The expression on the White Witch’s face was riveting, as if she were daring whoever looked at this card to turn away.
Behind her, clearly visible through the mouth of the cave, three poles were standing in a sloping field, arranged like the crosses on Calvary. On one of them was impaled the severed head of a donkey. On the other two, the severed heads of a reindeer, complete with antlers, and a Chinese-looking woman.
Beyond the field rose dark pine forests, and distant mountains. High up in the sky, among thundery clouds, a kite was flying with its tail on fire.
‘This is seriously weird,’ said T-Yon. ‘What about these heads, stuck on these sticks? What do they mean? And what about this tiny little girl, inside of this cooking pot?’
‘It depends what the other cards come up with,’ Sissy told her. ‘Everything that you can see on this card has a meaning, but the meaning always varies from one person to the next. That burning kite could mean that you’re prepared to take risks to be a high-flyer in your catering career. But it could also mean that your time is running out – that the kite itself is going to start burning soon, and drop to the ground. It’s like that little girl. She may be a doll but she may be a real child. We’ll have to see.’
She shuffled the remainder of the cards and then she laid them out like a Cross of Lorraine, almost the same as most fortune-tellers would lay them out for a Tarot reading. Then she arranged three more cards above them, face down, in a fan pattern.
T-Yon placed her Predictor card on the coffee table and pressed the flat of her hand on top of it.
‘OK,’ said Sissy. ‘Now I want you to ask the cards a question. Don’t tell me what it is. Think hard about it, and they’ll answer it for you.’
T-Yon closed her eyes and frowned in concentration. Then she opened them again and said, ‘Right. I’ve done it. I’ve asked them.’
‘You’re ready for this?’ Sissy asked her.
T-Yon nodded. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
Sissy turned over the first card. It was called La Châtelaine, and it showed a cross-section of a four-story town-house, like a dolls’ house with the front open. In each of its nine rooms stood a thin, narrow-shouldered woman in a pale gray gown – the same woman in every room, unless she was nontuplets. Her black hair was pinned up tight, and her face was pinched, as if in disapproval. She wore a white floor-length apron over her gown, and around her waist hung a chain with nine keys dangling from it.
‘The Mistress of the House,’ said Sissy.
T-Yon peered at the card with a frown. ‘She doesn’t look too happy, does she?’
‘I’m not surprised. Take a closer look at each of those rooms.’
In the living room, a man was sitting cross-legged in a high-backed armchair, holding up a newspaper. He had a high wing collar, but no head. In the parlor next door, a maid in a mob cap was kneeling in front of the fire, prodding it with a poker. The scene looked normal enough at first glance, until T-Yon saw that a young woman’s head was hanging upside down out of the chimney, her hair in flames and her face blackened with soot.
The scene in the kitchen was even more disturbing. A bald, stocky cook in a bloodstained apron was chopping up meat with a cleaver. On the chopping block in front of him was a grisly mixture of rabbits’ heads and pigs’ trotters, as well as human hands and knee joints.
Behind him, a red-haired kitchen maid was setting out a row of pies to cool on the window sill. Out of the crusts of each of the pies, human fingers were protruding. A fat man with a walrus moustache was standing right outside the window, holding up a pocket watch.
In every room, something gruesome and strange was happening. Even the portraits that hung on either side of the staircase depicted people with empty eye sockets, or people with their backs turned, or people whose faces were distorted in expressions of alarm.
In the smaller bedrooms, three of the beds looked at first as if they were covered with coarsely woven gray blankets, but then T-Yon saw that they were actually swarming with heaps of gray rats. On one bed, from underneath a tangle of rodents, a woman’s hand was dangling down; and on another bed, a child’s bare foot was protruding, but these were the only visible signs of what the rats were feasting on.
To begin with, T-Yon could see nothing horrific in the master bedroom, until she noticed the congealing blood that was sliding out from underneath the wardrobe doors, and the bloody red handprint on the white chamber-pot below the bed.
‘This is just horrible,’ she said, handing the card back to Sissy. ‘Like, what does it all mean? How can this have anything to do with me and my nightmares?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Sissy admitted. ‘But La Châtelaine is the very first card and this means that it’s an indicator of everything that’s going to happen to you next in your life.’
