Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (28 page)

The clock struck eleven, hesitant as usual, as if it didn’t like to upset anybody by telling them that time was going by. Sissy said, ‘Have you found out who they were, those two killers? I saw it on the news but they didn’t say.’

‘The older one came from New Milford. His name was Robert Touche and he was recently divorced. The other was a Cuban boy named Fidelio Valdes. He came from New York City. We’ve been talking to the girl they stayed with, in Canaan, but she doesn’t know too much about them.

‘How the two of them got together, and why they went around shooting people, we don’t have any idea.’

‘The cards warned me they were coming,’ said Sissy. ‘Two storms, both at once.’

‘Maybe we ought to give you your own fortune-telling department, up at headquarters.’

Sissy passed him a slice of cherry cake. ‘They warned me about a man in a chest, too. That’s about as close as they could have come to a man in the trunk of a car. They told me about footprints, leading to a lake. That was the two of them, I suppose, making their way to the Mad River Reservoir. They told me about a bird, caught in a trap, but I still can’t work out what that meant.’

Steve stayed for over an hour. He enjoyed talking to Sissy because she was so uncompromising, but he found her reassuring, too, as if she knew that he wasn’t infallible, but forgave him for it. He was tempted to ask her for another card reading, but in the end he didn’t have the nerve. Besides, her last reading had given him more than enough to think about.

Sissy stood by the side of the house watching him leave, and waved. As she turned back toward the house, she thought she glimpsed Gerry, going into the back door.

It made her feel heavy-hearted, leaving him alone here for Christmas, but she would write him a Christmas card, telling him how much she loved him, and that she would soon be coming back.