The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (17 page)

She weaved her way across the lobby to Everett’s office. Everett was there with T-Yon and Luther and a big-bellied man with a beard who was wearing a white jacket and checkered pants, whom Sissy took to be The Red Hotel’s head chef.

Everett was running through the last-minute details of the buffet they were going to be serving after the formal opening speeches.

‘We’re serving all of our specialties, right? Crawfish and cornbread cake, charbroiled oysters, shrimp Vacherie. How about the cedar-roasted redfish?’

T-Yon had pinned up her hair and was wearing a low-cut tube dress in startling red, with a large red silk flower pinned to the front.

‘Well, look at you,’ smiled Sissy.

‘How did it go?’ mouthed T-Yon, very quietly. Everett gave them a sharp glance but continued with his list of buffet dishes. ‘Did you find anything?’

‘I’m not quite sure what to tell you,’ said Sissy. ‘I saw a strange woman who seemed to vanish into thin air; and I heard some voices that seemed to be coming from out of the walls.’

‘My God. So there
is
something here.’

‘My witch compass seems pretty certain of it, and so am I. I can feel it in my bones. But I don’t have any evidence that’s going to convince your brother. It certainly didn’t convince that Detective What’s-his-face.’

‘Garrity?’

‘No, the other one, in that terrible green suit. I was up on the fifth floor and the witch compass was giving me such a strong indication that there was a spirit in one of the rooms there that I called him up to take a look. Which he did –
very
grudgingly, I may add – and then he left me without so much as saying that he didn’t believe me.’

T-Yon said, ‘I guess it
is
pretty hard for people to believe. I can hardly believe it myself. If I hadn’t seen those two people in my room . . .’

‘I’m trying to think what to do next,’ Sissy told her. ‘The trouble is, I don’t really know what Vanessa Slider wants – assuming it
is
her – or if she’s just causing mischief. You know, like a poltergeist. But I’m very worried that somebody else is going to get hurt, or maybe killed, even.’

‘I’ve been trying to talk to Ev about it,’ said T-Yon. ‘But he has so much invested in this hotel, so much money, so much hard work.’

‘I know. But maybe that’s one of the reasons why Mrs Slider is so resentful.’

‘You said you saw a woman. Do you think it was
her
? What did she look like?’

Sissy described the red-haired woman in the pale green dress, and how she had escaped down the stairwell to the fifth floor, and then disappeared.

‘I can’t think where she went. I had a very strong feeling that she
was
Vanessa Slider, or Vanessa Slider’s spirit, but then I might have been deluding myself. Or worse than that, this spirit might well have been deluding me. You saw how it made all my cards go blank, when we did that second reading, and then today I swear to God it invented a card that doesn’t even exist. That really freaked me out, T-Yon. I don’t have anything more powerful than my DeVane cards and if I can’t rely on those, I don’t know
what
I can do.’

‘Maybe we should just wait and see what happens. Everything’s going OK at the moment. Maybe she won’t do anything terrible. Maybe she
can’t
do anything really terrible – like, she’s only a spirit, after all.’

‘Believe me,’ said Sissy, ‘spirits
can
do really terrible things, if they want to. I’ve seen it happen, often enough. If there’s anything more dangerous than a jealous spirit, I’m glad I don’t know what it is.’

At that moment, Detective Garrity knocked at the door. ‘Detective?’ said Everett. ‘Any news of anything? We’re all clear to go, right?’

‘Sure but I’m looking for Mullard. You haven’t seen him lately?’

‘No, Detective, sorry.’

‘I saw him a little less than an hour ago,’ Sissy volunteered. ‘I came across some psychic disturbance on the fifth floor and I invited him to come up and take a look at it. Which he did.’

‘Psychic disturbance.’ The black turtle eyes didn’t blink.

Sissy looked across at Everett who was staring at her with his eyes narrowed as if to tell her, ‘
Just you be careful what you say, you old hippie. This is no time for scaremongering
.’ The head chef just looked puzzled, and obviously didn’t understand what she was talking about.

‘I have this English measuring device back from the time of witch trials,’ Sissy explained. ‘People used it to detect if there was any kind of malevolent presence hiding in their house, or in their barn, or their cowshed, or wherever.’

‘Malevolent presence.’ Detective Garrity enunciated the words as if they were a foreign language.

