CHAPTER 8

On Friday morning Corin walked into his store and stopped just inside the front door and looked toward the chair. He’d covered it with the tan blanket after Brittan and his mom left; he wasn’t sure why. It just felt right. Maybe because if there was something more to it than just an ancient hunk of wood, he didn’t want every shopper through his door pawing at it.

More than just an ancient chair.

Right.

He needed to stop his comic-book imagination from flying into the realm of the ludicrous.

Corin glanced at his watch. Nine o’clock. An hour before opening. Plenty of time to give the chair a meticulous examination.

After dropping his keys and wallet on his sales counter, he flipped on the radio to 88.7 KCME FM. Classical seemed the appropriate music to set the mood.

He eased over to the chair, drew back the blanket, and started with a visual inspection. Like before, the coloring captured him. It was surprisingly even for a chair this old that there were no cracks in the finish.

Beautiful. Looking at it stirred images of standing on Pikes Peak as dawn broke into the eastern sky.

Time to touch the chair. See if the tingling in his fingers was imagined.

Corin walked around to the back of the chair and held his fingers just above it. Then he lowered them to the chair as if he were touching a newborn’s cheek.

He waited.

Nothing.

He slid his fingers back and forth over the surface. Still nothing.

Must have been his imagination. Had to be. At least that’s what he told himself.

He circled around to the front, then placed both palms on the sides of the seat and slid them back and forth.

Still nothing.

After twenty or thirty more seconds he shrugged, leaned in close, and ran his forefinger along the seams where the legs met the seat of the chair.

Then where the seat met the back.

Marvelous.

It was so precise it looked and felt machine created. No gaps anywhere; no bumps where the pieces came together; no cracking in the wood, which meant previous owners over the years had either taken great care with it or the wood had been cured in such a way that the changes in climate and ravages of time hadn’t adversely affected the chair in even the slightest degree.

He pulled out a small tape measure and studied the chair’s dimensions.

Amazing.

The dimensions were perfect. Absolutely even distance along every centimeter between the edges of the seat. The legs were the exact same length. Exact.

After another ten minutes of examination, he stood back, gazed at the chair, and smiled. He needed to do research before he could set a price, but his instinct told him he had a piece worth thousands on his hands. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

God’s chair? Maybe not, but it still might be manna from heaven.

Could he sit in it? Was it sturdy enough? The woman had said he shouldn’t sit in it till he was ready, but what did that mean?

Brittan sat in it, why couldn’t he? He couldn’t be more than 120 pounds heavier than the kid.

Corin grabbed the back of the chair with one hand, the seat with the other, and gave it a gentle twist. Solid. He set it down and leaned into it with most of his weight. No movement. No creaking. It was as if the chair was carved out of a solid block of wood.

He squatted in front of it and rapped the seat with his knuckles. It could take his weight easily. Corin stood ready to sit but something stopped him. The feeling was like the time in high school where he’d been part of a trip to the state capitol and had been invited to sit in the governor’s chair. The same nervousness he’d felt twenty-one years ago filled his mind.

Corin sniffed out a laugh at his foreboding and sat.

It was comfortable and fit his body well.

Another few seconds and he’d need to get up and open the front door. But he didn’t want to. He wanted to wait for . . . what?

Don’t be an idiot.

What was he expecting? A spiritual massage? A vision from heaven? It was just a chair.

Old, yes, maybe very old, but just wood.

It felt like a thousand other chairs he’d sat in over the years. Hard seat. Constructed well. End of story.

But still, the lady was right; whoever crafted it had considerable skill. And to make the sales copy more interesting when he started advertising it, it would be nice to know who built it.

After grabbing his camera and taking thirty or thirty-five shots of the chair from all angles, and then ten more with his cell phone, he threw the cloth back over the chair and clipped toward his front door to welcome the hoards of customers who would fling cash his way today.

Early next week he’d spend some time on the Internet and maybe head for the library to dig up any info on the chair.

If he lived through the weekend.