The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (2 page)

‘Tea?’ asked Sissy. ‘Here – let me take your things. They’re so cute, aren’t they, this hat and this coat? Little Red Riding Hood rides again.’

‘I can get a glass of wine?’ asked T-Yon. Her Cajun accent wasn’t very strong, but it was distinctive enough for anybody to tell at once where she came from. Underneath her raincoat she was wearing a tight, gray short-sleeved sweater and tight black pedal pushers. Sissy could see why Billy had been attracted to her. Apart from being so pretty, she had very big breasts and very slim hips. Around her neck she wore a silver pendant attached to a leather cord. It was embossed with the face of a woman with her eyes closed, as if she were asleep, and dreaming.

‘So tell me, how did you and Billy meet?’ asked Sissy, as she came back into the living room with a frosty bottle of Zinfandel and two long-stemmed wine glasses.

T-Yon had picked up a black-bronze statuette of a dancing devil, with horns and a pointed beard and the shaggy legs of a goat.

‘
Scary
,’ she said, narrowing her eyes and peering into its face.

‘Him? He’s only scary if you believe in him.’

‘But you don’t? He has such a wicked face.’

‘From my experience, T-Yon, I believe that ordinary people are a whole lot wickeder than devils. Human beings – now
they’re
scary.’

T-Yon carefully replaced the statuette and sat down on the floral-covered couch. She watched as Sissy poured her a glass of wine.

‘Billy and me, we met in bakery class. I was supposed to be making choux pastry but every time I tried to do it I ended up with this big dry lump. Billy came over and showed me how to beat the flour into the water and the butter, and that was how we got together.’

‘Billy’s a great personality,’ said Sissy. ‘Never seems to lose his cool. So you’re at Hyde Park, too? How’s it going for you?’

‘It’s OK. It’s good. I think if we stay together Billy and me will open our own restaurant when we graduate. My whole family, they’ve always been in that kind of business. Restaurants, hotels. It’s just that – you know.’

Sissy sipped her wine and waited for T-Yon to say more. It had sounded from her intonation as if she wanted to say more.
It’s just that – you know –
what
, exactly
? T-Yon looked back at her, saying nothing, but then she gave a quick, nervous laugh.

‘Go on, T-Yon,’ Sissy encouraged her. ‘What are you worried about?
Something’s
eating you, isn’t it?’

‘You can tell that?’

‘I think I’ve been living on this planet long enough to sense when a person has something on their mind. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but that’s the reason you’re here, isn’t it?’

T-Yon blushed. ‘Billy’s always talking about you and I wanted to meet you so much. I’ve been nagging him for weeks to bring me here. But now that I
am
here, I feel like I’m wasting your time.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t you worry about
that
,’ said Sissy, flapping her hand. ‘Time is something I have plenty of, in abundance. Ever since my Frank was taken away from me, all those years ago, it’s just me and Mr Boots, and the days go by so slow, they’re like windmills turning when there’s scarcely any wind.’

T-Yon said, ‘Billy told me all about your fortune-telling. You know – the cards that you use.’

‘The DeVane cards, yes.’

‘He said they’re like Tarot cards? I never heard of them before.’

‘They’re kind of like Tarot cards, yes. But for starters, they’re very much bigger, and each individual card is a whole lot more complicated than any Tarot card. For instance, the DeVane cards won’t just tell that you’re going to meet the man of your dreams, they’ll tell you that you’re going to hate his brother, because his brother is unkind to animals, and that his mother cooks so badly that you sometimes wonder if she’s trying to poison you.’

‘Wow,’ said T-Yon.

‘Well, yes,
wow
. They’re amazing, if you know how to read them, but they’re not at all easy to read if you don’t have the facility. Me, for some reason, I’ve always been able to read them without any trouble at all, ever since I was ten or eleven years old. Don’t ask me how, or why, but I can see what’s going to happen tomorrow afternoon just as clearly as I can remember what happened yesterday afternoon. With the help of the cards, of course.’

T-Yon said, ‘Would you read them for me? I know that people usually pay you to do it, and I can pay you.’

‘You’ll do no such thing. You’re Billy’s girlfriend.’

‘I know, but I don’t want you to think that I’m taking advantage.’

