The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (8 page)

He held the doors open and looked back outside. There was no girl walking away from him in the corridor, only Luther patiently waiting with his hands clasped in front of his crotch.

Shit,
he thought
. I’m losing it. I must have been working too hard.

But then he thought about his telephone conversation with T-Yon.

‘
Sissy believes that people can still come looking for revenge, even after they’ve passed over
.’

S
issy went into the kitchen to make her potato and mushroom bake, while Billy and T-Yon took Mr Boots for a walk up the road. The sky had cleared now, and even though it was cool for an August evening, Sissy could leave the kitchen door open.

She could hear the repetitive whistling of a whippoorwill from somewhere in the woods. She always thought whippoorwills sounded as if they had lost their mate, like she had, and were hopelessly whistling for them to come back, over and over.

She sliced parboiled potatoes and laid them in a buttered dish. Then she covered them with sliced mushrooms, rosemary, chives and garlic, followed by another layer of potatoes. She poured cream over the top of the potatoes and seasoned them lavishly with ground black pepper; and then slid the dish into the preheated oven.

Frank had always complained when she made potato and mushroom bake. ‘A man needs his meat,’ he used to say. ‘You want to see me wasting away in front of your eyes?’

But Frank had never had the chance to waste away: he had been shot by a nineteen-year-old drug addict called Laurence Stepney, when he had tried to stop him from breaking into a station wagon outside the Big Bear Supermarket, near Norfolk. That was nearly twenty-five years ago now, and Laurence Stepney was now a free man. Frank, of course, was still in his casket.

‘
Pretty woman, walking down the street
,’ Sissy sang, under her breath, as she took off her apron. Frank had often sung that for her, even though it had usually come out in a low, off-key growl. He had never been good at paying her compliments, so he had recruited Roy Orbison to do it for him. And in spite of his complaints, he had always finished his potato and mushroom bake, and scraped the plate.

She poured herself another glass of Zinfandel and went back into the living room. She knew that she needed to give T-Yon a second reading if she was going to answer all of the puzzles and uncertainties that her first reading had raised. But the final cards that she had turned up had given her such a strong sense of danger that she wondered if it was a good idea to take the readings any further.

If T-Yon was convinced by her card readings that her brother, Everett, was at risk in any way, then she would obviously consider flying to Baton Rouge to try and protect him. The cards had predicted that she would. But Sissy was having second thoughts about the wisdom of T-Yon doing that. It was strange that T-Yon was the one who was having the nightmares, not Everett – not as far as she knew, anyhow. It was possible that T-Yon could make matters worse. Maybe Vanessa Slider was using her nightmares as way of getting herself back into The Red Hotel, as if T-Yon were carrying her in, like an infection. Or maybe she had some other reason for wanting T-Yon back there.

Shit and a bit
, thought Sissy.
And here I was looking forward to a quiet feet-up weekend, and maybe a few glasses of wine and a game of gin rummy with my old friend, Sam.

She had Googled
Vanessa Slider
on her laptop, but she had found only two, sparse entries, neither of which had given her very much more background than Everett had told T-Yon on the phone.

Wikipedia said that Vanessa and her husband Gerard had jointly managed what was then called the Hotel Rouge until 1985, when Gerard had died and Vanessa had taken over. In 1988, Vanessa had been arrested for the attempted homicide of a prostitute called Evangeline Doucet, for reasons which she refused to explain in court. She had been jailed for a minimum of fifteen years at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, while her son, Shem, had been sent to the East Baton Rouge Juvenile Detention Facility.

There was no information on Vanessa’s release date, or whether she was still alive. But as Sissy had told T-Yon, she had an intuitive feeling that Vanessa was dead, and that maybe her son Shem was, too, although she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

It wasn’t always so easy, telling the difference between the dead and the living. Some people who visited Sissy to have their fortunes read gave her a chill like a winter wind blowing across a graveyard, even though they were still alive.
Abominable snowpersons
, Sissy called them. On the other hand, she had been to funerals where her natural sensitivity had shown her that an aura still lingered around the person lying in the casket – usually blue, or gold, or pink – even though their hearts had long stopped beating.

