Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (14 page)

‘You’ll tear it!’ Helen protested. ‘You’ll break the washing machine!’

But Steve suddenly found the strength to twist the throw clear of the paddles, and it came free. He dragged it out of the tub and dropped it into the sink.

‘My hero,’ said Helen.

Steve said, ‘Let it dry out, then I’ll take it to the cleaners. Marjorie owes me a favor, anyhow. She’ll probably clean it for free.’

He went back into the kitchen and dried his hands. ‘By the way, what was Alan doing home?’

‘Alan? He said it was a home study day.’

‘Oh, really? He told me he had a strep throat. I asked him what he was doing outside, if he was so sick, and he said that you’d asked him to run an errand. Not to mention using all kinds of bad language and giving me the finger.’

‘You two didn’t fight?’

‘It wasn’t really a fight. Kind of a scuffle.’

‘Oh, Steve.’

‘For God’s sake, tell me when we
don’t
fight. I don’t understand that kid at all. He has a good home, a good education. If he needs anything, all he has to do is ask for it. Yet he struts around like a total punk.’

‘He’s rebelling, that’s all. He’s trying to show his independence.’

Steve unbuttoned his shirt cuffs. ‘He can show his independence as much as he likes, so long as he doesn’t show it around here. So long as he’s living with us, I expect him to show some respect.’

‘Steve . . . you don’t realize sometimes that you throw a very big shadow. It isn’t easy for Alan to come out from under it.’

Bare-chested, Steve put his arms around her waist and kissed her. ‘We should have had a girl. Then she would have looked like you, like the little fairy that fell off the top of the Christmas tree.’

Helen kissed him back. ‘You think we should have had a
girl
? You don’t have the first idea what trouble is, until you’ve had a girl. She would have had her tongue pierced, and a tattoo, and skirts so short she was flashing her fanny. You wouldn’t have had time to solve any crimes. You would have been following her everywhere, making sure that she didn’t smoke pot or have unprotected sex. Or any sex at all, for that matter.’

‘What do you think I am? Some kind of control freak?’

‘Go take a shower. You smell like stale detective.’

He was halfway up the stairs when his cellphone rang. He wrestled it out of his pants pocket and said, ‘Wintergreen.’

‘Detective? This is Trooper MacCormack. We have ourselves an eyewitness. A young guy who saw a van parked opposite the Mitchelson property, at the approximate time of the shooting.’

‘That’s good news. Where is he?’

‘Right here, at Lakeside Road. What do you want me to do? Bring him down to Litchfield?’

‘No, that’s OK. I’ll come on up to Canaan. Is he happy to wait?’

‘No problem. He’s going through coffee and frosted donuts like there’s no tomorrow.’

Steve had the fastest shower on record. He toweled himself dry, pulled on the clean woolen underwear that Helen had laid out for him on the bed, buttoned up his shirt, laced up his boots, and he was ready to go. Helen pushed a sandwich into his mouth as he opened the front door, and handed him two more sandwiches in a brown paper bag.

‘Be careful,’ she said. He kissed her, slid on the icy front steps, and landed on his butt in the snow.

‘I said “be careful!”’ she laughed.

He brushed himself off and tried to laugh, too, but he had bruised the base of his spine and anyhow he didn’t feel like laughing.

 

A
few minutes before three o’clock, Sissy heard a knock at the kitchen door, but before she could open it, Sam Parker came in, his cap and his shoulders covered in snow. He stamped his feet on the mat and clapped his gloves together like a performing seal.

‘Hi there, Sissy! I’m on my way to Torrington and I just dropped by to make sure you didn’t need nothing or nothing!’

Sam was going to be seventy on Christmas Day. He was a widower, who lived about a half-mile away, overlooking Lake Waramaug. He was stocky, and short, with a big head and a little mustache, like Clark Gable. Sissy had been close friends with his wife Beth, and watching Beth waste away from motor neurone disease had been one of the most painful experiences of her life.

‘I’ll tell you what, Sam, I could use some mayo, but don’t trouble yourself if you’re not going into a food store.’

‘No, I can bring you some mayo. Hell of a day out there. I wouldn’t go nowhere at all if I didn’t have to.’