‘I’m going to see people having their heads cut off, and being stuffed up chimneys, and eaten by rats?’
‘No, no. The card isn’t telling you that. But it is saying that your nightmares have their origins in a house someplace, a house in which some very upsetting things happened, and where things like that are very likely to happen again. Not necessarily people getting chopped to pieces and baked into pies – but things which led to people being seriously hurt, either physically or psychologically.’
‘You’re making me feel frightened now.’
Sissy gave her a serious, sympathetic look. ‘I’m sorry, T-Yon. That’s the last thing I want to do. But I’ve never once known the DeVane cards to be wrong. Not substantially, anyhow.’
‘But this woman, this chatelaine?’ T-Yon persisted. ‘I’ve never known anybody who looks like that. Well – maybe my old math teacher, Miss Berthelot, just a little. Is she a real person, or what?’
‘Yes,’ said Sissy, ‘I’m pretty certain that she is. Or was. Let me put it this way: she’s more than just a sign, or a metaphor. Now, you see this fat fellow with the big moustache standing outside the kitchen window – he’s a metaphor. I’d say that he’s what amounted to an officer of the law in the year seventeen something or other, and as soon as those pies have cooled off, he’s going to be opening them up to see what’s inside them, and if he finds fingers and ears, he’s going to be making an arrest on a charge of cannibalism.’
‘You can tell all that, just from this one card?’
Sissy smiled. ‘I did tell you, T-Yon. I have the facility. To me, these cards are like a picture book; or maybe a three-D movie. I pick them up and they come alive, and I can understand almost at once what they’re showing me.’
‘So what are they showing you about this chatelaine?’
‘To be honest with you, it’s not entirely clear, not yet. We’ll have to look at some more cards. But I do think that she’s the instigator of all of this. I don’t fully understand how or why, not yet, but, in some way, this woman is the root cause of your nightmares.’
‘Is she good or is she evil? I mean – do you think she’s giving me a warning about something, or is she trying to scare me?’
‘Again, T-Yon, I’m not entirely sure. She doesn’t look particularly shocked by what she’s found in each of these rooms, does she? This guy with no head reading the newspaper and all of these chopped-up people in the kitchen. I get the feeling that it’s the mess that’s upsetting her the most. All of this blood, and all of these arms and legs, and all of these rats doing their droppings. Look at her. She’s not flinging up her arms in horror, is she? She’s not screaming. She’s just standing there, looking distinctly pissed.’
T-Yon looked at the chatelaine more closely. ‘You’re right. She does look angry, doesn’t she? I don’t think I like her at all.’
Sissy said, ‘Anyhow – let’s see if the next card can throw some more light on the subject, shall we?’
‘OK. But let’s hope it’s not quite so horrible as this one.’
Sissy turned the second card over. It carried the picture of a boy, maybe eight or nine years old, wearing a floppy brown leather hat that co
vered the back of his neck, like the hats once worn by colliers or icemen. His shoulders were narrow and his face was pinched, like that of the chatelaine. Apart from his floppy hat, he was wearing a baggy brown jerkin and knee britches. His boots had no laces in them and looked very shabby and run down.
He was standing in a grassy field, under a sky filled with billowing white clouds. Behind him, six or seven naked young women were dancing in a line. They were all wearing immense hats piled up with apples and pomegranates and game birds and feathers, and one of them even had a large fish coiled around the brim.
In one hand the boy was holding up a lantern with a dazzling white light inside it, even though it was daytime; and in the other hand, a long metal spike with a T-shaped handle. The caption said La Piqûre de Guêpe.
‘The Wasp Sting,’ said T-Yon. ‘This card is really so strange.’
‘Stranger than you think,’ Sissy told her. She pointed to the ground around the boy’s feet and said, ‘Look at the grass. Stare at it, until your eyes go slightly out of focus.’
It appeared at first as if the wind had randomly ruffled the grass into swirls and waves, but as she continued to stare at it, T-Yon could gradually see patterns forming, and these patterns weren’t random at all, but human faces, with hollow eyes and noses and wide-open mouths. Human faces, scores of them, formed out of nothing more than windswept grass.
