The Chair (19 page)

“But now, the chain is broken with me.”

“Maybe she doesn’t have a daughter.”

“But why me? I’m not ready to be a guardian of some miracle chair—”

“It’s a legend, Corin!” Tesser laughed. “It would make a good movie, but it’s fiction. You’re not starting to take the healing part seriously, are you?”

Corin sighed as he stood and strolled back over to Tesser and sat next to his old friend. “No, of course not.”

But he had. For a moment, as he thought about the lady’s eyes and the intensity in them, he believed she could be the keeper of the genuine chair of Christ. That her ancestors formed an order that had passed a chair from one generation to the next for over sixteen hundred years. If a chair built by Jesus still existed, Corin would vote her as curator. And when he read the story about Brittan being healed, he’d believed for more than a moment.

Tesser patted Corin’s knee. “For this next part, take a deep breath, all right?”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

Tesser turned to the middle of the book and spread the pages with both palms but didn’t lift them for Corin to see. “Ready?”

“For?”

Tesser lifted his hands slowly as if he were a conductor raising his baton to start a symphony.

Corin leaned forward and looked at the four sketches on the pages. “Oh, wow.” He fell back in his chair as heat instantly raced to every corner of his body. The drawings—drawn from four angles—were exact representations of the chair locked in his basement.

“That’s my chair.”

“Yes, I know.” Tesser held up the photos Corin had given him earlier and gazed at them. “See why I’m saying your chair could be the one in the legend?”

“Whew.” Corin rubbed his forehead and let out a long breath. He stared at the drawings. There were two possibilities, maybe three. His was the chair of legend, it was a duplicate made from these drawings—he couldn’t think of a third option.

“You wanted a little excitement in your life, right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Oh sure you do. Everyone needs a little excitement now and again.” Tesser rubbed his hands together as his head bobbed.

“Do you?”

“Yes, and you’ve just given it to me. One more adventure to go on.”

“And if the chair turns out to be the real thing?”

“Why I’ll sit in it and live forever.” Tesser smiled.

“You think it can cure death? That the power in the chair means—?”

“No, Corin.” Tesser patted Corin’s hands again. “Fiction, remember? But humor an old man, eh? I won’t believe in the chair’s healing power till I see it with my own eyes, but I’m certainly fascinated by the legend. And even if your chair is only a duplicate made from these drawings . . .”—he laid his palm on the book—“we’ll have fun tracking down this mysterious lady. Find out if she’s real or a fake. And figure out why she gave the chair to you.”

“Is there anything else I need to know about the legend?”

“Yes, I think so.” Tesser closed the book and waddled over to his old maple desk, set it down, and patted it once. Then he sat and picked up a stack of mail.

“Well? Are you going to tell me?”

Tesser glanced up as if seeing Corin for the first time that day. “Let’s save something for next time, hmm? I think you have enough to digest for one day. But we should get together again soon.” He glanced at the book. “I’ll read through it again during the coming week and see if the other things I remember being between its covers are indeed still recorded there.”

Corin was tempted to tell Tesser to read through it in the coming
day
, but he stayed silent and left without comment.

CORIN DROVE AWAY from the professor’s house with conflicting emotions bouncing through his mind. Could this really be happening? Could such things as a chair containing Christ’s power really exist? Ridiculous. But hadn’t Brittan been healed?

He got to his store just in time to open but got little accomplished all day. He couldn’t stop thinking about the chair sitting in his basement.

By the time he locked the store’s front door and climbed into his Highlander, it was close to eight thirty. Time to head home and crash.

As Corin pulled out of the parking lot, he glanced at his cell phone. Whoops. He’d left it in the car all day. He picked it up and pushed the bottom to pull it out of hibernation. Wow. Five voice mails had come in while he was at the store. He pushed the recorded messages icon and stared at the little red dots seeming to scream for attention. All five calls were from Travis DeMiglio. That could only mean one thing.

The results of the carbon dating had shocked him.

C
orin played the first message: “It’s Travis; I have your results. Very strange. Call me ASAP.”

He deleted the call and played Travis’s next message.

“It’s Travis again. Call me about what I found out about your piece as soon as you get this. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Delete.

“Corin, sorry to bug you, but we have to talk about this chair of yours. It’s weird.”

Corin pulled into traffic and cued up the next message.

“Travis again. Listen, I ran the tests again and they came back even weirder. Let’s talk as soon as you can.”

He played the last message.

“Corin? Travis. I want to see that chair. Call me.”

He glanced at his watch: 8:35. Travis had probably left the lab at least two hours ago, but what could it hurt to try? He could at least leave a message. He tapped Call Back on his phone and waited for his Bluetooth to kick in. A moment later Travis answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey, you’re still there—”

“Tell me all about this chair, Corin. Where you got it, how long you’ve had it, where it’s from, what it’s made of—forget that last part I know what it’s made of—but I want to know everything else.”

It almost sounded like Travis was panting through the phone. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” Travis’s pen or pencil was tapping on a hard surface sounding like a woodpecker through the phone. “Not exactly.”

“You’re all worked up over some lab results?” Corin heard papers shuffling in the background and then something crash to the floor. It wasn’t like Travis. He was organized to a fault. “You okay?”

“Fine, just dropped some papers. And my briefcase.”

“You’re not drunk, are you?”

“Hah.”

“Whatever you found really has you flummoxed.”

“You could say that. More excited than anything else.”

“About the results from testing my chair.”

