The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (24 page)

‘Do you have the plan for the second floor there?’ she asked. Luther leafed through the schematics until he found it for her, and handed it across the pool table. She folded it over, and laid it next to the blueprint of the second floor from 1986. With her fingertip she carefully traced her path from Room 209 toward the window at the end of the corridor, where she had encountered Vanessa Slider.

‘
There
,’ she said, pointing to the blueprint. ‘I thought so. When Vanessa Slider owned the Hotel Rouge, there was a doorway right there, which led to a service corridor and a linen closet. That was how she appeared to walk through a solid wall. In
her
hotel, you can still do that.

She examined the blueprint more closely. ‘And look – this service corridor connects directly with the main staircase, so once you’ve gone through that door, you have access to every other floor in the entire hotel. For my money, Everett, that’s how T-Yon disappeared.’

‘But how did
she
go through the wall? T-Yon isn’t a spirit, or a presence, or whatever you call it.’

‘She didn’t need to be. Now that the two Red Hotels are in phase, anybody can cross from one to the other and back again, no matter if they’re still alive or a gone-beyonder. I can do it. You can do it. The only thing you need to know is exactly
where
you can do it. And now you do.’

Everett said, ‘In that case, what the hell are we waiting for? Let’s go find her.’

‘Everett, wait up. I really, strongly advise you not to.’

‘What? Why?’

‘It was what Vanessa Slider said to me. “
I want both of them. I want both of them
together
.”’

‘So what? She’s only a fricking ghost. What can she do?’

‘I hope you’re not serious. She managed to kill Detective Mullard, didn’t she, and cut him up like a cattle carcass? She probably killed Ella-mae, too, and cut her up, too, judging by all of that blood. And who knows where that blood on the rug came from. Besides . . .’

Everett looked at Sissy sharply. ‘Besides,
what
? Is there something you haven’t told me?’

‘I promised T-Yon that I wouldn’t, but under the circumstances—’

‘Is this something about her nightmares? She kept promising that she would tell me all about them, but then she kept finding excuses why she couldn’t.’

Sissy said, ‘She was very embarrassed about them, that’s why. Come over here, and I’ll tell you.’

She took Everett across to the bookcase, out of earshot of Luther and Bella. In a quiet voice, trying not to be too graphic, she described T-Yon’s nightmare about having sex with him, and how their stomachs were slit open and their intestines were tangled together.

When she had finished, Everett puffed out his cheeks and said, ‘Jesus H. Christ. Some goddamned nightmare. No wonder she didn’t want to tell me about it. But what does it mean? Does it mean anything at all? Maybe she’s been suffering from stress, that’s all.’

‘I think it means that the spirit of Vanessa Slider is trying very hard to get you two together so that she can take her revenge on both of you at once. For some reason that’s important to her. In Vanessa’s mind, it seems like you two have ruined her life.’

‘But how? Like I said before, I never even
heard
of Vanessa Slider before Stanley and I bought The Red Hotel.’

Sissy said, ‘Everett – I won’t go into everything that the DeVane cards have been telling me. Some of it is very horrible and a whole lot of it I don’t yet understand myself. But the cards have never given me warnings like this before. It’s almost like they’re screaming
watch out
!’

‘So how are we going to get T-Yon back?’

‘I’ll go. I’ll try to go through the wall and talk to Vanessa Slider and see if I can’t find out
why
she’s feeling so vengeful. Maybe there’s a way of negotiating some kind of settlement between us.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Sissy, that’s crazy. For one thing, how are you going to go through a solid wall? For another thing, that detective got chopped into hamburger meat and it could be that Ella-mae did too and who knows that the same thing won’t happen to you? Even if it’s possible, which I don’t believe it is, I can’t let you do it.’

‘How else can we get T-Yon back, Everett? The police won’t help us. Detective Garrity doesn’t even believe that she’s still here. I’ll try to go through the wall but I won’t go alone. I’ll take somebody big and strong, like Luther, if he’ll agree to come with me. Besides, I don’t think Vanessa Slider will hurt me. She doesn’t bear me any ill will personally. She just wants me to go away and mind my own business.’