‘That’s right, malevolent presence. And between Room Five-Oh-Nine I think it was and Room Five-Eleven, the device was showing positive. So I asked Detective Mullard to come see for himself.’

‘OK. So now where is he?’

‘I’m sorry, Detective, I have no idea. I don’t think he believed what I was telling him, so he left without saying a word, which I thought was rather impolite of him. I didn’t even see him go.’

Detective Garrity tugged thoughtfully at his pointed nose. Sissy guessed that he wanted to ask her more about the ‘malevolent presence’ but it was obvious that Everett was beginning to lose his patience.

‘Maybe we can discuss this later,’ said Everett. ‘Right now, we’re up to our ears. The opening gala starts in twenty minutes and we have about eleven thousand details still to sort out.’

‘OK,’ said Detective Garrity. ‘But if you do see Mullard, tell him I need to talk to him urgent, would you.’

‘Of course,’ Sissy told him. For the first time, however, she began to wonder if Detective Mullard actually
had
walked out on her. After all, she had heard the door to Room 511 close only once, when he first went in there. If he had taken a look inside and then walked out again, she would have heard it close twice.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to Everett, ‘but do you possibly have a master key I could borrow? I think I need to take another look at those rooms on the fifth floor.’

‘Is that really necessary?’ asked Everett. ‘Why don’t you go out there and grab yourself a Sazerac and spend the rest of the day enjoying yourself?’

‘Oh, go on, Ev,’ said T-Yon. ‘I’ll go with her.’

Everett’s phone buzzed, and he picked it up. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Go ask Clarice Johnson, she’ll let you in. But, please, Sissy – you can see what’s happening here. All of these people are here to
laissez les bon temps rouler
. So be discreet, will you? No more talk of malevolent what’s-their-names, if you don’t mind.’

Sissy made a zipper gesture across her lips, and then said, ‘Promise. No more talk of malevolent what’s-their-names.’

Clarice was busy working out a new room-cleaning schedule when they knocked at her office door, but she seemed to be pleased to have an excuse for a break.

‘This is driving me plumb crazy,’ she said, as she took them up to the fifth floor in the service elevator. ‘Cancellations one minute, new bookings the next. And each time the guests leave the room we have to clean it all over.’

‘Still no news of Ella-mae,’ said T-Yon.

‘Her momma came to see me,’ said Clarice. ‘She was in pieces with the worry. I tried to give her some hope, but, between you and me, I believe that poor young girl is gone for good.’

They reached the fifth floor and Clarice led the way to Room 511, her large hips swaying from side to side as she walked.

‘Mr Everett says that everything is OK now,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘But me, I’m not so sure. I still got this
uneasy
feeling, if you know what I mean.’

Sissy said nothing. She had promised Everett that she wouldn’t spread alarm and distress, and she always kept her promises. The only promise she had so far failed to fulfill was the promise that she had made to Frank that if anything ever happened to him, she would find herself another husband.

Clarice took out her master key and opened the door to 511. ‘There you go, Miss T-Yon. Do you want me to stick around?’

Sissy said, ‘No, thanks, Clarice. This won’t take long.’

‘Well, you’re welcome,’ Clarice told them, and went swaying away.

Sissy and T-Yon stepped into the room and looked around. Sissy opened the closet doors, but all she found inside was coat hangers and plastic laundry bags and a small guest safe.

‘Check under the bed for me, could you?’ she asked T-Yon. ‘I’m a little stiff these days, when it comes to bending.’

T-Yon knelt down and lifted up the bedcover. ‘No . . . no boogie men under the bed.’

Sissy reached into her bag and took out her witch compass. She laid it in the flat of her hand and slowly circled around. ‘I don’t know . . .’ she said. ‘It
feels
like there’s something here, but I’m not sure what it is.’

‘I don’t feel anything,’ said T-Yon. ‘Maybe that Detective Mullard just gave himself some unauthorized time off. He kept telling me that he was jonesing for a cheeseburger from Downtown Seafood.’

‘Well, you could be right,’ said Sissy. ‘In fact, that does seem more likely, when I come to think of it.’ But she was just about to put away her witch compass when the needle abruptly jerked toward the bathroom door.

‘Wait up,’ she said. Very slowly, she swung the witch compass from side to side, but the needle remained pointing in the same direction, and it was actually
trembling
, like a gun dog that senses a quail.

