The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (16 page)

‘So, OK. How exactly does it do that?’

‘Simple. The needle’s made out of pure magnetized cobalt. A lot of ordinary compasses have a small amount of cobalt in the needle, although they’re mainly steel. But this is
pure
cobalt, and pure cobalt has some remarkable spiritual properties.’

‘Really?’

Sissy lifted up the compass even higher, so that Detective Mullard could see it more closely, but he leaned away from it, as if he were afraid it was some kind of practical joke, and it was going to snap at him, or go off with a bang.

Sissy said, ‘The word cobalt comes from the German word
kobold
, which means goblin. That was what iron miners in Germany and Bohemia used to call it. Whenever a mine had a large amount of cobalt ore in it, they claimed that they could see and hear spirits. Apparently they could see them running through the tunnels and hear them knocking on the walls.’

‘And this . . . needle? This is your evidence?’

‘It’s worth checking out, Detective. Where’s the harm? After all, what evidence have
you
come up with?’

Detective Mullard blew out his cheeks. ‘All right, Ms Sawyer. I’ll indulge you. But only out of good old Southern courtesy. To be quite frank with you, I think this is horse manure.’

‘Let’s see, shall we?’

Detective Mullard had brought key cards for both rooms. He opened 509 and they went inside. It was very similar to Sissy’s room on the second floor, only larger, with a gilded rococo sofa as well as a chair. Detective Mullard looked inside the bathroom, and then the closets. He even knelt down on the floor, lifted the side of the red embroidered throw, and peered under the bed.

While he was doing this, Sissy was holding her witch compass close to the wall. Its needle had swung around and was pointing directly at the wallpaper.

‘Nobody here that I can see,’ said Detective Mullard, climbing to his feet. ‘Nobody visible, anyhow. Maybe there’s a ghost, but I don’t have my ghost glasses with me.’

‘The compass is still telling me that there’s a spirit here,’ Sissy told him.

Detective Mullard looked down at the compass needle and shook his head. ‘Maybe you need to take it in for a service,’ he said.

‘Detective – there’s a presence here in this hotel, I can assure you. How do you explain that rug, all soaked in blood but not a single spatter anywhere around it? How did Ella-mae disappear from that washroom without leaving any bloody footprints? Where did that whistling noise come from?’

‘What are you trying to suggest here, Ms Sawyer? Are you trying to tell me that this hotel is, like,
haunted
? Hey . . . maybe we should call in Scooby-Doo.’

‘Haunted isn’t quite the word I’d use myself, Detective. And you can make a joke of it if you want to, but there
is
something here. You can’t see radon gas, can you? But it can still kill you.’

‘OK. I’m sorry. But you want to try being a detective here in BR and see if you don’t end up kind of cynical, especially when it comes to superstition. We’re not like New Orleans, we don’t go in for all of that voodoo crap, pardon my French. Look – maybe this woman is in the room next door, and that’s why your compass is pointing at the wall. Let’s go check.’

Sissy looked at the witch compass. The needle was shivering slightly, as if the presence which it had detected had started to edge very gradually toward the left, and further away.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here. It’s started to move, and I don’t want to lose contact with it.’

‘Whatever you say, Ms Sawyer.’

There was no question about it, the needle was showing that the presence was inching further toward the window. It could be that it
was
next door, in Room 511, and the needle was tracking its progress through the wall. Or it could be that it was right here in the room with her, but it was invisible. Maybe Detective Mullard’s suggestion hadn’t been so ridiculous after all: maybe they did need ghost glasses, if only such things existed for real.

Sissy heard Detective Mullard open the door to Room 511, and then the door quietly close itself behind him. After a few seconds, the needle stopped shivering, and stayed perfectly still. She waited, and waited. There was no sound from next door, but neither did Detective Mullard come back. She waved the witch compass from side to side, but now the needle simply swung in response to her hand movements. The presence had gone.

Lost it, damn it! And who knows where it might have slunk off to now?

She opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Detective Mullard still hadn’t reappeared, so she went to Room 511 and tried the door handle. The door had locked itself, and so she knocked at it, and called out, ‘Detective! Did you find anything?’

