The Hotel Nantucket (115)

When he hears the knock on the front door, he jumps to his feet. He fears it’s one of his (former) friends, trying to lure him out just once before the summer ends. Because who else could it be?

Chad peers out the window and sees the gunmetal-gray Jeep Gladiator that Ms. English drives.

Whoa! Chad thinks. He runs down the stairs, opens the front door, and sure enough, there’s Ms. English standing on his porch.

She smiles at him. “Hello there, Long Shot.”

“Ms. English!” he says. Ms. English is here, on Eel Point Road? Chad then recalls seeing her down the street at number 133 back in the middle of the summer. He’d never mentioned seeing her because he didn’t want her to know that he knew she cleaned other houses. A chilling thought comes to him: Ms. English is here tonight to see if she can clean for his family. Now that the hotel is closing, she must need a job.

Chad feels mortified by what Ms. English has already seen: the long white-shell driveway lined on either side by pruned boxwood, the hydrangea bushes showboating along the front porch, and the needlessly enormo waterfront home behind him.

“Is your father at home?” Ms. English asks.

“My father?”

“Yes,” Ms. English says. Her outfit falls somewhere between what she normally wears to work and what she wore to drinks the other evening. She has on white pants and a navy tunic printed with white hibiscus. Her hair is in corkscrew curls to her shoulders and she’s wearing pearl earrings. “He’s expecting me.”

“He is?” Chad says—and at that second, Paul Winslow strides out from the back of the house.

“Magda, hello!” he says—and Chad nearly falls through the floor. His father knows Ms. English? Chad experiences a moment of vertigo as he wonders if maybe this whole summer has been a setup. Has Paul Winslow been pulling the puppet strings all along? Did his father want him to be working at the hotel to teach him the lessons that he thought he’d learned on his own?

“I went out today and got a bottle of Appleton Estate Twenty-One,” Paul says. “Just to have it on hand for you. Can I pour you a glass?”

“I’d love it, Paul, thank you,” Magda says.

Paul claps Chad on the shoulder. “Show Magda to my study, please, bud. I’ll be back in a second with the drinks.”

Paul heads to the kitchen and Chad stares at Ms. English for a second. Is this another one of those moments, like when she told him what happened to Bibi, where nothing is what it seems? Maybe Paul is interviewing Magda—not for a job cleaning their house but for a job at the Brandywine Group. If Ms. English works there, will that make Chad’s position there any more palatable?

No, Chad thinks. Not really.

“The study, Long Shot?” she says.

“Oh, right.” Chad shows Ms. English into the study. She sits in one of the butterscotch suede club chairs and crosses her legs. She pulls her phone and a legal pad out of her bag.

“Okay,” Chad says. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t you want to stay?” Ms. English asks.

“Stay?” Chad says. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s going on? Why are you here?”

Ms. English laughs. “Oh, Long Shot, you should see your face, it’s priceless.” She leans forward and whispers, “Your father and I are forming a partnership. We’re going to buy the hotel.”





28. The Cobblestone Telegraph




When we next see Fast Eddie, he’s seated at the big front table at Cru, where he has ordered a magnum of Dom Pérignon, which is attended by two servers and three live sparklers.

Well, it’s no wonder. It has taken a mere three days for him to secure a twenty-million-dollar offer on the Hotel Nantucket. The buyer is known only as the Long Shot Trust, but because Eddie can’t keep his mouth shut (something his sister, Barbie, scolds him for nonstop), someone among us discovered that the property was purchased in equal parts by two entities. One was Paul Winslow, a principal at the Brandywine Group who owns a home on Eel Point Road, and the other was Magda English, the head of housekeeping at the Hotel Nantucket.

“I knew Magda was hiding something,” Nancy Twine of the Summer Street Church said. “I used to wonder about her putting so much in the collection plate on Sundays and now I find out she could have put in ten times more. She has millions!”

Yes, Magda English’s net worth hovers around twenty-four million dollars. The (unconfirmed) story is that she caught the eye of Xavier Darling thirty years earlier when she was working on one of his cruise ships. He wined and dined her in Monte Carlo and they ended up at a casino where she placed a five-hundred-dollar bet (her own money, she would be quick to point out) and rolled the dice at the craps table for nearly two hours, going all in each time and walking away with two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. She invested this money with Xavier Darling’s bankers, where it grew at a steady rate. Then, in 2012, Xavier approached Magda with a dark-horse opportunity: he was investing in a company that was developing a new kind of personal security software. After reading the company’s prospectus, Magda told Xavier she wanted in. The company went public in July of 2021 and Magda’s small fortune became a big fortune. The following month, her sister-in-law, Charlotte English, died suddenly in her sleep and Magda moved to Nantucket to be with her brother, William, and her nephew Zeke. She had been looking at property with Fast Eddie, including homes on Eel Point Road, but hadn’t found anything to her liking. She took the job as head of housekeeping at the hotel because she was always happiest when she was busy.