The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (20 page)

Inside the open front doors, however, appeared the front porch of another house, as if one house were built inside the other. The same man was standing on the steps of this house, although he was wearing only an open shirt and black breeches, and his feet were bare. There was a woman standing next to him, but it was a different woman, and she was naked apart from a pearl necklace and a pair of pink slippers.

In the orchards that surrounded this house within a house, children of various ages were playing with hoops and hobby horses, and small dogs were running around.

Usually, when this card came up, it told Sissy that a husband was having an affair, and might even be leading a double life with a mistress and children of which his wife was completely unaware. Once, it had even revealed that a friend’s husband was bigamous. He had been living with one wife in New Milford for eleven years, although three years ago he had married a second wife, ten years younger, forty miles away in Darien.

But this time, One House, Two Houses had to have a different meaning altogether. She wasn’t asking the cards about anybody’s marital relationship. She wanted to know more about the mutilated body in the bathroom, and what kind of danger
she
might be facing.

One House, Two Houses? One house inside another? What did that mean, in the context of Vanessa Slider and The Red Hotel?

She was still frowning at the card when Luther walked in. One crumpled shirt-tail was hanging out of his baggy red pants and he looked exhausted.

‘Oh,
that’s
where you at,’ he said. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. ‘We should all be vacating the premises in a half hour or so, just as soon as we’ve finished tidying everything up. I was wondering if you’d like to come stay with me and Shatoya for a day or two. I was going to introduce you to Shatoya earlier on, but I didn’t get the chance. Ms T-Yon’s going to be staying with Mister Everett but he only has the one spare room.’

‘Well, that’s very generous of you,’ said Sissy. ‘So long as it’s not going to put you out. I could always find another hotel. There’s the Hilton right next door.’

‘Shatoya give me such a hard time if I let you do that,’ said Luther. ‘Pervided you don’t mind my Aunt Epiphany. She lives with us permanent. She’s kind of individual in her ways but she’s good for babysitting and she cooks up the best smothered pork chops you ever tasted.’

‘Didn’t you say your Aunt Epiphany was a voodoo queen?’

‘That’s correct, Ms Sissy, but we don’t encourage her to practice it too much around the house. We let her have her dolls, but we don’t want our kids growing up thinking that the way to get your revenge on somebody is to go sticking pins in no effigy.’

He looked down at the cards that Sissy had laid out. ‘What those telling you? Good news, I hope. We could sure do with some.’

Sissy was just about to tell him about the house within a house when a pretty black waitress in a short red skirt came up to them. ‘If you’re hungry, Mr Broody, we have a whole stack of burgers left over.’

‘Sure, why not?’ said Luther. ‘I was so busy organizing that gala I never got the time to eat nothing. How about you, Ms Sissy? Think you could go for a burger?’

Sissy shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry at the moment, thanks. But an iced tea would be very welcome.’

‘Great. Cheeseburger charred, with one large Diet Coke and a ice tea for the lady here.’

When the waitress had gone, Sissy held up
Un Maison, Deux Maisons
so that Luther could focus on it clearly. ‘You see this card, Luther? This card is telling me that something highly unusual is happening here in this hotel.’

‘
Unusual?
Shoot. You are seriously not joking.’

‘How can I put it? It’s like there’s not just one reality, but
two
, and one reality overlaps the other.’

‘Say
what
?’

‘Well, look – the picture on this card here shows us one house hidden inside another house. So these people have an outside life which all the world can see quite openly, but behind the front door, they have another life, which is secret, and which nobody else gets to see.’

‘OK . . .’ said Luther, dubiously.

‘Most of the time, this card indicates that a woman’s husband is having an adulterous affair. But not here, and not now.’

Luther pulled a face, almost as if he were in pain. ‘I’m not too sure what you driving at, Ms Sissy.’

Sissy laid the card back on the table. ‘You may think I’m just a nutty old woman, Luther, but I’m sure that this is the answer. Or
part
of the answer, anyhow. That rug that was soaked in blood, what room did Ella-mae find it in?’

‘Suite Seven-Oh-Three.’

‘OK. She found it in Suite Seven-Oh-Three. But what I’m saying is that – originally – it didn’t come from
that
Suite Seven-Oh-Three.’