She took out a cigarette and flicked her Zippo alight, but then she snapped the Zippo shut and tucked the cigarette back into the box. She had tempted death quite enough for one day, she thought to herself. Sometimes you have to turn around and look him in the eye and say, no, you can wait.

Billy and T-Yon came back into the house, and brought Mr Boots in, too. ‘He had a swim in the pond, didn’t you, boy? But he’s dried off now, and he doesn’t smell quite so bad.’

‘I sometimes wonder why I don’t have him put down,’ said Sissy. ‘He costs me a fortune in food, and he’s such an unresponsive mutt these days.’

Mr Boots lay down on the floor and looked up at Sissy with sad, appealing eyes.

‘You won’t have him put down because you love him,’ said Billy. ‘And you know that he’d come back to haunt you. That’s the trouble with being so psychic. Your friends die, your pets die, but you can never get rid of them. What was the name of that cat you used to have? The one you saw sitting on the window sill looking in at you, about three years after he had died?’

‘Oh, Smokey,’ said Sissy, with a flap of her hand. ‘I saw him two or three times after that. At least those goddamned goldfish never came back.’

‘Something smells good,’ said T-Yon. ‘Is that your potato and mushroom bake?’

‘It’ll be ready in a half-hour,’ Sissy told her. ‘Hope you’re ravenous; I made three times too much, as usual.’

‘Does that give us time to have a second reading?’

‘You’re really sure you want to?’

‘Of course, yes. If there’s any kind of problem at The Red Hotel, I really want to know about it. I don’t want anything to happen to Everett.’

‘I suppose you want me to kick my heels outside?’ said Billy.

‘No, Billy-bob, you can stay here for this. I’d like to see what
you
think of the cards that come up.’

‘OK. But those DeVane cards, they always give me the heebie-jeebies. They always did, even when you used to tell my fortune when I was a kid. I guess they were always right, though. They said that I was going to be working a kitchen, didn’t they, even when I was sure that I was going to be a Navy Seal?’

Billy went into the kitchen to fetch himself a can of Schlitz and then flopped down in the armchair opposite and popped the top. ‘So – you’ve done one reading. What’s the story so far?’

Sissy quickly told him all about Vanessa Slider and The Red Hotel, and how the cards had predicted that she and her son, Shem, were trying to get back to the hotel to exact their revenge. She confessed that she wasn’t sure
why
they wanted revenge, or what for, although she suspected that it was linked in some way to all of the gruesome goings-on depicted in
La Châtelaine
card – all that chopping up of humans and animals and baking them into pies, as well as the beds heaped up with ravenous rats, and the man with no head.

She didn’t tell Billy about T-Yon’s nightmares; and neither did she tell him about the Night Kitchen card, with the girl frying her own entrails. She didn’t want to spoil Billy’s relationship with T-Yon by telling him that she had dreamed about sleeping with her brother, and neither did she want him to think that something terrible was going to happen to her, and panic. They had to interpret the cards calmly, and rationally, and analyze what they were really trying to say, even though some of them were so enigmatic and some of them were so gory, and most of them were both.

Billy listened, and nodded, but when Sissy had finished he shook his head and said, ‘No. No way, José. I can’t see any of this happening for real.’

‘But you said yourself that the cards were always right,’ said T-Yon.

‘They are. They are. I’m not disputing that. But even if they’re right, they’re not always, like,
literal.
You can’t take them at face value, can you? Because it’s like they’re hundreds of years old, right, and most of the things they’re predicting about, they didn’t have them in those days. So you have to
interpret
them. This guy with no head, for example, reading the newspaper. He could be some reporter, giving The Red Hotel a bad write-up, because he’s stupid. No head, see? No head equals no brains. It doesn’t literally mean that some guy’s going to get his head cut off in real life.’

T-Yon turned to Sissy and said, ‘Is that right? I mean, I
hope
it’s right.’

Before Sissy could answer, however, Billy added, ‘Don’t get me wrong. I do believe the cards are giving you the heads up that Everett’s in for some trouble. But it’s not going to be, like, death-and-destruction type trouble. I don’t know. Maybe the Baton Rouge planning authorities are going to give him a hard time about his fire doors. Or – look at these rats. Maybe he’s going to have mice running around in some of the bedrooms and he has to call in the rodent exterminator. It could be that his restaurant gets some one-star reviews. You know, maybe some of the guests are going to get food poisoning or something.’