‘Like a cup of coffee before you go?’

‘Thanks for the offer, but I don’t want to be making too many comfort stops, not in this weather.’ He looked through to the living room, where Mr Boots was lying in front of the fire. ‘Hi there, Boots! Look at you! Don’t know why they call it a dog’s life, when he’s indoors warming his nuts and I’m out driving in twenty below.’

Mr Boots barked, and thumped his tail against the rug.

‘I reckon that dog’s more human than most humans,’ said Sam. He tiptoed into the living room in his snow-boots and roughly tugged at Mr Boots’ ears. ‘Look at those eyes! There’s real genuine intelligence, behind those eyes! I’ll bet he could give you a mean game of backgammon, if God had given him fingers, ’stead of paws!’

It was then that Sam saw the DeVane cards laid out on the coffee table. He turned around to Sissy and said, ‘Still telling your fortunes, then?’

Sissy gave him an almost imperceptible nod. It had been the DeVane cards which had first warned Sissy that Beth was seriously ill. Beth had been losing her balance and dropping things, and at first she had thought it was nothing but her natural clumsiness. But Sissy had turned up La Pierre D’Achoppement, the Stumbling-Block, which showed a woman tripping up and falling into a chasm, at the bottom of which pigs were tearing at the flesh of living people.

At Beth’s request, Sissy had told her fortune with the cards from the day that her illness had been diagnosed, and she had been able to predict Beth’s gradual deterioration with dreadful accuracy. Her muscles wasting away; her inability to walk; to dress herself; or to take herself to the toilet. Her inability to chew her food, and swallow; and worst of all, her inability to speak.

Beth had wanted to be ready for each stage in her illness before it happened, and Sissy had told her, although she had lied about the day she was going to die.

Sam took off his glasses, polished them with his scarf, and then peered at the cards with interest. ‘So what’s in store for us? All good news, I hope.’

‘To be honest with you, no. The cards have warned me that two storms are coming, although I don’t exactly know what that means, not yet. Then
this
card came up . . . the Headless Doll, which meant that some child was going to be orphaned. The next thing I heard of, some poor young woman in Canaan had been shot dead by a sniper, and her poor little girl lost her mother.’

‘I heard about that on the news. You really think this card predicted it?’

‘Yes, I do. And I think these other cards are connected with it, too, although I still don’t understand how.’

‘Hmm,’ said Sam, standing up straight. ‘Hard to know what to do about it, I’ll bet.’

‘I thought of calling the police, but Trevor said that they wouldn’t take any notice.’

‘No, I don’t suppose they would. Besides . . . you remember what it was like with my Beth. You told her what was going to happen to her, but there wasn’t nothing she could do to stop it, was there? And nothing
I
could do, neither, although I would have given my life, if it would have made any difference.’

Sissy reached out and laid a hand on his sleeve. ‘Sam,’ she said, and he knew exactly what she meant.

‘Maybe you should ask the cards about it, theirselves,’ he suggested. ‘Like, what should I do to stop this thing from happening, whatever it is?’

‘I don’t know. They’re very good at telling the future, but they’re not particularly helpful. In fact they’re downright abusive, at times.’

‘Why don’t you try it, all the same?’

‘OK. Why don’t you take off your boots?’

She sat down on the couch while Sam went back into the kitchen to take off his boots and his coat. She didn’t need to do a full reading. All she had to do was lay two more cards on top of the two Predictor cards, and then a third card across them, horizontally. The first two cards would tell her if there was any point in her trying to change the future, and the third card would tell what she actually had to do, if there was.

Sam came back in as she was turning up the first card. ‘Les Trois Araignées,’ she said, holding it up.

‘Hm. Looks like three spiders to me.’

‘That’s exactly what it is. Three spiders. But if you look close, you can see that they’re all spinning the same web. This means that whatever is going to happen next, it depends on three things, or more likely three people, all working together.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Could be either. Two spiders are white and one spider is black, which means that one spider has evil intentions while the other two are comparatively harmless. But if the black spider can persuade the two white spiders to work for evil, then the three of them could do very great wickedness between them. If you look closer, you’ll see that there are tombstones in the background, hidden in the grass.’