‘Ms Sissy,’ said Luther, trying to be patient. ‘We only have one Suite Seven-Oh-Three.’

Sissy lifted her finger. ‘You
think
you do, Luther, but it’s the same as this card. A house within a house. Inside Suite Seven-Oh-Three is another Suite Seven-Oh-Three. Not existing in the same dimension, maybe. But there, all the same. And somebody has the ability to move between one Suite Seven-Oh-Three and the other Suite Seven-Oh-Three, which is why there were no footprints and no fingerprints and no blood spattered all over the place.’

Luther looked at Sissy for almost half a minute before he said anything. Then he traced a pattern on the tabletop with his fingertip, as if he were trying to draw an explanatory diagram.

‘You trying to tell me there’s
two
Suite Seven-Oh-Threes?’

‘For all I know there may be even more.’

‘Well, let’s just stick with two of them for now. But one of them exists in another dimension?’

‘Exactly. But when I’m talking about another dimension, I don’t mean like some science-fiction story, with Martians in it. You know,
The Creature from the Tenth Dimension.
I simply mean another dimension like time, or space. They could be slightly out of sync.
Infinitesimally
out of sync, which does happen. Some psychics call it phasing. Phasing accounts for the appearance of what we call ghosts, and why it’s possible for us to talk to gone-beyonders.’

‘Gone-beyonders? Who are they?’

‘Dead people, to you.’

Luther thought for another long while. Then he said, ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Ms Sissy. Do you
really
believe we got two Suite Seven-Oh-Threes? I don’t mean to cause you no offense but you beginning to sound even wackier than my Aunt Epiphany.’

‘No, Luther, I don’t believe you have two Suite Seven-Oh-Threes. I believe you have much more than that. I believe you have two entire hotels.’

She picked up the One House, Two Houses card again. ‘This is what this card is telling me. You have two hotels, almost identical except for one fraction of a fraction’s difference, either in time or in location, which is why one can exist inside the other.’

Luther looked around the Showboat Saloon. Then he looked back at Sissy. ‘So you think we’re sitting inside a saloon, inside a saloon?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sissy admitted. ‘Like I said, there may be many more. There may be an infinite number. It could be like looking into one of those three-piece dressing-table mirrors, and seeing your reflections going off left and right, hundreds of them. Where do they end? Do they end at all? And how do you know which one of them is the real you?’

‘You messing with my head, Ms Sissy. Are you going to explain all of this to Mr Everett? How about the poh-lice? Think they’ll understand it any better than I do?’

‘Not just yet, Luther,’ said Sissy. She nodded toward her DeVane cards. ‘I need to finish this reading first. It could tell me a whole lot more.’

At that moment, the waitress came back with Luther’s cheeseburger and Coke and Sissy’s iced tea.

‘You don’t mind if I dig in, do you?’ asked Luther. ‘I’m so hungry I could eat two of these. Well – from what you say, maybe I’m going to. One burger inside of another burger.’

He opened his cheeseburger and smothered it with tomato relish before picking it up in both hands and starting to eat. ‘Mmm-mmhh!’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘You don’t know what you missing here, Ms Sissy! This is
good
!’

Sissy smiled, but all she could think about was that bloody, headless body sitting in the bath in Room 511, and she seriously wondered if she would ever be able to eat meat ever again.

She continued to turn over her DeVane cards. The rest of them told much the same enigmatic story as her previous reading. Somewhere, a whistling shadow was patiently waiting for T-Yon. Somewhere, an unknown woman was pressing her hand against a whitewashed wall, while the portrait of a man looked mournfully down at her. Pastry cooks were baking pies with human fingers protruding from their crusts, and leaving them to cool on their kitchen window sill. Down by the water’s edge, Everett was frantically waving a red banner for help, while brown pelicans flocked all around him.

Sissy had never known the cards to be so urgent, and so alarmist, and yet so confused. She felt almost as if they were panicking.

‘You should have ordered one of these,’ said Luther, holding up his cheeseburger, of which he had already devoured more than half. ‘Our grill chef, Jimmy, he’s the best in town. We stole him from Louie’s on West State Street.’

