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.
Outside, the wind was rising again, and the trees began to thrash restlessly at their roots, like tethered stallions.
Billy dropped down on to his knees and shuffled through every single card in the pack.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it! Every single one of them. Even my favorite, Les Moulins À Vent Pourpres – The Purple Windmills.’
He turned them over again and again, almost frantic, but it made no difference. Every one had the same peacock pattern on both sides. No Wasp Stings, no Wizards, no Frightening Journeys, no Clowns.
‘What’s happened?’ said T-Yon. She was breathless and panicky. ‘It’s not a trick, is it? Sissy – please – tell me it isn’t a trick!’
Although she was determined not to show it, Sissy was probably as frightened as T-Yon was. She stood up, and as she did so she felt a chill crawling through her bones, all the way down her spine, one vertebra after another, and all around her pelvis, like a frozen girdle, and down her thighs. Even her skin felt as if it were shrinking.
From the direction of the kitchen, off to her right, a faint white figure appeared. It was almost an exaggeration to call it a figure, because it was less substantial than a wisp of smoke. Yet it appeared to have a smudgy face, with hollow eyes, and it moved as if it were trying to walk along a verandah in a high wind, with its right hand held out sideways for a non-existent railing, and its left hand clutching its collar close to its neck.
All of these details were blurred; and they came and went as the figure made its way across the living room.
T-Yon looked up at Sissy and said, ‘My God! What is that? Is that a ghost?’
But Sissy raised her hand to caution T-Yon that she should stay quiet, because a second figure had appeared, and then a third. They were both as indistinct as the first figure, but somehow Sissy could see that they were different. The second figure had its head bent and both hands clasped to its neck; the third was walking with a much stronger stride, as if it were determined to face up to this unfelt hurricane without holding on to anything for support.
Each of these smoky white images silently flapped and silently curled, which gave Sissy the impression that they were women, with wind-blown dresses. They walked toward the window, through which the last pale light of the day was shining, and as they approached it they melted away.
Four or five more of them materialized and flickered across the room, while Sissy and Billy and T-Yon watched them in silent disbelief. Then the last of them vanished, as if they had never existed. A twist of white smoke, and then nothing at all.
Billy stood up and said, ‘Christ on crutches, Aunt Sissy. What were they?’
Sissy bent down and picked up a card from the coffee table. It was La Châtelaine. The image had returned to the face of the card; and so had all of the images on all of the other cards. Billy picked some up, too, to make sure, and then dropped them again.
Sissy was shaken to the core. She opened her mouth but she couldn’t speak. With her DeVane cards, and her natural facility to read them, she had always felt that her psychic influence was stronger than anybody’s. Anybody that she had ever met, anyhow, and she had met more than a few – at psychic fairs, and seances, and so-called magic shows. Gypsies and mediums and general purveyors of hocus-pocus.
But something or somebody had passed through her living room this evening and whoever or whatever they were, their influence had overwhelmed hers like a psychic tsunami. It had mocked her by defacing all of her DeVane cards, and then it had trailed in front of her a procession of spirits, white and transparent, although Sissy for the life of her couldn’t think why.
She sat down, abruptly. T-Yon said, ‘Are you OK, Sissy? You’re looking real pale.’
‘I’m, ah . . . yes, I’m OK. Just get me another glass of wine, would you, sweetheart?’
She took out a cigarette and lit it – took two puffs and then crushed it out in the ashtray.
T-Yon came back from the kitchen with a glass of wine for her. ‘What were those things? I never saw anything like that in my life, never.’
‘No,’ said Sissy. ‘Me neither. But I’ll tell you something for sure. You and me, we’re off to Baton Rouge.’
‘You’re what?’ said Billy. ‘You can’t go to Baton Rouge! What are you going to do in Baton Rouge, for Christ’s sake?’
Sissy looked up at him. ‘I wish I could tell you, Billy-bob. But I can see it right here.’
She tapped her forehead with her fingertip. ‘I can see it and I can even hear it. I don’t think I was ever supposed to. What we saw here tonight, those spirits or ghosts or whatever you want to call them, they were a warning. I was being told to stay away and mind my own business.’
‘By who?’
‘My guess is, Vanessa Slider.’
Billy shook his head in exasperation. ‘Come on, Aunt Sissy. You don’t have proof of any of this. You can’t go all the way to Baton Rouge based on some half-assed card reading and some optical illusion of some spirits or whatever they were. Hey, they could have been smoke, blown in from next door’s bonfire, and
because we were all hyped up for that reading, we thought they were ghosts.’