Sissy stood up and went over to the carved walnut bureau that stood underneath the window. The rain was still gushing noisily over the guttering, where the downpipe was blocked with last fall’s leaves. Frank had always been good at maintenance. He would have been up there months ago with his ladder and his trowel, clearing it out. But the long dead can’t clean out gutters, any more than they can hold us in their arms and tell us how much they used to love us.

She opened the left-hand drawer and took out the worn cardboard box that contained the DeVane cards. On the front of the box there was a picture of a clown with a red hat and a deathly white face, holding up a complicated key in his left hand and a glass ball in his right. He had an extraordinary expression on his face, the expression of somebody who is still laughing a loud and artificial laugh, but is right on the edge of screaming with fury. ‘
Oh, you think that’s funny, do you
?
You think that’s so–o–o fricking funny
?’

The curly circus-style lettering above the clown’s head said
Images d’Amour
, meaning
Pictures of Love
, but Sissy knew from years of experience that the cards didn’t necessarily predict love that had a happy ending. They could show you a passionate love affair, but a love affair that might be brought to a bloody conclusion by a jealous husband rushing into the bedroom and stabbing both of the lovers with two enormous kitchen knives. They could show you a beautiful new baby girl and her doting parents, and then foretell that the baby would drown in a garden pond before she reached the age of two, surrounded by ducks.

Sissy always thought that the DeVane cards showed life as it really was, without any false hope. In the DeVane cards, Death stood patiently by the window, staring at the rain, but knowing that sooner or later the time would come for him to turn around.

‘Here they are,’ said Sissy, coming back across the living room and showing T-Yon the box. ‘They were engraved and printed in France in the eighteenth century, and this is the only pack I’ve ever seen. There
are
others, so I’m told, but I don’t think anybody uses them to tell fortunes, the way I do. Probably because they don’t know how, or else they
do
know how but they’re scared to. Like I told you,’ she added, tapping her forehead, ‘you have to have the facility.’

T-Yon touched the box with her fingertips, as if for luck. ‘They’re
huge
. And that clown. He’s real creepy looking, isn’t he?’

‘He’s called
Le Serrurier Riant
, the Laughing Locksmith. He’s showing you that he can unlock the future. Key in one hand, you see? Crystal ball in the other.’

Sissy sat down and slid the cards out of the box. ‘Before I start, T-Yon, I really need to know why you wanted me to tell your fortune so badly. It’s a hell of a drive from Hyde Park to here, especially on a day like this. Forty miles at least.’

T-Yon didn’t answer at first, so Sissy said, ‘You didn’t come here just to find out if you and Billy are suited for each other, did you, or if you’re going to make a real career out of your cookery?’

T-Yon raised her left hand in front of her face, looking at Sissy through her fingers. Sissy knew exactly what it meant, when people did that. They were about to tell her something that they couldn’t hold in for very much longer, but which made them feel confused, or guilty, or deeply ashamed.

‘I’ve been having these dreams,’ she said, so quietly that Sissy could hardly hear her.

‘You want to speak louder, sweetheart?’ Sissy asked her. ‘I’m a little deaf in my left ear. And whatever it is that’s upsetting you, it won’t be cured by whispering.’

‘Sorry,’ said T-Yon, and took her hand away from her face. ‘I’ve been having these dreams about my older brother, Everett. Not dreams, really, nightmares. But worse than any nightmares I’ve ever had before. I know I’ve only just met you but after what Billy told me about you—’

‘Go on,’ Sissy coaxed her. ‘It’s like I said. You can tell me if you want to but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t.’

‘Well – Everett has just restored this old hotel in Baton Rouge. That’s what he does, him and his business partner, he finds these run-down hotels and he restores them and gives them all of their glamour back. They’ve done two so far, the Shenandoah Suites and the Denham Palace, and The Red Hotel is their third.’

‘Sounds like he’s pretty successful, your brother.’

‘He is. He has been. But about three weeks ago, not long after he’d opened The Red Hotel, I started having these nightmares about him.’

‘OK . . .’

T-Yon said, ‘They’re really embarrassing, but they’re horrible, too. And they’re always the same, night after night. I haven’t told anybody about them, not even Billy. But I’ve been beginning to think that if they don’t stop soon, I should maybe go talk to my doctor.’

‘Instead, you’ve decided to come to me,’ said Sissy. ‘So let’s see if I can help you.’