She approached the bathroom door and opened it. There was nobody inside. Only a gleaming white bath with old-style brass faucets, and a shower, and two handbasins, and a mirror that completely filled the opposite wall. She could see herself peering in through the door, holding the witch compass in the palm of her hand.

T-Yon said, ‘What is it, Sissy?’ and came up close behind her.

Sissy shook her head. ‘The compass . . . it definitely seems to sense something, but . . . I don’t know—’

‘
My God!
’ screamed T-Yon, right in her ear. Her voice so high pitched that it was almost inaudible. ‘
My God, Sissy!
Look!
Look in the
mirror!
Oh my God!
’

Sissy stared at the mirror but she could still see nothing but herself. Behind her, though, T-Yon’s eyes were wide and her face was rigid with shock. She clutched Sissy’s shoulder and pointed at the mirror but she didn’t seem capable of getting any more words out.

‘
What?
’ said Sissy. ‘What is it, T-Yon?’

‘Can’t you see them?’ squeaked T-Yon. ‘They’re looking at us! They’re looking straight at us! They know we’re here! Oh my God, can’t you see what they’re doing?’

‘I don’t see anybody,’ said Sissy. ‘Only you and me, nobody else. Who is it, T-Yon?’

T-Yon tugged at the sleeve of Sissy’s kaftan. ‘We have to get out of here! We have to get out of here now! They’re looking at us, Sissy! They know that we’re here!’

Sissy grabbed hold of the bathroom door-handle and quickly pulled it shut. She took T-Yon out into the corridor, although she deliberately dropped her bag on to the floor so that the outside door wouldn’t close by itself. T-Yon was shaking and she wouldn’t release her grip on Sissy’s sleeve.

‘T-Yon, what did you see in there? I didn’t see anything at all in the mirror except our reflections.’

T-Yon took several deep breaths, and then she pressed her hand over her mouth to calm herself down.

‘Who were they?’ Sissy asked her. ‘How many of them were there?’

T-Yon was still trying to regain her composure, and at first she couldn’t answer.

‘What were they doing? Please, T-Yon, try! You have to tell me!’

At last T-Yon managed to say, ‘It was horrible. It was so, so horrible!’

Sissy waited, and then T-Yon said, ‘There was a
body
. A man’s dead body, lying on a table. It was all cut up and bloody. There was so much blood! It was all the way up the walls, everywhere! And there was this
boy
.’

‘Go on,’ Sissy coaxed her.

‘The boy . . .
he
was all bloody, too. His hands, his clothes. He even had spots of blood on his face. He had . . . he had a really huge knife. He had a really huge knife and he was cutting the body up into pieces. Like, cutting the muscles away from the arms. But he had this
angry
look on his face, as if he hated what he was doing.’

She stopped, and took another deep breath.

‘You said
they
,’ said Sissy. ‘Who else was there, apart from the boy?’

‘A woman. A woman in a green dress with buttons all down it. She was standing nearby, watching what the boy was doing, but not so near that she had any blood on her.’

T-Yon turned and looked at the door to Room 511 and saw that Sissy had left her bag on the floor to keep it open.

‘What if they come after us?’ she said, in a panicky voice. ‘What if they come out of the mirror and kill
us
, too?’

‘T-Yon, I don’t think that they can,’ said Sissy, trying to calm her down. ‘You saw them but I didn’t, and that tells me that they were giving you a personal message – but only you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s happened to me before. I’ve read people’s fortunes, and when I do they can sometimes hear their loved ones talking to them, even though
I
can’t hear anything. Once or twice they’ve even
seen
them, sitting in the room, but I never have. The message is for them and them alone.’

‘Oh, God,’ said T-Yon. ‘Why don’t you just close the door? There’s no way I’m ever going back in there.’

‘Well, I’m going to take one more look,’ said Sissy. ‘They might have left some evidence that they were there.’

‘Don’t be long,’ T-Yon begged her. ‘Please, that was so horrible. It was like my nightmare. All of his insides were hanging out.’

‘I won’t be a moment, I promise.’ Sissy pushed her way back into Room 511 and walked across to the bathroom door. Before she opened it, however, she pressed her ear to it and listened. She was sure that she could hear voices, although they may have been the voices of guests in the corridor outside as they were being shown to their rooms.