No answer. She knocked again, and said, ‘Detective Mullard! Can you open the door? I think the presence must have taken a powder!’

Still no answer. She knocked a third time, but now she was beginning to think that if anybody had taken a powder, it was Detective Mullard. He had probably looked into Room 511, seen that there was nobody in there, and decided to leave without even bothering to tell her. So much for his talk about ‘good old Southern courtesy’.

She was starting to walk back along the corridor when one of the security men came around the corner, jingling his keys.

‘Ah!’ said Sissy. ‘Just the fellow I need!’

‘Ma’am?’ said the security man. He was African-American, with braided hair and a pencil moustache.

‘I have to get into Room Five-Eleven. I’m sure I left my bag in there.’

‘Ma’am?’ he repeated. Sissy could see him looking at her ID tag, and then at the bag hanging over her shoulder.

‘Oh . . .’ she flustered. ‘My
other
bag.’

‘No problem, ma’am,’ said the security man. ‘In any case, everything’s all clear now, and all of the guests can return to their rooms. I’m up here doing a double-
double
-check, that’s all.’

Sissy followed him back to Room 511. He swiped open the door with his key card and then held it wide so that she could go inside.

She looked quickly around. Detective Mullard certainly wasn’t here. He wasn’t in the bathroom and he wasn’t hiding behind the drapes and he was far too bulky to have squeezed himself under the bed, him in his crumpled green three-piece suit, even if he had any reason to. No, he had obviously taken a quick look, found nothing, and walked off without telling her. Great. She would give him a piece of her mind for doing that.

‘No, sorry,’ she told the security man. ‘I must have left it someplace else. Thank you anyhow.’

‘No problem,’ the security man repeated, although he was looking at her as if she were a likely candidate for Sunrise Assisted Living.

Sissy walked slowly up and down all of the fifth-floor corridors, waving her witch compass as she went, but the needle didn’t even twitch, not once.

She went back and held it close to the wall in between Rooms 509 and 511 one last time, just to make sure, but there was still no response.

When she reached the elevators, she turned around and listened again, and then she said, under her breath, ‘Where in the heck are you hiding, Vanessa? Come on, show yourself. Maybe we can work something out.’ She waited two or three minutes, and then she pressed the elevator button for up. She would have to return to the seventh story so that she could start her spirit hunt over.

It took her nearly two hours. Floor by floor, she went down through The Red Hotel, using the witch compass to sense for Vanessa Slider and her son, Shem, and scattering some of her herbs and spices on the carpets to see if they had left any footprints, or drag marks, or any evidence at all that they had been there.

On every floor, she could still feel that pervasive coldness, that bitter sense of resentment, as if somebody had maliciously left a waiting-room door wide open so that everybody inside would feel an icy-cold draft.
The trouble is, nobody else seems to feel
it but me
.

If Detective Mullard had sensed it even slightly, he wouldn’t have been so dismissive, and he wouldn’t have walked off like that and left her. And Detective Garrity hadn’t shown any awareness of it, either, even though he dealt with evil on a daily basis. As for Everett – he flatly refused to believe that there were any spirits here – or at least he didn’t
want
to believe it. Spirits were seriously bad for business.

She had just stepped out of the elevator on the third floor when – off to her left – she saw a dim figure flit across the corridor, from one room to the room directly opposite. The figure looked like a woman, but she was silhouetted by the window at the end of the corridor, so it was difficult to tell if it was the same red-haired woman in the pale green dress that she had seen on the roof. Also, strangely, she appeared to be out of focus, like a figure seen through bright early-morning fog.

Maybe I need some new eyeglasses
, thought Sissy. But she went up to the door through which the figure had disappeared and took out her witch compass. She moved it slowly left and right, left and right. The needle trembled once, and then trembled again, as if it had caught the faintest hint of something, but after that it spun aimlessly around.
Darn
. Even if that out-of-focus woman
had
been a spirit, she was gone now.

