”

  “About thirty minutes ago.”

  “Was anything stolen?”

  “No. I was in my office and came out right after it came through the window.”

  “Any idea who played John Elway with the rock?”

  Corin plucked the stone off the table he’d set it on and handed it to the cop.

  “I grabbed it without thinking about fingerprints.”

  “Don’t sweat it; rocks like this wouldn’t take a print anyway.” The cop stared at him. “Any idea?”

  “No.” Corin lied. He wasn’t sure what Jefferies was capable of, but he suspected his linebacking cabal had a certain proficiency for these type of projects.

  The policeman turned the rock over and looked at the words. “What’s ‘it’? What do they want you to leave in the barn?”

  Corin lied again. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “I see.” The cop held Corin’s gaze long enough it was clear he didn’t believe him, then jotted a note on his pad. “There’s not much I can do other than file a report and make a few more passes through this neighborhood each week.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Do you have any enemies you know of?”

  “No.” This time he didn’t have to lie.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, you do now. This doesn’t look like the work of a couple of kids. Which means whoever it is will probably be back.”

  The cops stayed another few minutes, doing a quick sweep of the store, and then turned to Corin. “You get any ideas who did this, let us know, okay?”

  After boarding up the broken window, Corin e-mailed Nicole and asked her to meet him as soon as possible. Then he called Tesser, got his voice mail, and asked the professor the same thing.

  No way would he be dropping the chair off in some old abandoned barn.

  But he needed answers. The water was closing in and he needed a life jacket.

  No, he needed a speedboat.

  CHAPTER 33

  The next morning at eleven thirty, Corin met Nicole at Rob’s Ruby Rocket Diner, just off Highway 24 and fifty miles east of the city, focused on one thing: getting answers.

  The door squealed like a pig in labor as he opened it, and he glanced around the restaurant. There were ten or eleven tables, all of them empty except for the one farthest from the front door where Nicole sat staring at him.

  He eased toward her, studying her eyes, which were serious and seemed full of concern. When Corin reached the table, he slid into a red vinyl chair straight out of the sixties, folded his hands, and rested them on the table next to the salt and pepper shakers that were even older than the chairs. He brushed the remnants of a French fry off the table and interlaced his fingers again.

  “Thanks for meeting me on such short notice.”

  She didn’t answer, just nodded.

  “Is there a reason you wanted to meet at a restaurant an hour from town in a dive that probably hasn’t seen a mop since Washington was president?”

  Corin had been so focused on Nicole, he hadn’t noticed a plump blond woman in a uniform two sizes too small standing at their table, pen and pad in hand.

  Whoops.

  She slapped two glasses of water onto the table. “We’ve only been in business since the Lincoln administration. And we did a remodel when Roosevelt came into office.”

  “Which one?”

  “Teddy.” She smiled and asked what they wanted.

  “You have a great sense of humor.”

  The waitress nodded and winked at him.

  Corin ordered iced tea and a hamburger and Nicole ordered black coffee and French onion soup.

  “Why here?” Nicole said. “Because he probably wouldn’t follow you out this far and wouldn’t think of you coming into a place like
this if he did.”

  “Who is ‘he’?”

  “The person who is after the chair and would possibly even kill to relieve you of it.”

  The scene with Mark’s linebackers flashed into Corin’s mind. “Jefferies, right?”

  “I’m not going to tell you who it is.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  For the first time Corin wondered about Nicole’s mental stability. She had never been anything but fully self-assured. She appeared that way now. But this was the first time she’d said something crazy.

  Actually that wasn’t true. From the start her ideas had been dancing on the edge of the universe.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s part of your growing up. You need to learn who to trust and who not to trust rather than be told.”

  “My growing up? I’m thirty-four years old.” Corin bent his cardboard coaster two ways so he could spin it like a top on the grease-stained table.

  “Some people die still as children.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think you know, Corin.”

  He did know. He’d heard a single traumatic incident in a person’s life could freeze his emotional age at the moment the event happened. So intellectually he might be thirty-four but emotionally he was, what? Ten? “So I’m ten years old?” The coaster slowed to a stop.

  “It’s time to face your fear. You’re in the midst of doing that, which I applaud you for.”

  “What does facing my fear have to do with telling me I’m still ten years old?”

  “I didn’t say that, you did.”

  “I’m scared of drowning. So what? I’m sure a lot of people are.” He dropped a penny in his water glass and watched it sink to the bottom. “And I am trying to face it.”

  “How?”

  “I sat in the chair again.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? That surprises me.” She stared at him till he dropped his eyes.

  The waitress arrived with their food. A welcome distraction. It gave him time to think. Should he tell her? The revelation he’d received probably wouldn’t surprise her. Nicole had almost predicted it.