What was more, they were all individual faces, all different. Some of them were obviously men but many more were women. All they had in common was that they were screaming, as if they knew that they were trapped in this field forever and could never escape.
Red Stain
Everett was winding up his conversation with the mayor’s office when his deputy manager, Luther Broody, rapped at his open office door and mouthed the single word, ‘Problem.’
Everett said, ‘That’s fine, sir. That’s terrific. So long as his honor can be here by three. Thank you. Thank you again. Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.’
He tossed his phone on to the heaps of correspondence on his desk, tilted his chair back and looked up at Luther with a self-satisfied beam. ‘That’s it, L.B. Everything’s sorted. The mayor has agreed to cut the ribbon and make a short speech and even better than that he’s going to bring his daughter, Lolana, along, too. If the reigning Miss Teen Baton Rouge doesn’t pull in the media, I don’t know what the hell will.’
‘We have ourselves a problem,’ Luther repeated. Luther was a bulky African-American with a glossy bald dome like a mahogany newel post and bulging wide-apart eyes and a look about him that always led people to ask if he was Samuel L. Jackson’s younger brother. They never said ‘Samuel L. Jackson’s younger but enormously fatter brother’ but Luther could tell what they were thinking by the way they looked at his belly overhanging his belt. Luther had never been able to say no to a king shrimp po’boy.
‘OK,’ said Everett. ‘What’s gone wrong now? You sorted out that elevator problem with Kone’s, didn’t you?’
‘We have a stain on one of the bedside rugs in Suite Seven-Oh-Three.’
Everett blinked at him. ‘A stain? What kind of a stain? Can’t Clarice deal with it? For Christ’s sake, just change the rug. Don’t tell me we don’t have any spare rugs.’
‘I think you should come take a look at it first.’
‘L.B., I’m up to my neck at the moment. I have a meeting in about five minutes with Paul Artigo for which I’m already going to be late and then I have a lunch date with Theresa Overby and after that I have a conference call booked with the bank.’
‘It looks like blood.’
‘It’s blood? How much blood?’
‘A whole lot of blood. At least half a body full, I’d say.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘I wish I was, Mr Everett, sir. But I think we may have to consider calling the poh-lice.’
Everett stood up. ‘OK, let’s check it out. Shit, this is all I need.’
He drew back the sliding window that connected his office with his personal assistant next door and said, ‘Bella, I’ll be back in five. Can you tell Raymonde that the mayor is coming for definite? And can you ask Olivia what’s happening with those revised media releases? She promised me she’d have them all done by this morning.’
Bella was a handsome fifty-year-old woman with her hair fixed in a gray French pleat and a sharp line in pale gray suits. ‘Yes, sir, boss,’ she replied, without looking up. Everett knew that she would do it. She was the most efficient PA he had ever employed. She would even remind him when it was the doorman’s daughter’s birthday.
Everett lifted his cream linen coat from the back of his chair and shrugged it on. He straightened his bright red necktie in the mirror beside the door, and then followed Luther out of his office and across the hotel lobby.
Several guests were gathered around the fountain in the center of the lobby, talking and laughing. Although the hotel would not be officially opening until Friday afternoon, its refurbishment was ninety-nine percent complete and Everett had been taking reservations for more than a month. All that needed finishing off now was the decorative tiling in the sauna and the planting of camellias on the roof garden.
‘Who found it, the rug?’ asked Everett. ‘It wasn’t a guest, was it?’
Luther shook his head. ‘Housekeeper, making the room ready for this evening. The guests are coming in from Cincinnati and they don’t touch down at BTR until eight oh five, so they won’t be checking in before nine at the earliest.’
‘That’s one mercy. We do have an alternative suite free, in case?’
‘Seven-Oh-Nine. It’s not up to the same specification, of course, but if we have to alter their booking, I guess we could offer it to them gratis.’
Everett looked at him sharply, so he added, ‘Or, you know, at a ten percent discount.’ Another sharp look. ‘Or maybe five.’
The elevator arrived with a soft chiming sound and they stepped aside to let out a party of six or seven elderly men wearing Kiwanis baseball caps. Everett nodded and smiled to them and said, ‘Have a great day, gentlemen. Good to have you stay with us.’