He picked up some of the cards, and said, ‘Look at these pictures. You don’t seriously think that anybody is going to be baking human fingers into pies anytime soon? It’s
symbolic
. That fat guy outside the kitchen window, maybe he’s a local cop who wants a kickback for protection. Pie, fingers. You know – getting his fingers into the pie.’

‘But what about Vanessa Slider and her son?’ T-Yon asked him. ‘The cards specifically say that they’re looking to get their revenge.’

‘Yes, but –
again
,’ said Billy, ‘you don’t even know if this chatelaine woman is really her. She could represent one of her relations, or some attorney who thinks that Vanessa Slider was done out of her share in the business when she was sent to the pokey, and is trying to claim it back. A writ can do as much damage as a double-headed ax, don’t you think?
More,
probably.’

He paused. ‘All I’m trying to say is, this is the twenty-first century, and even if what these cards predict is always spot on, you have to interpret them according to the way life is today, not like it was back in eighteen-oh-when.’

Sissy collected up all the DeVane cards and slowly shuffled them. ‘There’s a lot in what you say, Billy,’ she admitted. ‘In fact I taught you most of that myself, when I first showed you how to use them.’

Billy spread his arms wide and said, ‘It’s logical, right? Like, for instance, even if T-Yon
does
go back to Baton Rouge, there’s no way she’s traveling there in a horse and buggy. Jesus. It would take her the next six months.’

‘Well,’ said Sissy, ‘we’ll have to see what the cards tell us next. Here’s your Predictor card, T-Yon. Ask your question. In fact, you can ask more than one question, if you want to. But again – don’t tell me what it is.’

T-Yon laid the card on the coffee table, closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them up again and said, ‘Done it.
Three
questions, actually.’

Sissy laid the cards out in the Cross of Lorraine pattern, with three cards in a fan shape at the top. Billy leaned forward in his armchair so that he could see better, and said, ‘Go, Aunt Sissy! Let’s see you unravel the mysteries of the future, right before our very eyes!’

Sissy looked at him sharply. ‘I hope you’re going to take this seriously, Billy-bob. Otherwise you
can
go kick your heels outside. And your ass, too, while you’re at it.’

‘Sure, Aunt Sissy. Sorry. I just think the DeVane cards are really cool, that’s all. Scary as all hell, but really cool.’

Sissy took hold of the edge of the first card and she was about to turn it over when she felt a strange prickling sensation in her fingertips, as if the card had given her a very mild electric shock. She let go of the card and looked around the living room, frowning.

‘What’s up, Aunt Sissy? Aren’t you going to turn over the cards?’

Sissy could feel some disturbance around her. She wasn’t at all sure what it was. For some reason it put her in mind of the last time she had visited Florida, and the foyer of her hotel had been hung from floor to ceiling with light gauzy drapes, which had silently lifted and fallen in the breeze which blew in from the ocean.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she said, in a very quiet voice. ‘Well, maybe not
wrong
, but different.’

‘What is it?’ asked T-Yon.

‘A draft. A very soft draft. Can you feel it?’

T-Yon lifted her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe something. How about you, Billy?’

Billy pulled a face. ‘I don’t feel nothing. Come on, Aunt Sissy. I think you’re just spooking yourself out.’

‘Yes, maybe I am. But let’s just see what this first card has to tell us. This is going to be like
La Châtelaine
card, T-Yon . . . whatever it is, it’s going to influence all the rest of the cards which follow. You do realize that?’

‘Whatever, it’s OK with me,’ said T-Yon. ‘I’d rather know the worst.’

On the back of this card, like every other card, there was an engraving of a peacock sitting in the center of a frame of decorative leaves. Sissy turned it over, but to her bewilderment the front was exactly the same.

She thought for a split second that two cards must have somehow become stuck together, face-to-face. But then she felt that soft draft, rising again, and she sensed that this was no accident. She quickly turned over the next card, and the next, and the next. All of them were identical, with the same pattern on the front as there was on the back. All of the pictures of chatelaines and chefs and terrifying kitchens – all of the pictures of rats and monks and screaming faces in grassy fields – they had all disappeared. Both sides of every card showed the same peacock in the same leafy surroundings, but that was all.