‘You really think that? Did they smell like smoke?’
‘No, OK, they didn’t smell like smoke. But even supposing you’re right, and this Vanessa woman is warning you off, don’t you think the prudent thing to do would be to stay right here? If she can wipe all of the pictures off of your DeVane cards, and then put them back again, do you think that’s somebody you’re any match for?’
Sissy said, ‘T-Yon came to me, Billy-bob, asking me for help. When people come asking me for help, I never say no, and I’m not going to say “no” now.’
Billy opened his mouth, but before he could speak, the kitchen door slammed so loudly that all three of them jumped in fright.
The Missing
Detective Garrity appeared in the open doorway of Everett’s office with a toothpick protruding from the side of his mouth. Everett was talking on his headset to Charlie Bowdre, his chief maintenance engineer.
‘So you checked all the plumbing, yes? And you checked the a/c vents? And what? You found nothing at all? How about the Wi-Fi system? No – I know you don’t have Wi-Fi in the boiler room, but I’m trying to consider every possible option here. Like, maybe it was some kind of radio interference. Yes. No. Well, how the hell should I know?’
He beckoned to Detective Garrity and said, ‘Come on in. How’s it going up there?’
Detective Garrity took out the toothpick. ‘The CSIs are pretty much done. I’ll have their report in tomorrow sometime and, if there’s anything more I need to ask you, I’ll get back. They’re taking the rug with them for chromatography and DNA tests.’
He paused for a moment, looking at Everett with those black turtle eyes. Then he touched his ear to imitate Everett’s headset and said, ‘Don’t mean to be intrusive, sir, but it sounds to me like you got yourself even more problems.’
‘Well, yes, but we’re not even sure what’s wrong yet. Didn’t you hear anything, up on seven?’
Even longer pause. ‘Hear anything like what?’
Everett blinked. ‘OK. Obviously you didn’t hear it. You would know for sure if you had, believe me.’
‘So what was it, this thing that I didn’t hear?’
‘If you didn’t hear it, Detective, it really doesn’t matter.’
‘I think that I can be the judge of that, sir.’
Everett thought: shit. As if I don’t have enough of a headache. This is just going to get weirder and weirder and more and more out of my control, and if I can manage to open this hotel on Friday without any more shit hitting any more fans, it’s going to be a miracle.
‘We, uh – we had some kind of a whistling sound, up on five. I don’t think it was anything serious.’
‘Whistling sound. What kind of a whistling sound?’
Everett shrugged. ‘Kind of like, whistling, that’s all.’
‘But it’s stopped now, right?’ said Detective Garrity. ‘Although you don’t have any idea what caused it.’
‘Well, that’s right. That was Charlie Bowdre, my chief maintenance guy, I was talking to just then – to see if he could find out what it was.’
‘Doesn’t sound dangerous or nothing? Not like nothing’s going to blow up?’ These were questions, and very pointed questions, too; although Detective Garrity spoke so flatly that they didn’t sound like it.
‘No, no. Nothing like that. It’s probably like I was saying to Charlie, Wi-Fi interference. We have Wi-Fi in every room. Free Wi-Fi as a matter of fact, if you’re interested, unlike many of the major hotels in downtown BR.’
‘I’m not fixing on staying here, sir. I came down here to see if I could talk to the maid who found the rug.’
‘Ella-mae? Oh, sure.’ He pressed the button on his speakerphone for housekeeping and asked to speak to Clarice.
‘Clarice? Can you bring Ella-mae to my office, please? Detective Garrity wants a few words with her, but don’t tell her that. Just bring her.’
‘Ella-mae went to the bathroom.’
‘OK, bring her as soon as she comes back.’
‘Come to think of it, Mr Everett, sir, she’s been gone for more than ten minutes. Maybe even longer than that. I can’t say that I’ve been keeping my eye on her.’
‘You don’t think she’s snuck off home, do you?’
‘I don’t rightly know, Mr Everett, sir, but I’ll go take a look in the ladies’ room. I’ll get back to you directly.’
Everett raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Staff! You got to believe it! One word from me and they do what they like.’
Detective Garrity remained expressionless. ‘You have the girl’s home address, if needs be.’
‘Oh, sure. But she’s probably still around the hotel someplace. I did ask her to stay.’
They waited for a minute or two. Everett was about to ask Detective Garrity if the CSI team had found any more traces of blood in Suite Seven-Oh-Three when his speakerphone buzzed.
