The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (15 page)

She turned over the first card. Again, it was
La Châtelaine
, the thin, disapproving woman in gray – or rather, nine identical, thin, disapproving women in gray – each with their bunches of nine keys around their waists.

‘So, you are here, Vanessa,’ said Sissy, under her breath. ‘Now let’s see if we can find out where you are exactly, and what you’re so angry about.’

She turned over the next card, and it was
L’Asile De Mon Frère,
My Brother’s Asylum, which T-Yon had taken to represent The Red Hotel. So far, the cards were giving Sissy the same warnings that they had given T-Yon, only in a different sequence. But Sissy had no illusions about it. The fact that her first card had been
La Châtelaine
had shown her that Vanessa Slider was aware that she was here, and that she probably knew
why
.

The third card surprised her, and it surprised her because she couldn’t remember ever having seen it before. She was sure that she knew every single DeVane card intimately, and all of the myriad meanings that their pictures symbolized, from the stampeding black horses which could predict either a catastrophic failure in business or else a huge breakthrough in somebody’s career, to the coy lovers hiding naked in a forest, which predicted either a secret affair or else a newly flourishing adventurousness in a long-lasting relationship.

This card was simply called
Le Mur
, The Wall. It showed a woman in a black floor-length robe standing in a corridor in front of a whitewashed wall. She had her left hand pressed flat against it and her right hand held to her heart. A small sepia portrait was hanging on the wall, in the top-left corner. It showed a handsome man in a felt hat, looking at the woman with a sad expression on his face.

‘Now what in the name of heck are
you
trying to tell me?’ said Sissy. She couldn’t believe that she had never seen this card before. She must have done, but how she could have forgotten it she couldn’t imagine. She was tempted to pick up all the cards and count them, just to make sure that she hadn’t mysteriously acquired one extra.

‘The wall . . .’ she whispered. But
which
wall? Was it a real wall or a metaphorical wall, some obstruction that was preventing somebody from getting where they wanted to go? And who was the woman? Was it Vanessa Slider, or some other woman, and why was she pressing her hand against the wall like that?

The man appeared only as a portrait, and Sissy knew what this signified: that he had left the woman, and was now far away. Either that, or he was dead.

The petroleum tanker hooted again as it began to make its way southward down the river. Sissy looked up, and as she did so, a woman appeared.

Sissy couldn’t stop herself from letting out an ‘
ah!
’ of sheer surprise. The woman had stepped out from behind the square concrete elevator housing, where she must have been standing ever since Sissy came out on to the roof, but how Sissy had failed to see her when she had crossed from one side of the roof to the other, she couldn’t think.

The woman had dark red hair pinned back in a French pleat, and a very white oval face. In fact her face was so white that it looked blurry and unfocused in the morning sunshine, and Sissy found it hard to see exactly what she looked like. She was wearing a pale green button-through dress and pale green shoes to match. She didn’t acknowledge Sissy at all, but walked directly to the door which led to the staircase, which Sissy had left half open.

Sissy raised her hand and said, ‘
Excuse me!
’ but the woman ignored her and disappeared down the stairs.

For a moment, Sissy couldn’t think what to do. After all, it was none of her business why the woman had come up on to the roof. Maybe she had felt like a cigarette, or had an argument with her partner and needed a break to think about it. Maybe she had just wanted to look at the river and meditate.

Or maybe it was none of those things. Maybe she wasn’t a real woman at all. Maybe she was no more than a memory of a woman, an image of somebody who was no longer alive.

Oh, for God’s sake!
Sissy admonished herself.
Stop letting your damned imagination run away with you!
Go ask her!
It may be embarrassing but at least you’ll know!

She hurriedly scooped up her DeVane cards and dropped them, loose, into her bag. She could sort them out later. Then she hurried across to the exit door, and began to climb down the concrete stairs as fast as she dared, holding tightly on to the railing as she did so.

When she reached the landing, she found that the two cleaners were still at work. The bloodstains on the wall were fainter, but they still hadn’t managed to erase them completely.