‘I still think I should come. T-Yon’s my sister, Sissy. It’s my hotel. If I hadn’t bought it, this never would have happened.’

‘You don’t know that, Everett. But I honestly believe that if you come too, you’ll be putting T-Yon in even greater danger. And yourself, too.’

They went back over to the pool table, still strewn with blueprints and schematics. Luther could tell that they had been talking about him, and he said, ‘
What?
’

D
etective Garrity was deeply unamused, and his voice was dry-throated and even less expressionless than it usually was.

‘I’ll tell you, we’ve just finished another search, and I can categorically guarantee to you that Ms Savoie is not in this hotel, and neither is this Slider woman nor anybody else. The tracker dogs traced Ms Savoie’s scent halfway along the second-floor corridor but then they lost it. According to the dog handlers, that means she went halfway along the corridor and then turned around and retraced her steps.’

‘So where did she go from there?’ Sissy asked him. ‘Why didn’t she come back down to the lobby? Mr Savoie was waiting for her, she knew that. He was going to take her back home.’

‘I can’t tell you what went on inside Ms Savoie’s mind, Ms Sawyer. All I know for sure is that she is not on the premises. Period.’

‘How about you accompany me up to the second floor, Detective, to see if
I
can get through the wall? You can always stand there and say “I told you so, you batty old psychic” if I can’t do it.’

Detective Garrity closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were looking inside himself for any remaining reserves of patience. ‘Ms Sawyer, ma’am, I have been up and down to every single floor in this hotel all day, again and again. I have initiated three full searches, two with bloodhounds. Right now I have to go back and report to my captain so that he can make a statement to the media. After that I am going to go home and get myself something to eat and two or three hours’ sleep. I suggest you do the same.’

With that, he walked away across the lobby.

Sissy looked at Luther and said, ‘I thought, from what he said earlier, that maybe he
half
believed me.’

‘He’s a cop,’ said Luther. ‘Cops only believe what they can persuade a public prosecutor to believe. Don’t matter if it’s true or not.’

‘How about you, Luther? Do you believe me?’

‘Me? I always keep an open mind, Ms Sissy. If we try to walk through that wall and all we succeed in doing is flattening our faces, then I
won’t
believe you. But if we
do
go through it, then what can I say? The Lord works in all kinds of miraculous ways that we can’t understand, but just because we can’t understand them, that don’t mean they ain’t true. I can’t understand nuclear physics, but that don’t mean it don’t work.’

‘You’re a good man, Luther,’ said Sissy, laying her hand on his arm. ‘A good man and a clever one, too.’

The two of them took the elevator to the second floor. As they went up, Luther smiled and shook his head and said, ‘There’s one thing I can’t believe. I can’t believe I’m even thinking of doing this. If Shatoya could see me now.’

‘If your Aunt Epiphany could see you now, I think she’d be proud of you.’

They walked along the corridor until they reached the place where Sissy had seen Vanessa Slider. Sissy had brought the 1986 blueprint with her, tucked in her bag, so that she could precisely pinpoint the place where there had once been a doorway.

‘OK . . .’ she said. ‘This should be it. The wallpaper and the skirting board don’t look any different from the rest of the corridor, do they? I mean, you couldn’t tell that there used to be a door here.’

‘Oh, when they remodeled, they stripped this place right back to the bare brick. They replastered, they replaced all of the moldings. All of the doors is original, but they burned them right down to the bare wood and repainted them.’

Sissy looked up and down the corridor. Through the window at the end, she could see the twinkling lights of Lafayette Street. She couldn’t pretend to herself that she wasn’t frightened. She almost found herself wishing that the wall would prove to be solid, and impenetrable, even though she had seen Vanessa Slider walk through it with her own eyes.

‘Are you ready for this?’ she asked Luther.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. There’s only one question I’m axing myself, and that’s what happens if we go through but we can’t get back. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days in nineteen eighty-six. I been there, when I was eleven years old, and I hated every minute of it.’

‘Vanessa Slider came through to this side, and
she
managed to go back. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do the same.’

‘This is sheer craziness, isn’t it?’ said Luther. ‘Here we are discussing something downright impossible. I mean –
look
.’