Sissy gave him a quick-dissolving smile. ‘Maybe some other time.’

She was just about to turn over the last card but as soon as she touched it she knew that she didn’t need to. She could feel instinctively that it was the Night Kitchen. In spite of that, and even though the cards were so unsettled, she felt a small amount of satisfaction that she had probably learned more from this reading than Vanessa Slider had wanted her to.

Vanessa Slider had run down the stairs from the roof in her pale green dress, but where had she vanished then?
To Sissy, the logical answer was that she had disappeared from one Red Hotel and reappeared in another.

As she was gathering up her cards, she heard Detective Garrity call out, ‘Ah, Ms Sawyer, ma’am. You’re still here, then.’ He came across the saloon, closely followed by a sallow young detective with shiny black hair and a raspberry-colored coat.

‘Hallo, Detective,’ said Sissy. ‘I’m just waiting for Mr Savoie to finish up and then I’ll be leaving. Mr Broody here has kindly offered me a roof over my head.’

‘Afraid I have some bad news,’ said Detective Garrity.

‘You’ve identified the body?’

He nodded. ‘The CSIs found a billfold and a signet ring in the bottom of the bathtub, underneath the cadaver. They both belonged to Kevin Mullard.’

‘Oh, no, I’m so sorry. Oh, that’s terrible.’

Detective Garrity was trying hard not to sound too emotional. ‘That’s only a preliminary ID, of course. But I can’t see how there’s any doubt. Kevin – you know – Kevin was a truly great guy. Rough at the edges, if you know what I mean. Terrible taste in suits. But you could always count on him, day or night. God knows what the hell they did to him.’

Luther was still chewing the last of his hamburger. Suddenly he frowned, and stopped chewing, and chased something around the inside of his mouth with his tongue. He reached up with finger and thumb and carefully spat it out.

‘Gristle?’ asked Sissy.

Luther picked up his napkin and wiped it and then he held it up. It was a green plastic button.

S
issy went back to Everett’s office. Everett was standing around talking to Charlie Bowdre and two other maintenance men, while Bella was tidying up his desk for him.

‘You all ready to go?’ asked Everett.

‘Yes,’ said Sissy. ‘My bag’s at reception. I’m waiting on Luther, that’s all. He’s not feeling too good.’

‘Oh, yeah? What’s the problem?’

‘I think you’d better ask him yourself.’

She didn’t know for sure that Luther had been eating what he had suspected he was eating, and she didn’t want to upset Everett more than was necessary. The CSIs had asked Luther to stick his finger down his throat and vomit into a bowl so that they could analyze his stomach contents. Just thinking about it made Sissy feel nauseous.

She looked around. ‘Where’s T-Yon? I wanted to make sure that she was OK.’

‘She’ll be here directly. She forgot her make-up, that’s all, and she went back up to her room to get it.’

Sissy sat down in the corner. Detective Garrity came into the office and took Everett aside, speaking to him quietly and intently. It was obvious from the look on Everett’s face that Detective Garrity was telling him what Luther had found in his cheeseburger.

When he had gone, Everett turned to Sissy and said, ‘You knew about this?’

‘Yes,’ Sissy admitted.

‘You’re a fortune teller. Tell me this. Can things get any frigging worse than they are already? Personally, I don’t see how they can.’

Sissy was tempted to try and explain her idea about the hotel within a hotel. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. It was a known phenomenon, phasing, scientifically measurable, and it had been the only plausible explanation for countless so-called ‘hauntings.’ True, she had never come across it on such a massive scale before. Usually, it was little more than singing in an empty room; or the reflection of a dead husband, seen through a window; or the smell of baking when the stove was cold, and the wife who had once bustled around the kitchen was lying in the cemetery.

But Sissy thought:
it’s possible, if Vanessa Slider is vengeful enough. Who knows what people can do when they feel bitterly wronged?

Luther appeared, gray-faced, his eyes red-rimmed, as if he had been dusted with ash.

‘How are you feeling now?’ she asked him.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘That’s three times I swilled out my mouth with Listerine but I can still taste it.
Yecchh!
One of those CSI women promised to call me as soon as she’s analyzed it, but I’m not too sure I want to find out, to tell you the God’s honest truth.’