The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries)

by Masterton, Graham

  Off to the right, the door to the bedroom was wide open. Everett could see the end of the bed with its red-satin bedspread and the overhead chandelier shining. He crossed the living room slowly, checking the polished wood floor for footprints or any other marks, but all he found was a yellow duster that Ella-mae must have dropped as she came running out of the bedroom in a panic. He left it where it was.

  The bedroom was decorated in the same rococo style as the living room. It was dominated by a king-size tester bed with heavy, red brocade curtains, another red-velvet couch, and a gilded dressing table that could almost have doubled as an altar.

  The stained rug was lying on the floor right in front of him, slightly askew and rumpled up in the middle. It was a large rug, at least seven feet long and four feet wide. As Ella-mae had said, it was supposed to be white, but, except for one small triangular corner and half of one edge, it was soaked through with glistening crimson.

  ‘You see?’ said Luther. ‘Sure looks like blood, don’t it, even if it ain’t?’

  Everett got down on the floor on his hands and knees next to the rug and leaned right over it. He sniffed, but it didn’t smell of anything distinctive, like paint. If this really was blood, it was fresh, and hadn’t yet acquired that rusty tang that blood did when it dried.

  He knelt up straight and looked around the bedroom with a frown. ‘I don’t get this. I mean, I really don’t get this at all. Where the hell did this come from? And who the hell would have wanted to put it here? And why?’

  ‘You can search me,’ said Luther. ‘Even if it is blood, maybe it ain’t human blood. Maybe somebody killed some animal on this rug. Some goat maybe. You know like those Muslims do, when they cut their throats and hang them up to bleed to death. What do they call it? Halal. Or maybe some voodoo priestess sacrificed two or three chickens.’

  Everett stood up and brushed the knees of his pants. ‘Get a grip, L.B. This suite hasn’t been occupied yet, has it? Not by anyone?’

  ‘No, sir, it hasn’t. Tonight’s guests are going to be the very first.’

  ‘Nobody has stayed here and even if somebody did manage to get in, how did they smuggle in a human sacrifice, or a live goat, or enough chickens to produce this much blood? And how did they do it without making any noise? And why is the blood only on the rug, and not splattered all over the floor and up the walls?’

  Luther looked thoughtful. He sniffed, and then he said, ‘Supposing that it is blood, and it comes from some person, or some animal, or however many chickens, then they was killed on it someplace else, and the rug was brung in here afterward.’

  Everett nodded. ‘Exactly. That’s the only explanation, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure. But it still don’t tell us who done it, or why they done it.’

  ‘There’s something else it doesn’t tell us, and that is what we’re going to do about it. We could throw the rug into the incinerator, and not say anything more about it. That’s the simplest solution.’

  ‘Well, sure it is,’ said Luther. ‘But what if the person who done this comes back when we have guests staying here? Whoever it is, he or she has acquired themselves a key card to let themselves in. Maybe even a master key. What if they come back and do harm to one of our guests?’

  ‘You can change all the security codes, can’t you?’

  ‘Of course I can, for sure. But that still ain’t no guarantee, is it? If any of our guests got themselves killed or injured and the police found out that we incinerated this rug then we would both be in serious doo-doo, wouldn’t we, on account of destroying material evidence?’

  ‘How are they going to find that out? You and me, L.B., we’re the only people who know about it.’

  ‘You and me and Clarice and Ella-mae and anybody else that Ella-mae has told already. Apart from that, we both have a conscience, don’t we?’

  ‘OK. You win.’ Everett had forgotten that Luther used to be a sergeant in the Baton Rouge PD, apart from being a lay preacher at his local Baptist church. He knew that Luther was right, and that they should really call the police, but – Jesus – he had so many other problems to deal with, like a critical shortage of kitchen staff and a series of inexplicable glitches in the hotel’s computer system. This mysterious blood-soaked rug was just about the last thing he needed.