“Yes.” Travis sighed through the phone and stopped talking.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“I’m just trying to figure out where to begin.” For ten seconds the only sound was the hum of the phone. “How important is this chair to you?”

“Important.”

“Something you want to keep?”

Corin considered the question. Before he’d met with Tesser? He might have sold it if he could get some serious money. But now? No way. He wasn’t letting go.

“Definitely want to keep it.” Corin swerved around a slow-moving dark blue Infiniti G35. Those cars were fast. What was the guy doing going forty in a forty mph zone? “So tell me.”

“No actually, I’m not going to tell you.”

“What?”

“Not over the phone I mean. We need to do this face-to-face, all right?”

“What, you think your phone is bugged?”

“In person.”

“Fine. When?”

“Now.”

“You’re forty-five minutes away from me and it’s eight forty-five. You sure?” Corin hoped Travis would say yes. He didn’t want to wait to find out what Travis had discovered.

“If you meet me halfway, it will only be twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds for each of us.”

“Where?”

“Palmer Park. West end.”

“A park? Why a park? Why not a restaurant where we can get a drink and catch up?”

“You’re not getting it, are you? There’s some weird stuff going on around the piece you gave me.” Travis paused. “Very weird.”

“Okay, see you in twenty minutes.”

Travis was a scientist. Logical. Not easily blown by the winds of emotion. But something about the chair was pounding gale force winds at his friend’s sails.

The saga of the chair was growing stranger by the hour.

CORIN PARKED HIS car and walked toward the west end of the park. Before he’d walked thirty yards he spotted Travis standing under the going golden leaves of an aspen tree, glancing furtively around the park and up at the trees, as if the squirrels were about to start firing missiles his direction.

Corin sauntered up behind Travis and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Whaaaaa!” Travis spun and popped Corin on his shoulders with the palms of both hands. “Don’t do that!”

Corin laughed and shoved his hands into his 501s. “Sorry, all this cloak-and-dagger stuff brings out the practical joker in me.”

Actually it didn’t bring out the joker, it brought out the formidable Stress Man, able to double Corin’s heart rate in a single bound. Sneaking up on Travis, keeping the moment light, should keep his foe subdued, but something told him the carbon dating info he was about to learn would wake Stress Man back up again.

“This isn’t a joke.”

“What isn’t?”

“Your chair.”

“Yeah, I get that part. Something has you a little spooked. So why don’t you let me get behind the curtain with you and maybe I’ll join you in your paranoia.”

“I’m not spooked and I’m not paranoid. I just want to make sure our conversation stays between the two of us.”

Corin pulled a small piece of bark off the tree. He wouldn’t be telling anyone. Maybe Tesser. “I’m guessing my chair is older than this aspen?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.” Travis rubbed the sides of his nose and tried to smile. “I’m not even 10 percent sure.”

“What does that mean?” Corin repeated.

“We ran the test eighteen times and got eighteen different results.”

“Is that possible?”

“No.” Travis dug in his ear so hard Corin thought his friend would lose his finger.

“You’re saying you got eighteen different ages?”

Travis nodded.

“From the same piece of wood?”

“Yes.”

“What was the oldest date?”

“Over thirty thousand.” Travis said it more as a question than a statement.

“Years old?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking.” Corin leaned forward to be able to see Travis’s eyes.

“No.”

“And the youngest?”

“Today.”

“What?”

Travis rocked his head back and forth as if he were a bobble-head doll. “The tests came back saying the wood from the chair came from wood harvested sometime in the past year.”

“That’s insane.”

“Now do you see why I called you incessantly?” Travis held his fist up to his ear as if it were a phone.

“And the dating ages in between?”

“Five thousand five hundred years, three hundred and seventy-five years, thirty years . . . like I said, each time the results were different.”

“How can that happen?”

“It can’t.”

“Never?” Corin paced. Three steps to the right, then three back to the left.

“And one of the tests came back 50K plus.”

“Meaning?” Corin rubbed the bark on his chin, just hard enough to register an unpleasant sensation.

“Our dating can project back forty five to fifty thousand years. Anything older we classify as greater than 50K.” Travis opened his hands and tilted his head.

“You’re saying the reading came back saying this piece is older than your instruments can date it?”

“Exactly.”

Corin stopped pacing. “Explain.”

“There’s nothing to explain. The reading says this piece of wood is fifty thousand years old or maybe a million years old.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means everyone around here is begging to have whatever that piece came from brought in here.”

“You weren’t supposed to tell anyone you were testing this. I thought my e-mail made that clear.” Corin broke the strip of bark into pieces and tossed them to the ground.

“I couldn’t help it. We typically run three nine minute tests and average the three to determine the age of the object. They’re usually within a few years of each other. So when your readings started bouncing all over the universe, well, people noticed.”

“I don’t need anyone else noticing.” Corin kicked at a small pile of leaves on the ground.

“Where did you get that chair?”

“It was given to me.”

“By who?”

“Some lady named Nicole.”

“Have you talked to her since then?”

“Not really. She sent me an e-mail. That’s it.”

“Do you have a way to get a hold of her?”

“No.”

The implications of Travis’s findings swirled through Corin’s head. Of course a chair imbued with the essence of God would have no age and every age. If Christ had made the chair and Tesser was right—that Jesus’s power flowed throughout it—wouldn’t the chair somehow be outside of time?

“What would the age of the chair be if you took an average?”

“There’s no point in doing—.”