‘Did a woman just come past you?’

The cleaners frowned at each other and then shook their heads. ‘Woman? No. We didn’t see no woman. Mind you, I can’t say that we was paying too much attention.’

Sissy hesitated for a moment. Then she thought she heard footsteps echoing up the stairwell from the flight below. She leaned over and saw a white hand sliding down the railing – a white hand with a pale green cuff.

‘Thanks,’ she told the cleaners, and continued to make her way down the stairs. She was frightened that she was going to stumble and fall. Her good friend, Grace, had fallen only last year, and broken her hip, and died from the complications. But she could hear the woman continuing downward, and she was determined to catch up with her. There was something strange about her, even if she
were
real. After all, why was she using the stairs, instead of the elevator? Maybe she didn’t want anybody else to see her. That’s if anybody else
could
see her.

She leaned over again and glimpsed the hem of the woman’s dress as she crossed the sixth story landing. Then she heard her shoes pattering down to the fifth.

‘
Excuse me!
’ she called out. ‘
Excuse me, can you wait up a moment, please?
’

Her voice echoed in the stairwell, but even if the woman heard her, she didn’t answer, and she didn’t stop. Sissy reached the sixth story, and hurried across to the next flight down.

She was only halfway down to five, however, when she thought she heard a door squeal on its hinges, and then bang shut. She stopped, and listened. All she could hear was a soft upward draft, and the muted, barely audible sound of people talking, and doors opening and closing, and vacuum cleaners, and elevators whining up and down.

There was no more pattering of shoes, and when she looked over the railing she could no longer see the woman’s hand.

She carried on down to the fifth-story landing as quickly as she could. She went across to the exit door and pulled it open and – sure enough – it made the same squealing noise that she had heard as she was coming down the stairs. She stepped out into the corridor, and as she did so the door closed behind her with a bang – which, even though she was expecting it, made her jump.

She looked to the left, guessing that the woman would be heading for the elevators, but there was no sign of her. When she looked to the right, however, she was just in time to see the woman’s pale green dress as she turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

Well,
she thought,
unless she has a room here, which she
won’t
have, because the fifth story hasn’t yet been cleared for occupation by guests, there is absolutely no place for her to
go
. The corridor in that direction was a dead end.

With renewed determination, she stalked along the corridor with her bag making a chunking sound with every step. She reached the corner, but the corridor ahead of her was empty. At the far end, there was a window with a view of the Hilton hotel on the opposite side of Lafayette Street, its facade glaring white in the sunshine, but there was no woman to be seen.

Sissy walked halfway along the corridor, then turned around, frowning. Maybe the woman had previously been booked into one of the rooms and still had her key. But what had she been doing on the roof, and why hadn’t she answered when Sissy called her? And how was it possible that she had passed those two cleaners without them seeing her?

She took her bag off her shoulder and rummaged inside it until she found her witch compass. She had bought it over twenty years ago, in an antique store in Glastonbury. It was the size and shape of a pocket watch, made of tarnished silver with a hinged lid. Inside, under glass, was a pointer like an ordinary compass, except that there were no markings for NESW.

She opened the lid and held the witch compass out in front of her, in the flat of her hand. Then she slowly walked along the left side of the corridor, all the way to the window. Nothing. The needle didn’t even stir. She paused for a moment and then she walked back along the right side. She made sure that she held the witch compass close to each door in turn, in case the woman was inside one of the rooms, and hiding inside the bathroom, or one of the closets, which would make it more difficult for the needle to sense her presence.

She was halfway back to the corner when the needle suddenly swung to the left. It wasn’t pointing to any of the doors, but to the middle of a length of totally blank wall.

‘What in the name of . . .?’ Sissy murmured.

She walked a few steps further, but the needle continued to point to the same spot. She stepped back, and there was no question about it. The witch compass was insistent that there was a spirit here, either alive or passed over, although she couldn’t guess how a living being could be right inside a wall.