  He took his cellphone and flipped it open. ‘This is going to give us some grade-A publicity for our grand opening ceremony, wouldn’t you say? “Cops probe inexplicable bloodstain at Red Hotel.” Folks are going to start asking if it’s safe for them to stay here even before we’re officially open for business.’

  Luther said, ‘Wait up, Mr Everett. We don’t have to rush into nothing. First off, before we do anything at all, I’ll have the security team search the whole building, top to bottom. Maybe that will give us a clue as to who brung this rug in here. If there’s anybody staying here who didn’t ought to be, we should find them for sure.’

  ‘And if we don’t? Then what?’

  ‘I can’t say for certain. Let’s don’t cross that bridge before we reaches it.’

  Everett checked the time on his cellphone. He was ten minutes late for his meeting with Paul Artigo, the president and CEO of the Baton Rouge Convention and Visitors Bureau, a man he was anxious to schmooze, not antagonize.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘why don’t you instigate a search and get back to me later? I really have to go.’

  He turned to leave the bedroom. Just as he did so, however, the front door of Suite 703 slammed shut, as if somebody had banged it in a temper.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he said. He hurried to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside into the hallway. He looked to the right, toward the elevators. There was nobody in sight, which there should have been, even if the door-slammer had immediately run away.

  He looked to the left, and as he did so, he saw the briefest flicker of a shadow at the very end of the hallway, next to the window. It was a tall, attenuated shadow which reached almost to the ceiling – not quite the shadow of a man but nothing like the shadow of one of the curtains. It vanished almost at once, but, as it did so, Everett had the strangest sensation of compression, like the window of an automobile being closed at speed. A moment of temporary deafness.

  Luther came up behind him.

  ‘What’s up, Mr Everett?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know. I’d better get going.’

  ‘Don’t you start worrying yourself about this rug, Mr Everett. No matter what happens, no matter how weird it seems to be, there’s always an explanation for everything. My Aunt Epiphany told me that, and she’s a real genuine authentic voodoo queen.’

  Everett continued to stare at the wall by the window where the shadow had been dancing. ‘OK . . .’ he said, slowly, although he couldn’t understand why his skin felt so prickly, as if he had brushed up against poison ivy.

  The Night Kitchen

  Sissy had now turned over all of T-Yon’s cards, except for the three cards arranged in a fan shape.

  Some of the cards were bizarre. One showed a horse-drawn carriage being driven at breakneck speed by four monkeys in powdered wigs. On another, two hugely obese men were sitting under a sky that was black with rooks, greedily cramming their mouths full with struggling brown toads.

  Yet another depicted a dead man lying in an open coffin while seven women in bird-like masks danced around him, all of them lifting up their voluminous petticoats to show that they were wearing nothing underneath.

  ‘For some reason, this card is very, very meaningful,’ said Sissy, holding up Sept Putains De Danse.

  ‘You don’t know why?’ asked T-Yon.

  ‘Not yet, I have to admit. But that’s not unusual. Everything will fall into place, I promise you, like a jigsaw. It always does. Sometimes you get the answer before you get the question, and I think this is one of those times.’

  ‘Seven women exposing themselves to a corpse? If that’s the answer, I can’t begin to imagine what the question is.’

&
nbsp; Sissy looked down at all the DeVane cards that she had already turned over. ‘Don’t you worry, sweetheart. It’s all beginning to come together. Like I said, your nightmares about your brother have definitely been set off by this woman, La Châtelaine. I don’t yet know where her house is located, but if this reading doesn’t tell us, we’ll probably find out in the next.’

  ‘But who is she? And why is she giving me these nightmares?’

  ‘Again, I’m still not sure. But – here – look at this next card.’

  The card depicted a gloomy prison cell, in which a woman and a boy were sitting on a bale of dirty straw, both in leg irons. The caption read La Récompense Est Des Chaînes, The Reward Is Chains.

