I’m reasonably certain that our whole house isn’t haunted, but I’m beginning to believe one corner of the house is. Unfortunately, the forty square feet involved happen to include the space surrounding my writing chair in the family room. If you’ve been one of my blog readers for some time, you’ve heard about some of the unsettling incidents that occurred previously.
In a 2021 blog posting entitled Dodging a Bullet, I reported how one of our ML Coleman oil paintings, a 36 by 48 autumn scene, decided to drop off the wall and fall to the floor for no immediately discernible reason. It came to rest with a corner of the frame stuck under my chair. It missed hitting my head by a good eight or nine inches, but a miss is as good as a mile, right? We later established that one of the screws holding the wire hanger had come loose from the frame. The painting ended up with an inch-square hole in the canvas which our late son, Tom, patched for us. The painting is back in its original spot, a good six feet from my shoulder. The screws seem to be holding. So far so good!
The family room fireplace is parallel to my chair, also six feet away. The painting is to the left of the fireplace, and to the left of the painting is the mirrored bar. It has two glass shelves filled with glassware, and in the ceiling above the shelves is a can light. In March of last year, I wrote about another unfortunate incident in a blog post entitled A Midnight Escapade. In that one I told how, with Bill and Jojo tucked away in bed, I was sitting here watching my late night true crime shows, when I heard water running. Thinking I had left the kitchen faucet on, I stood up to turn it off only to find that there was a stream of water pouring out of the can light over the bar sink. Fortunately the light wasn’t turned on at the time.
I summoned help that night by using my husband’s garage walker to negotiate the uneven dirt path to walk next door to our property manager’s house. He came over and helped clean up the mess. We later learned that the origin of our electric water fall was due to torrential rain being dammed up behind a blocked scupper on our flat roof. The scuppers are all fixed now, thank you very much, but here’s a word—three words, actually—of advice: If you’re ever tempted to purchase a flat-roofed house in the Seattle area, DON’T DO IT!
Which brings me up to last night’s misadventure. It wasn’t actually midnight, only 9:45, early enough that Bill was still in his chair which is to the right of mine. I had gone to the bar for my refill and had taken four of the six steps (Yes, I count them!) to get back to my chair, when all hell broke loose behind me. At first I thought the painting had fallen again, but it was still on the wall, right where it was supposed to be. Then I thought maybe one of the glass shelves over the bar had collapsed. When I turned around to look, the shelves themselves were still intact, but three of the glasses on the lower shelf had evidently decided to take a flying leap off the shelving.
Before the fall
Most of the glassware in that collection are made of titanium crystal that we purchased sometime back in the nineties. The glasses in question were tall water glasses that had been stacked two deep. When I caught my breath and got around to assessing the damage, I discovered that only two of the three leapers were broken. Those were the ones that had landed on the bar’s polished granite countertop. The one that fell all the way to the hardwood floor was just fine, thank you very much. I bought the titanium variety because they were dishwater safe, and they are that. But stone countertops aside, they’re also reasonably indestructible.
Okay, as I was writing this, I remembered the more recent broken water pipe issue in the powder room. That’s a good fifty steps from my chair so it doesn’t qualify as a possible haunting site, but I think I’ve zeroed in on the individuals who are likely the cause of the unsettling events that have occurred in close proximity to my writing chair. Unsurprisingly, they’re entirely products of my own imagination—the evil spirits of the bad guys I’ve created over the years while sitting in my writing chair, clicking away on the keyboard of my laptop, and writing murder mysteries which include any number of very scary characters.
So yes, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I believe that the Case of the Falling Glassware is entirely the fault of a guy named Stephen Roper. You won’t meet him until October of this year when the next Joanna Brady, The Girl from Devil’s Lake, goes on sale. Trust me, throwing things at someone is exactly the kind of stunt he would pull.
By the way, someone just gave me a decorative coaster that really touched me—WRITER’S BLOCK: WHEN YOUR IMAGINARY FRIENDS STOP SPEAKING TO YOU. In my experience, that’s entirely true. Since my collection of imaginary Ali Reynolds friends have finally stopped maintaining radio silence, I need to stop writing this blog, pay attention to them, and get to work on Smoke and Mirrors, the next Ali book.
In case you’re interested, my senior English teacher from Bisbee High, Mrs. Medigovich, would say that I went off on a tangent in that last paragraph. Too bad. I’m someone who happens to LIKE tangents! Except for right now. When I read this to Bill, he informed me that there are tangents, co-tangents, and something else I can’t spell which are all supposedly related to tangents. According to him, that’s “geometry talk.” Excuse me. I almost flunked in Mrs. Winters’s geometry class in high school. As a liberal arts major, plain old ordinary tangents are plenty good enough for me!
PS. If the attached photo of The Most Dangerous Corner of Our House doesn’t come through, please email me at jajance@me.com.
PPS The back of my writing chair is just visible at the bottom of the photo.