She rummaged around in her bag again until she dug up her cellphone. She found the number of The Red Hotel on the back of the identity badge that Everett had given her, and tapped it out with her silver-polished fingernail.

‘The Red Hotel, good morning,
bon jour
. . . how may I help you?’ asked the receptionist.

‘Yes, this is Ms Sawyer. I’m visiting the hotel with Mr Savoie’s sister.’

‘Of course, Ms Sawyer. What can I do for you?’

‘I’d like you to put me through to that Detective Garrity, if he’s around.’

‘Detective Garrity? Oh – he’s not here right now. I think he went to get some breakfast. But his partner is right here in the lobby. Would you care to speak to him?’

‘Sure. OK. He’ll do.’

While the receptionist went off to bring Detective Mullard to the phone, Sissy kept the witch compass pointing at the wall, just to make sure that the spirit didn’t shift its location, or vanish altogether.

At last, Detective Mullard said, ‘Mullard here. Hi. Where you at, Ms Sawyer?’

‘I’m up on the fifth floor, Detective, between rooms Five-Oh-Nine and Five-Eleven. I think I’ve found some evidence and I need to take a look inside those two rooms.’

‘Evidence such as?’ said Detective Mullard. He made no attempt to disguise his lack of interest.

‘I’m not sure yet. But I believe it might help us to find out who abducted Ella-mae Grover.’

‘Oh yeah? The fact is I’m pretty tied up right now, ma’am.’

‘This won’t take you long, Detective. And if you don’t come take a look now, it may be too late.’

A pause. A sigh. Then, ‘OK, ma’am. I’ll bring up the keys. But I sincerely hope this isn’t going to be a waste of my valuable time.’

‘Oh, my dear Detective Mullard. Heaven forbid.’

W
hile she waited for Detective Mullard to come up to the fifth floor, Sissy sat on the window sill and tidied up her DeVane cards.

She counted them out as she did so, to make sure that
Le Mur
hadn’t mysteriously appeared as an extra card. There were fifty-nine cards, as usual, but she couldn’t find
Le Mur
. She searched through her bag again, but there was no trace of it. It had disappeared as inexplicably as it had appeared.

She sat there feeling as if the world were revolving slowly around her. This was extraordinary trickery – like nothing that she had ever encountered before. She was ninety percent convinced that it was Vanessa Slider, or her spirit, if she were dead, and her son, Shem, too. It was frightening enough that they were capable of entering and leaving rooms without leaving any trace of how they had managed to get in or out, but what really worried Sissy was that they could manipulate her DeVane cards to the point where she was reluctant to rely on them any longer. Supposing she acted on the advice of some card that didn’t really exist, like
Le Mur
?

Sissy had encountered plenty of hostile spirits before, but most of the time they felt simply cheated and bewildered because they had died. Almost all of the spirits with whom she communicated were gentle and loving – sad that their lives were over, nothing more – missing their loved ones as much as their loved ones missed them.

But this was something else altogether. She could feel that there was
hatred
here, almost tangible hatred.

She heard the elevator chime, and then Detective Mullard appeared around the corner of the corridor in his flappy green suit.

‘Ah, Detective. Thank you for coming up.’

‘Sure,’ he sniffed. ‘You said you had evidence?’

‘That’s right. I do.’

Detective Mullard stood looking at her for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘You want to, like,
share
it with me, this evidence?’

‘There’s somebody in one of these two rooms. A woman. I’m not sure which one, because they appear to be someplace between the two.’

Detective Mullard turned to Room 511 and then to Room 509. ‘I see. OK. You saw somebody go inside?’

‘No.’

‘You
heard
them, then?’

‘No.’

‘Then, excuse me for asking, how is it can you tell if she’s in there?’

Sissy held up her witch compass. ‘I used
this
. It’s kind of like a metal detector, only for spirits.’

‘
Spirits?
You mean like ghosts?’

‘Well, souls if you prefer. It can sense the presence of any kind of human spirit, alive or gone beyond. You see how the needle is pointing to the wall? I can move it here, like so. Then I can move it back again, but it’s still pointing to the same place.’