‘Fine hotel!’ said one of them. ‘Can’t believe how great you’ve fixed it up! I stayed here once in nineteen seventy-nine and it was the pits, I can tell you! You could hardly get near the bar for all the women of easy virtue.’
‘I’m sorry to tell you that the women of easy virtue have all moved on,’ Everett told him.
‘Damn shame!’ piped up another Kiwanis. ‘I didn’t bring my wife with me on this trip! Don’t know any good phone numbers, do you?’
‘Sure,’ said one of his companions. ‘Southside Gardens Retirement Community. Plenty of women there, Martin – and all of them a darn sight sprightlier than you!’ and they all wheezed with laughter.
Everett and Luther went up in the elevator to the seventh floor. In the three mirrored walls, where they could see six more Everetts and six more Luthers, Everett thought how tired he looked, or maybe it was just the lighting. He was tall and rangy, with dirty-blond hair that stuck up straight no matter how much he tried to wax it down, and he had the same pronounced cheekbones as his sister, as well as the same green eyes, although his chin was squarer, like his father’s. His girlfriend, Zelda, always complained that he looked as if he worried too much and didn’t eat enough, and she was right: he did, and he didn’t.
When they reached the seventh floor they turned left and walked along the corridor to the very end. The corridor was quietly carpeted in crimson, and there were gilded antique-style lamps all the way along it. Their interior designer had been given the brief of ‘plush Southern boudoir.’ Everett and his partner, Stanley Tierney, had wanted their guests to feel as if they were back in the nineteenth-century Baton Rouge of paddle-wheel casinos, piano bars, and saloons like the Rainbow House, with its wines, liquors and ‘segars’.
Clarice Johnson, the head housekeeper, was waiting for them outside the open door to Suite 703, along with one of her maids. C
larice was a small, round African-American woman with a huge pompadour fastened at the back with a bright red bow, but although she was small she was tireless and dynamic, and had a relentless eye for detail. If a toilet roll hadn’t been folded into a point and fastened with a Red Hotel sticker, the offending maid would be made to feel that she was the laziest, most shiftless girl that Clarice had ever had the misfortune to employ, and that she had let down not only herself, but her family, and The Red Hotel, and the entire Louisiana hospitality industry.
‘Hi, Clarice,’ said Everett. ‘And this is . . .?’
‘Ella-mae,’ said Clarice. ‘She started working here only two days ago.’
Ella-mae was hugging her shoulders with her thin black elbows sticking out, and her eyes were darting from side to side as if she were looking for a way to escape. Everett said, ‘Hey, Ella-mae. There’s nothing for you to fret about. Just tell me what happened.’
‘Go on, Ella-mae,’ Clarice encouraged her.
‘Just as soon as I goes into the bedroom I sees it right there,’ said Ella-mae, in a high, unhappy whine.
‘You mean the rug beside the bed?’
‘That’s right. It’s supposed to be white but it ain’t white it’s all this blood color. I don’t know how it could have gotten that way so I goes up close and I kneels down and I touches it with my finger. And it’s wet, and on my glove it’s all red like it really is blood. I runs right out of the room and I calls for Ms Johnson.’
‘Thanks, Ella-mae,’ said Everett. ‘You did just the right thing. You can go now, but please don’t leave the hotel yet, OK? I may need to talk to you some more.’
And the cops may want to question you, too, he thought, but he didn’t tell her that.
He turned to Luther and said, ‘Come on, L.B. Let me check this rug out for myself.’
Clarice ushered Ella-mae away to the service elevator, her arm around her shoulders. Everett pushed open the door to Suite 703 a little wider, using his elbow, in case there were fingerprints on it.
Inside, the suite was furnished in grandiose nineteenth-century style, with buttoned armchairs and a red-velvet couch that was heaped with cushions. The drapes were red velvet, too, and drawn back from the windows with gold silk cords. In spite of the period effect, the room smelled very new. New plaster, new floor-sealant, new paint. A gilt-framed antique mirror hung above a mock marble fireplace, but on the facing wall there was a fifty-inch plasma TV screen.
The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) Page 3