  ‘Look at their hands,’ said Sissy. ‘Blood red, halfway up to their elbows. That means that they’ve committed some really terrible crime, probably murder. In this reading, the woman is almost certainly the chatelaine and the boy is the same boy who was wearing the floppy brown leather hat. I’m almost one hundred percent sure that he’s her son. So whatever they did, they were both caught and brought to justice and punished.

  She swallowed some more wine, and thought for a while, lightly drumming on the prison card with her fingertips. Then she said, ‘They were locked up, but I can sense that both of them are free now. They may have served their time, but I’m not feeling that. I’m feeling that maybe they’re dead. All the same, I get the strongest sense that they’re making a comeback. In fact I’m sure of it.’

  ‘How can they do that, if they’re dead?’

  ‘Well – they shared a very powerful telepathic bond between them when they were alive and they would still have that same bond in the spirit world. That kind of psychic togetherness can sometimes develop between parents and their children, although it’s usually much closer between mothers and sons – not so much between fathers and daughters.’

  ‘But what do they want?’

  ‘The cards tell me that they’ve come looking for two things. One is to settle some old scores. You see this double-headed ax at the side of this picture? That’s the symbol for revenge. The other is to pick up where they left off. There they are, walking along a country road, with their backs to us. They’re headed for that tall house in the distance, which looks pretty much like the same house in the chatelaine card. They’re going back to the place they consider to be their home.’

  ‘But why are they giving me nightmares? I don’t know anybody like that. I never have.’

  ‘You never knew them but they obviously know you. Or of you, anyhow.’

  T-Yon shivered. ‘They know me? Now you’re really scaring me.’

  Sissy reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘It’s better to be scared than to let yourself be caught unawares. In your heart you know that, don’t you? I think that’s why you came here to me looking for help, rather than go to your doctor. A doctor would have done nothing more than give you a prescription for Xanax and tell you to stop worrying so much.

  ‘Me, on the other hand, I’m telling you exactly what your immediate future has in store for you, and I won’t lie to you, T-Yon – your immediate future looks very strange, and maybe a little dangerous, too. We need to find out who these spirits are and why they’re giving you such terrible nightmares, and we don’t need to be wasting any time.’

  ‘So how do we do that?’

  ‘See this card – Le Retour Effrayant? This means that you’ll soon be going on a long journey, although I doubt you’ll be traveling by pony and trap, like the girl in the picture.’

  ‘Le Retour Effrayant? What does that mean?’

  ‘Literally translated, The Frightening Journey Back.’

  ‘Oh, no. The Frightening Journey Back to where?’

  ‘Someplace familiar, I would say, even if it is frightening. Look at the girl. She’s holding up a hand mirror in front of her face, because she doesn’t need to see the road ahead. She knows it already. All she wants to do is study her own expression. Now see here – there’s a monk in a brown hood standing by the side of the road and he’s leaning on a long red walking stick. Now, if that isn’t a clue . . .’

  T-Yon turned to Sissy wide-eyed. ‘A red stick. Of course. That has to mean I’m going to Baton Rouge.’

  Sissy smiled. ‘I told you how much these cards could show you, didn’t I? Now let’s see who you’re going to be visiting in Baton Rouge, as if you didn’t know already.’

  Sissy turned over the next card. ‘This is L’Asile De Mon Frère.’

  ‘L’Asile? Doesn’t that mean . . .?’

  ‘Yes. It means “asylum”. This is your brother’s madhouse – according to the cards, anyhow.’

  T-Yon studied the card intently. After a while, she said, ‘It’s the same house, isn’t it? It’s the same house as the chatelaine’s house. I’m sure of it. What do you think?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Sissy. ‘They do look alike.’

  The house in the asylum card was seen from the point of view of somebody standing very close to it, and looking up, so that it almost appeared to be collapsing on top of the artist who was drawing it. Above it, the sky was swirling like a Van Gogh painting, with crows and hats and sheets of paper being blown around the rooftops in a gale-force wind. It wasn’t one hundred percent identical to the other two houses, because it was painted gray, but it had the same number of windows and the same kind of gambrel roof.

  ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ said T-Yon.

  Sissy touched all the cards again, her fingertips dancing from one to the other. Then she said, ‘As far as I can work out, the cards are telling us that sometime in the past this woman used to be in charge of your brother’s hotel. It’s the same building.’

  ‘But this house doesn’t look like The Red Hotel at all.’

  ‘Of course not. The Red Hotel wasn’t even thought of when these cards were first drawn. But it symbolizes The Red Hotel, in the same way that this chatelaine and her son symbolize the real people who are causing your nightmares.’

  ‘So this scary thing you were talking about . . . you think that’s where it’s going to happen? At The Red Hotel?’

  ‘I would say so, almost certainly. That’s unless somebody does something to stop it.’

  ‘And that somebody, that’s me?’

  Sissy said, ‘It could be. I’m not entirely sure. Let’s take a look at these last three cards. Maybe they’ll fill in some of the gaps.’

  She picked up the left-hand card and turned it over. ‘This card tells you why you’re facing such trouble.’

  The card was almost totally black, with only a pair of yellow eyes glowering in the darkness. It was called L’Ombre Qui Siffle, The Shadow Who Whistles.

  ‘Every time this card comes up, it means that there’s some individual in your life who’s waiting for you,’ said Sissy. ‘For some people, it’s a long-lost friend, or a lover. For other people it’s somebody who means them to do them harm. He’s hiding in the shadows, but he’s very patient, he’ll go on waiting for as long as it takes. That’s why he’s called “the shadow who whistles”, because he’ll amuse himself by whistling until you show up.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a “he”?’

  ‘I don’t. It could equally be a “she”. Usually the cards give me quite a definite feeling one way or another, but this time they’re kind of ambivalent about it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the two of them,’ T-Yon suggested. ‘The mother and the son, both.’

  ‘You could be right. But let’s see what this card has to tell us. This is what is going to happen to you today.’

  She turned over the next card. It was Le Drapeau Rouge, The Red Flag. The picture showed a young woman in a kitchen, cutting out pastries. Outside the open window, a sunny meadow sloped down toward a river, and beside the river stood a wooden watchtower. A young man was standing on top of the watchtower waving a large scarlet banner, and obviously calling out, because he had one hand raised to his mouth.

  Underneath the watchtower,
scores of brown pelicans were clustered; and all around the window, white magnolias flowered, so beautifully engraved that Sissy could almost smell them.

  ‘I believe that young woman in the kitchen is you and that young man on top of that tower is your brother,’ Sissy told T-Yon. ‘See those brown pelicans? The brown pelican is the state bird of Louisiana, and the magnolia is the Louisiana state flower. You’re going to talk to your brother today, and he’s going to tell you something important. It’s something to do with the color red, I imagine. Maybe it’s just about The Red Hotel, but I get the feeling that it’s more than that. I get the distinct feeling that he’s worried. In fact I’d say that he’s very worried.’

  ‘Maybe I should call him now,’ said T-Yon. ‘My God, I hope he’s OK.’

  ‘Let’s just turn this last card over, shall we?’ said Sissy. ‘This will tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.’

  She took hold of the edge of the card and she was about to turn it over when she hesitated. She could feel which card it was even before she looked at it, and she was reluctant to show it to T-Yon in case it upset her too much. She could turn it over and lie about what it meant, but the DeVane cards were very unforgiving if anybody tried to distort what they were saying. It had happened to her once or twice before, when a really terrifying card had come up, and she had pretended to her client that its message was relatively harmless. The cards had gone cold for weeks on end, and it was only after she had laid them out again and again and kissed each card and expressed her heartfelt contrition that they had gradually come back to life. The DeVane cards were always complicated, and sometimes obscure, but they invariably told the truth, no matter how unpalatable that truth might be; and they expected anybody who used them to do the same.