‘Mr Everett, sir! This is Clarice! You better come quick. I went to the women’s restroom and there’s blood all over.’
‘What about Ella-mae?’
‘No sign of Ella-mae, noplace.’
Grim-faced, without hesitation, Everett hurried out of his office with Detective Garrity close behind him. As they speed-walked across the lobby, trying not to break into a run in case they alarmed any of the guests, Detective Garrity took out his cellphone and spoke to Detective Mullard.
‘Kevin, I’m down on the first floor. Haul your ass down here pronto and bring those two forensics with you. No – tell them to drop whatever it is they’re doing and get on down here now. The staff restrooms on the first floor. The women’s. Reception will tell you.’
Then he called the second precinct for backup. ‘No, I don’t know for sure. Possible fatality, but no cadaver yet. Whatever it is, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’
The women’s restroom was halfway along a corridor in the first-floor annex which housed most of The Red Hotel’s live-in staff. Six or seven of them were milling around, whispering to each other, looking shocked. The restroom door was halfway open and Clarice Johnson was standing outside it, trying to appear calm and in control, but Everett could tell at once that she was just as shaken as the others. She kept twisting her black bead necklace as if she were trying to strangle herself.
Everett introduced her to Detective Garrity. Clarice said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Everett, sir. I had no idea nothing like this was going to happen.’
Detective Garrity said, ‘Of course you didn’t, ma’am. How could you.’ Then he said, ‘I understand how upset you are, but how about trying to describe what you saw when you first walked in there.’
Clarice twisted her necklace one way, and then the other. ‘I push open the door and call out, “Ella-mae, girl, you still in here? What’s the matter witchew?” But then the very first thing I saw was blood, and it was all over. Up the wall, all across the floor. Even on the ceiling, Lord help us.’
‘Did you go in any further?’
‘Well, for sure, to see if Ella-mae was hurt. I walk in and I’m having to go on my tippy-toes because of all the blood on the floor. I push open the cubicles one by one but there ain’t no Ella-mae. If that blood is hers, I don’t know how she could have gotten out of there because anybody who lose that much blood must be dead as a doornail. I don’t know. Maybe somebody carry her out, or drag her out.’
Detective Garrity looked up and down the corridor, with its gold-carpeted floor. ‘However she got out of there, whether she walked or whether she was carried, she couldn’t have come this way. There isn’t a single spot of blood on this carpet.’
He looked down at Clarice’s feet. She was wearing only white socks.
‘What happened to your shoes, ma’am? The shoes you were wearing when you walked into the restroom.’
‘I took them off. They was all bloody on the bottom so I took them off.’
‘You still got them? You didn’t wash them
or nothing?’
‘No, sir. I got them in a shopping bag.’
‘Good for you. Our forensics people will want to examine them, to compare your footprints.’
‘What with?’
‘Anybody else’s footprints, obviously. Ella-mae’s, if that was Ella-mae in there, and whoever attacked her and subsequently disposed of her.’
Clarice shook her head. ‘I didn’t see no other footprints, sir. That restroom floor, that was shiny like a red mirror.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘I can see it in my mind’s eye, sir. Clear like day.’
‘OK, ma’am,’ Detective Garrity told her. He nearly rested a reassuring hand on her shoulder but then he drew it back. ‘If you can stick around for a while. I may need to talk to you some more.’
‘I ain’t going noplace,’ Clarice reassured him. ‘I live here.’
Detective Garrity took a pair of fawn latex gloves out of his inside coat pocket, and made a fastidious performance of snapping them on. His voice may have been flat but all his gestures were very showy. He pushed the door of the restroom wide open, so that they could see right inside. Everett said, ‘Jesus.’
There was a small vestibule and then a second door, which was also wide open. Beyond that, Everett could see the edge of the wall beside the washbasins, part of a washbasin, and about a quarter of one of the mirrors. There was bright red blood all the way up the wall, in loops and spatters and squiggles, and even blood across the ceiling, as Clarice had told them. The mirror was smeared with blood as if somebody’s hair had been forcibly pressed against it and then wiped from side to side. There were even two or three handprints on it.
Clarice had been right about the floor, too. The white tiles were covered from one wall to another with glassy red, with only a few erratic footprints in it. From the size and pattern of the footprints, which looked like a sneaker about size 6.5, it didn’t seem likely that anybody else had stepped into it but her.
Detective Mullard arrived, with the two CSIs, his pants flapping noisily as he came toward them.
‘Where we at, Slim?’
The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) Page 7