With that, without waiting for Sissy, he took three steps across the corridor, swinging his arms with an exaggerated swagger.

Even Sissy expected him to collide with the wall with a thud, and she let out a high-pitched ‘
ha!
’ of amusement. But he vanished through the patterned wallpaper as if it were mist, and he was gone.

My good God
, thought Sissy.
My good God you actually
can
walk through it. Oh my God he’s disappeared.

Her heart was beating like a panicky canary in a cage, but she knew that she had to follow him. Who knows what Vanessa Slider would do to him if he appeared without warning and without explanation in the Hotel Rouge, the way that Detective Mullard must have done? Now that Sissy came to think of it, Vanessa Slider and her son, Shem, had probably killed Detective Mullard out of self-preservation, especially if he had told them that he was a cop.

She squeezed her eyes tight shut, held her arms out in front of her, and walked toward the wall.

It was the most extraordinary sensation that she had ever felt in her life. It was like walking through a sharp blast of icy-cold wind, thick with fine, abrasive granules of sand. There was a sound like
sshhhhhhhh!
and then she was through.

She opened her eyes. She was standing in a dingy corridor lit only by a single naked light bulb. The walls were papered with maroon-and-gold stripes, but the paper was very faded and peeling with damp in places. The carpet was green and worn through to the string. The first thing that struck her was the
smell
. Stale cigar smoke, mingled with mildew, and bleach, and burned cooking fat.

Luther was standing halfway along the corridor, peering into a closet. He turned around as she appeared and said, ‘There you are, Ms Sissy! Welcome to the Hotel Rouge!’

‘My God,’ said Sissy. ‘We actually came through! Even I didn’t believe that we could really do it for real.’

‘You and me both. It’s like a dream, ain’t it? And not like the one that Martin Luther King had, neither.’

‘What’s in the closet?’ Sissy asked him.

‘Laundry, mostly. Sheets, pillowslips. No Ms T-Yon.’

‘Well, we’d better see if we can find her.’

‘How exactly we going to do that? We can’t search the whole damn hotel. We don’t have no keys, for a start, so that we can access the rooms.’

‘We call her. We walk up and down the corridors, one after the other, and we shout out,
T-Yon!
Are you there
,
T-Yon?
Teeeeee-Yon!
’

‘Holy shit, Ms Sissy! That Vanessa Slider’s going to hear you, if you screech like that! Fact she probably heard you loud and clear already!’

Sissy hefted her shoulder bag. ‘That’s the idea, Luther. If there’s one person who knows where T-Yon is, it’s her.’

She led the way along to the end of the service corridor. Luther cautiously pushed open the door to the main staircase, and it gave a soft, squeaky groan. Compared to the same staircase in The Red Hotel it was airless and humid and badly lit and it reeked of dried urine. They could hear echoing voices from below them, and the sound of radio music, and a constant grinding noise, like the grinding that Sissy and Detective Garrity had heard in Room 511.

‘Sounds like a kid, as well as a woman,’ said Luther. ‘That Vanessa Slider ain’t on her own here and that’s for sure. Not unless she’s some kind of ventriloquist.’

They negotiated the landing, which was cluttered with stacking metal chairs and empty cardboard boxes and brooms and a broken vacuum cleaner, and opened the door which led to the main second-floor corridor.

It was hard to believe that this was the same corridor along which they had walked after they had stepped out of the elevator. The walls were papered in the same maroon-and-gold stripes as the service corridor, and the floors were carpeted in the same grass green, disfigured with stains and black spots of discarded chewing gum and threadbare in places.

Luther looked around as he padded along the corridor and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Can’t believe how she could have allowed the place get so run down.’

‘I know. Especially when she said that Everett and T-Yon had taken her dream. If I ever had dreams like this I’d be afraid to go to sleep.’

She lifted her bag from her shoulder and took out her witch compass. Even if shouting out T-Yon’s name brought no response, there was at least a chance that the cobalt needle would sense where she was.

‘
T-Yon!
’ she called out. ‘
Are you here, T-Yon?
Teeee-yon!
It’s Sissy!
Can you hear me, T-Yon?
’