The Hotel Nantucket (6)
Whatever her real name is, she travels the globe, reviewing the Hampton Inn in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, with the same critical eye that she does the Belmond Cap Juluca in Anguilla. (Both received four keys out of five.) It’s well known that Shelly has never given a five-key review. She claims to be on a quest for that elusive five-key property, but Lizbet thinks this is a feint. Shelly will never give a five-key review; withholding it is her currency.
“Well, sir, we’ll try our best,” Lizbet says.
“That’s not going to cut it, Elizabeth,” Xavier says. “We are going to do what it takes to be the only hotel in the world that woman deems worthy of the fifth key. We are going to leave no doubt in her mind. Am I understood?”
“Yes, sir, you’re understood.”
“So we will get five keys from Hotel Confidential by summer’s end?”
A competitive spirit that Lizbet hasn’t felt since she raced her brothers swimming across Serpent Lake in Crosby, Minnesota, surfaces.
Building the new! she thinks. In that moment, Lizbet believes she can achieve the (highly) improbable—no matter what obstacles she encounters.
“We will get the fifth key,” she says.
3. Ghost Story
For one hundred years, Grace has been trying to set the record straight: She was murdered!
In August 1922, the Nantucket Standard reported that nineteen-year-old chambermaid Grace Hadley had perished in the fire that consumed the third floor and attic of the grand Hotel Nantucket—a fire that had been started by an “errant cigarette of unknown origin.” Technically, this was true, but the article left out secret, salacious details that only Grace knew. The hotel’s owner, Jackson Benedict, had set up a cot for Grace in the attic’s storage closet, directly above his quarters, so that he could sneak up and “visit” her whenever he was in residence. In addition to her job as a chambermaid, Grace served as lady’s maid to Jack’s wife, Dahlia, who called Grace “homely” (not at all true) and “a smart aleck” (occasionally—okay, often—true). On Grace’s very first day of work, Dahlia spewed bathtub gin in Grace’s face, temporarily blinding her. (After that, Grace always kept a safe distance between them.)
Before the fire started in the small hours of August 20, Jack and Dahlia hosted a dinner dance in the ballroom, as they did every summer weekend. These lavish events often ended with Dahlia getting drunk and throwing herself at other men. The Benedicts would then repair to the owner’s suite and scream profanities at each other; one time, Dahlia threw a silver candlestick that missed Jack but hit their tabby cat, Mittens. (Afterward, the cat walked with a limp.) Grace could only too easily imagine Jack whipping out their secret during one of these feuds, like a dagger from a sheath: I’m sleeping with your girl Grace.
That would have been all Dahlia needed to hear.
Grace was woken by the sound of sirens (faint though they were in the attic) and she smelled the smoke and felt the searing heat of the floorboards—it was like standing on a griddle—but she couldn’t get out of the storage closet. Her door was jammed. She pounded; she screamed, “Help me! Save me! Jack! Jack!” Nobody heard her. Jack was the only person who knew Grace was in the attic, and he hadn’t come.
Ghosts are souls with unfinished business on earth, and such is the case with Grace. She has tried to just “let it go” and “move on” to her eternal rest—but she can’t. She won’t. She is going to haunt the damn hotel until she has an acknowledgment of the hideous truth: Dahlia Benedict started the fire intentionally and then locked the door to the storage closet from the outside. She killed Grace! And Dahlia wasn’t the only one to blame. Jack had seduced Grace, and the vast difference in their social status left Grace with no choice but to comply. Jack hadn’t saved her. He was ashamed about having a mistress, and so he let her burn.
After the fire, Jack sold the hotel for a song—but Grace became determined to let people know she was still there.
She started with the eight-foot-high mahogany doors—termites.
Then the silks that had been brought back from Asia by Nantucket whaleships and the hotel’s velvets, brocades, and toiles—moths, mold, mildew.
Grace suffused the hotel with the smell of rotten eggs. Management suspected the cesspool and called the plumber, but nothing could eradicate the stench. Sorry, not sorry! Grace thought.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, the hotel closed. It remained shuttered throughout the Great Depression and during the war, too, of course. These were, Grace admits, dull years. It was just her, the rats, and an occasional owl. Anyone who had heard the story of the poor young chambermaid perishing in the hotel fire had bigger things to worry about.
In the 1950s, a new owner marketed the property as a “family-friendly budget hotel.” This meant threadbare sheets that tore as easily as wet tissue and waxy coverlets in obnoxious prints that disguised stains. Grace hoped that wherever Jack was, he knew how common and low-rent his once elegant hotel had become.
In the 1980s, when movies like Poltergeist and Ghostbusters came out and everyone was suddenly an expert in paranormal activities, it became chic to say the hotel was haunted. Finally! Grace thought. Surely someone would do a little digging and figure out what had happened to her. Grace started properly haunting the hotel guests who deserved it: the philanderers and the casually cruel, the abusers and the loudmouths and the prejudiced. Stories accumulated—cold drafts, knocking noises, a bowl set spinning on the server in the third-floor hallway, water falling drip by drip onto the forehead of a slumbering man. (This man was handsy with the girls in his office.)