Sissy started to walk back to the other end of the corridor, but she had only just turned the corner when she thought she heard a woman say, ‘—
deserved it? What do you care?
’

Sissy froze, with her head cocked to one side, and listened. It was difficult to tell where the voice might have come from. On the one hand it had sounded very close, as if the woman were standing only a few inches behind her, but on the other hand it had sounded muted, as if she had been shouting from a long way away, or through a very thick wall. Maybe it was a TV, with its volume turned right down.

She waited and waited. A whole minute passed, then another.
I must have imagined
it
, she thought. But then she heard a young boy’s voice. He was shouting, too, but his words were suppressed in the same way that the woman’s had been. She tried to make out what they were saying to each other, but it wasn’t easy because their voices were not only muted, but they came and went, like voices on a long-wave radio.

‘—
hate
doing this—
’
the young boy shouted. In fact, he was almost screaming
.
‘
—it’s horrible!
’ He had a strong local accent, and he pronounced it ‘
hawble
’.

A pause, and then the woman shouted back at him: ‘
Quit
your griping, will you? You think
this
is horrible?
At your age I had to do things a whole lot worser’n that
—’

‘—
come you never do it, then—?
’

‘—
’cause I told
you
to do it, that’s why
—’

‘—
it’s
horrible
. It makes me barf
—’

‘—
pick up that goddamned cleaver and get on with it
—’

Sissy shuffled around and around, three or four times, trying to make out where the voices were coming from. It didn’t sound as if the woman and the boy were inside any of the rooms. It was more like they were deep inside the walls – very close by, but muffled by brick and plaster and wallpaper.

The woman shouted one thing more, although Sissy couldn’t understand what she meant. She thought it was something like ‘—
stab ornery Anne
—
!
’ but she couldn’t make any sense of it.

After that, the third floor became completely hushed – except for the usual hotel noises and the sound of traffic in the streets outside. Sissy waited for another minute or two, and then decided to continue with her spirit-hunt. She made her way back to the elevators, and as she did so she heard a sudden outburst of jazz music from somewhere down below –
Muskrat Ramble
if she guessed it right. Everett must have started rehearsals for his grand opening gala.

She was beginning to flag a little and her ankles were beginning to ache, but she hobbled around the rest of the third floor as quickly as she could. Nothing. Not a single shiver from her witch compass. No more foggy women. No more voices.

‘You’re here someplace, Vanessa,’ she repeated, in a challenging whisper, as she waited for the elevator to take her down to the second floor. ‘Come on – why won’t you show me where?’

Down on the second floor, guests were beginning to arrive, chatting and laughing, and bellhops were showing them to their rooms. As they passed her in the corridor, Sissy took care to make sure that they didn’t see what she was doing, a batty silver-haired woman in a multicolored silk kaftan and strings of chunky beads, swooshing her witch compass slowly from side to side like a Geiger counter. But she picked up no more psychic disturbances at all.

She was sure now the spirits were here, somewhere in the building, and as she stood waiting for the elevator to take her back down to the lobby, she tried to think what she ought to say to Everett and T-Yon, and Detective Garrity, too.

No doubt about it – there
is
a presence in The Red Hotel. In fact I’ve even
seen
it. It could be Vanessa Slider. She’s my number one suspect, but I don’t have any proof of it. All I can tell you for sure is that she means you no good.

What can we do about it? I really don’t know.

Whether it is her or not, I have a very bad feeling about this, and I can’t even trust my cards to tell me how to keep you from harm.

The elevator doors chimed open, and she saw her own reflection standing inside. She suddenly realized that she looked less like an ageing flower-child, and more like a witch.

W
hen she stepped out of the elevator, Sissy found that the lobby was already packed. A jazz quartet in Derby hats and candy-striped silk vests were tootling away beside the reception desk, although they were finding it hard to make themselves heard over the chatter and laughter of more than three hundred people crowded around the fountain – local dignitaries and their wives, restaurant and hotel critics, newspaper and TV and radio reporters, as well as the entire LSU Tigers team, along with their managers and their cheerleaders in their purple-and-gold uniforms. The noise was deafening.