T-Yon paused again, but then she took a deep breath and said, ‘I’m lying in bed in this hotel room. For some reason I know that it’s The Red Hotel, but it’s not like The Red Hotel the way it is now. I mean, Everett and his partner have remodeled it completely, so that it’s all red-velvet drapes and gilt-framed mirrors. You know, like old-style Baton Rouge. But in my nightmare the room is all brown and green, with a nineteen sixties TV and a nineteen sixties telephone with a dial on it. And it
smells
, too. I’ve never been able to smell anything in a dream before, but this hotel room has a very strong smell like lavender furniture wax and bug spray. I can still smell it even after I’ve woken up.’

Sissy raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s highly unusual. Most of us can
hear
things in dreams, you know – like people talking, or singing, or the ocean crashing on the shore. And most of us can
feel
things, too. But to
smell
your dream, that’s very rare, although my late husband once woke me up in the middle of the night because he swore that he could smell smoke, when there was no smoke. But anyhow, carry on. What happens in this nightmare?’

T-Yon said, ‘I’m lying on the bed, like I said, and the thing is that I’m not wearing anything at all except for a black garter belt and black nylon stockings. I’ve never worn a garter belt and stockings in my life,
ever
, which makes this so weird. The door opens and my brother Everett walks in. He’s wearing a Mardi Gras mask – dead white, with very black slanty eyes – but I know at once that it’s him. He’s not wearing anything, either, except for long black socks, and I’ve never known him to wear long black socks – like,
never
, ever.’

‘OK,’ said Sissy. Outside, it had suddenly stopped raining, and the room gradually began to fill with light.

‘Everett doesn’t hesitate. He comes across to the bed and he climbs on top of me. I know what he’s going to do but I don’t try to stop him. In fact I feel like I want him – not because I love him but because I feel that he’s going to make it worth my while. It’s like I’m a prostitute, rather than his sister. It’s really hard to explain. He starts to have sex with me and even though he’s my older brother I don’t resist him at all. On the other hand I’m not too enthusiastic either. I just lie there and watch TV and let him do it.’

‘What’s on the TV?’ asked Sissy. ‘Is it any program you recognize?’

‘Is that important?’

‘I don’t know. It could be.’

‘It’s in black and white . . . something like
The Lucy Show.
The TV is slowed right down, so I can’t hear what anybody’s saying. All I can hear is Everett panting underneath that mask.’

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking you this, but don’t you feel even the least bit turned on?’

Sissy could tell that T-Yon was taken aback by her directness, but before she consulted the DeVane cards it was important for her to know as much as possible about T-Yon’s nightmare – what she could hear, what she could see, and how she was feeling. Sometimes the smallest detail could unlock the whole secret of a frightening dream. A face glimpsed high up at an attic window. A tatty old crow, perched on a distant gatepost. A small child sitting by the roadside, sobbing his heart out.

‘Turned on?’ said T-Yon. She thought about it, and then she added, ‘No, I guess I’m not – not really. I can
feel
him making love to me, physically. I can feel him inside me, but it’s not really exciting.’

‘Does it go on for long, this love-making?’

‘Some nights it seems to go on for hours. Other nights it’s over in just a few seconds. But it always ends the same. Everett makes love to me faster and faster and then he suddenly stops, and bunches up, and lets out this terrible
aaahhhhhhhh
! At the same time I have this sliding feeling in my stomach.’

T-Yon ran her fingertip down in a vertical line from her breastbone to her waist. ‘It’s the most horrible sensation you can imagine. It’s like somebody’s cutting me open with a really sharp scalpel – right through my skin and my muscles and all the layers of fat and everything.’

She stopped for a moment, and took two or three steadying breaths. Then she said, ‘Everett, he’s making this kind of a whimpering noise. You know – like a puppy when somebody’s run it over. It’s muffled, because he still hasn’t taken off his mask. I’m too shocked to make any sound at all. I lift my head and look down at my stomach and it’s gaping wide open. Everett’s still on top of me, and
his
stomach is gaping open too.’

‘My God,’ said Sissy. She was really craving for a cigarette now, and she wished Billy would hurry back from the store. On the other hand, she was anxious to hear the rest of T-Yon’s nightmare before he returned. She didn’t want T-Yon to hold anything back, which she might very well do if Billy were here. Hearing that his new girlfriend was having nightmares about sex with her own brother wouldn’t be the greatest aphrodisiac of all time.