Without a word, Sam took a pack of Marlboro out of his shirt pocket, shook out two, and lit them. He passed one to Sissy and they both sat in silence for a moment, blowing out smoke. ‘I see you’re beating that craving just as good as me,’ he remarked.

Sissy turned over the second card. This was unexpected. Les Menottes, the Handcuffs, which showed a shallow stream, under a gibbous moon. A naked woman being led across stepping-stones by two men wearing pointed hoods. The woman’s wrists were fastened together with a decorative chain of assorted flowers: roses and chrysanthemums and daisies. There was a strange distracted smile on her face, as if she were thinking about something very pleasurable.

‘So what does this mean?’ asked Sam. ‘Hanky-panky in the park?’

‘I’ve never turned up this card before, not in all the years I’ve been telling fortunes. These three people are
very
intimately linked. Maybe not related, maybe not lovers, but very close to each other in some way. The handcuffs are only made of flowers, which tells us that the woman has been willingly enslaved. This card may be throwing some light on our spiders . . . explaining what their relationship is. But look at the moon. The moon means madness. Whatever these three people are doing together, it’s a kind of collective lunacy.’

Sam coughed, and cleared his throat. ‘I think you’ve about lost me here, Sissy. Spiders, handcuffs. I don’t know. When you were reading Beth’s cards, it all seemed a whole lot clearer.’

‘That’s because we were close to Beth, and we knew what was happening to her. But these people, whoever they are, we don’t know anything about them at all. Not yet, anyhow. But we will. You wait and see. By the time we’ve finished, we’ll know them better than they know themselves.’

‘Well, if you say so. What’s the last card? I’d better be making tracks soon, before this snow gets too deep. Four inches, that’s what they forecast. Up in Maine they got eight.’

Sissy took a deep drag on her cigarette and set it down in the big blue ashtray. She turned over the third card, and it showed two people standing in a heavy snowstorm, each with one hand raised beside one ear. Les Écouteurs Dans La Neige. The Listeners in the Snow.

‘Two people,’ said Sissy, and she could feel her cheeks flush. ‘Two people, standing in the snow, listening.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I think that’s you and me.’

‘How do you figure that? They could be anybody.’

‘But it’s the last card, it’s the one that’s supposed to tell me what to do now.’

Sam made a face. ‘OK. One of those people may be you, but there’s nothing that says that the other one’s me.’

‘Yes, there is. This card tells me what I’m supposed to do
now
. And it’s snowing, isn’t it? And you’re the only other person here.’

‘So what are we supposed to do?’ said Sam. ‘Stand out in the snow and listen?’ He held his hand up to his ear like one of the characters on the card.

‘We could try it.’

‘Sissy, you know how much I respect what you can do with these cards. But I don’t think you have the first idea what any of this means.’

Sissy held her head in her hands and stared at the snow card as if she expected it suddenly to speak, and tell her what it meant. She was sure that the figures on the card were Sam and herself. But Sam was right. She didn’t have any idea what it signified, or what she was supposed to do about it, even if she did.

All the same, she had an overwhelming feeling that the cards were trying to tell her something important. They gave her the same sensation that she got when the phone rang in the small hours of the morning. Whoever was calling, and whatever they had to say, you just knew that it wasn’t good news.

‘Put your coat back on,’ said Sissy.

‘What?’

‘Put your coat back on, we’re going outside.’

Sam crushed out his cigarette. ‘OK, if you say so. But I think you’re sending your beagle down the wrong rabbit-hole.’

He shrugged on his coat and put on his boots, while Sissy buttoned up her blue fur-collared parka. ‘Do you want a Cherry Mash?’ she asked him, holding out the bag. ‘Trevor bought them for me.’

‘No, thanks. I just ate lunch.’

‘Oh, go on, it gives me an excuse to have one.’

They both unwrapped a Cherry Mash, and then they stepped outside into the snow. It was so silent that they could hear a snowplow clearing the highway, over two miles away. ‘So what do you think we’re supposed to be listening for?’ asked Sam.