Free The Red Hotel (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) by Graham Masterton

to herself. Sometimes you have to turn around and look him in the eye and say, no, you can wait.
    Billy and T-Yon came back into the house, and brought Mr Boots in, too. ‘He had a swim in the pond, didn’t you, boy? But he’s dried off now, and he doesn’t smell quite so bad.’
    ‘I sometimes wonder why I don’t have him put down,’ said Sissy. ‘He costs me a fortune in food, and he’s such an unresponsive mutt these days.’
    Mr Boots lay down on the floor and looked up at Sissy with sad, appealing eyes.
    ‘You won’t have him put down because you love him,’ said Billy. ‘And you know that he’d come back to haunt you. That’s the trouble with being so psychic. Your friends die, your pets die, but you can never get rid of them. What was the name of that cat you used to have? The one you saw sitting on the window sill looking in at you, about three years after he had died?’
    ‘Oh, Smokey,’ said Sissy, with a flap of her hand. ‘I saw him two or three times after that. At least those goddamned goldfish never came back.’
    ‘Something smells good,’ said T-Yon. ‘Is that your potato and mushroom bake?’
    ‘It’ll be ready in a half-hour,’ Sissy told her. ‘Hope you’re ravenous; I made three times too much, as usual.’
    ‘Does that give us time to have a second reading?’
    ‘You’re really sure you want to?’
    ‘Of course, yes. If there’s any kind of problem at The Red Hotel, I really want to know about it. I don’t want anything to happen to Everett.’
    ‘I suppose you want me to kick my heels outside?’ said Billy.
    ‘No, Billy-bob, you can stay here for this. I’d like to see what
you
think of the cards that come up.’
    ‘OK. But those DeVane cards, they always give me the heebie-jeebies. They always did, even when you used to tell my fortune when I was a kid. I guess they were always right, though. They said that I was going to be working a kitchen, didn’t they, even when I was sure that I was going to be a Navy Seal?’
    Billy went into the kitchen to fetch himself a can of Schlitz and then flopped down in the armchair opposite and popped the top. ‘So – you’ve done one reading. What’s the story so far?’
    Sissy quickly told him all about Vanessa Slider and The Red Hotel, and how the cards had predicted that she and her son, Shem, were trying to get back to the hotel to exact their revenge. She confessed that she wasn’t sure
why
they wanted revenge, or what for, although she suspected that it was linked in some way to all of the gruesome goings-on depicted in
La Châtelaine
card – all that chopping up of humans and animals and baking them into pies, as well as the beds heaped up with ravenous rats, and the man with no head.
    She didn’t tell Billy about T-Yon’s nightmares; and neither did she tell him about the Night Kitchen card, with the girl frying her own entrails. She didn’t want to spoil Billy’s relationship with T-Yon by telling him that she had dreamed about sleeping with her brother, and neither did she want him to think that something terrible was going to happen to her, and panic. They had to interpret the cards calmly, and rationally, and analyze what they were really trying to say, even though some of them were so enigmatic and some of them were so gory, and most of them were both.
    Billy listened, and nodded, but when Sissy had finished he shook his head and said, ‘No. No way, José. I can’t see any of this happening for real.’
    ‘But you said yourself that the cards were always right,’ said T-Yon.
    ‘They are. They are. I’m not disputing that. But even if they’re right, they’re not always, like,
literal.
You can’t take them at face value, can you? Because it’s like they’re hundreds of years old, right, and most of the things they’re predicting about, they didn’t have them in those days. So you have to
interpret
them. This guy with no head, for example, reading the newspaper. He could be some reporter, giving