The Hotel Nantucket (76)
Which, of course, Lizbet couldn’t do. Not in August.
Lizbet pokes her head out her office door. Diane Brickley is, Lizbet would guess, nearly eighty years old. She looks like one of the ladies who eat lunch every day on the patio of the Field and Oar Club. She’s wearing a knee-length Nantucket-red skirt that she probably bought at Murray’s Toggery back in the 1960s—it’s faded to pale pink—a yellow slicker, and a rain bonnet (the forecast did call for thunderstorms, but out the front doors of the hotel Lizbet sees golden sunshine). There’s an antique Nantucket Lightship basket hanging from Diane Brickley’s forearm. Lizbet realizes that Diane Brickley is one of the Field and Oar ladies, and she sits on the board of directors at the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum. She lives at 388 Main Street.
“Hello, Mrs. Brickley, it’s Lizbet Keaton.”
Diane waves a hand. “At least somebody here knows me. I have my daughter visiting with her four teenage sons and I can’t handle the noise, the smell, or the mess. Please put me in the room you save for visiting dignitaries.”
Hotels do not keep rooms vacant for VIP walk-ins; that’s a myth. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brickley,” Lizbet says. “We’re full. We don’t have a single room available.”
“Full?” Mrs. Brickley says. “The White Elephant is full, the Beach Club is full, and the Wauwinet is full, but I thought for sure you’d have a room available. Isn’t this place haunted?”
Guests have been posting their “visits” from the ghost of Grace Hadley all over social media. Nothing that Grace does shows up on anyone’s camera, but these people get likes and follows and reposts anyway. Derek White, a fourth-grade teacher from Shaker Heights, reported seeing a ghost reflected in his dark bedroom window; he claimed she was wearing “one of the hotel bathrobes and a Minnesota Twins cap.” A few days later, guest Elaine Backler was applying eyebrow pencil when she saw a “floating robe and navy baseball hat” in the mirror behind her. (Lizbet is certain Elaine must have heard about Derek’s sighting and was corroborating it to stoke intrigue. The detail about the Twins cap, though, nags at Lizbet. She misplaced her own navy Minnesota Twins baseball cap sometime during her first week of work and it hasn’t turned up.)
The Washington Post calls, then USA Today, but all Lizbet can tell them for sure is that a chambermaid was killed in a fire at the hotel a hundred years earlier. Is Grace Hadley now haunting the hotel? “It’s anyone’s guess,” Lizbet says lightly. The phone rings nonstop; people have started booking rooms for the following summer.
Lizbet wants to tell Mario about this—tell him he was wrong that the hotel might be a flash in the pan; Lizbet is half full for next June already—but she has consciously avoided any situation in which she might see Mario. She hasn’t texted or called. He called her once at midnight, waking her up; it took extreme willpower but she let the call go to voice mail, and he didn’t leave a message. He also sent Beatriz to the front desk with a bakery box—the homemade pizza rolls, the gougères, the doughnuts—and Lizbet brought it directly to the break room for everyone else to enjoy.
She longs for him every second of every day.
Her new obsession is monitoring Yolanda’s trips to and from the Blue Bar kitchen. Yolanda seems to go mostly in the morning and the afternoon, and Lizbet knows that Mario doesn’t arrive until four (or, when he wanted to make out with Lizbet in her office, three thirty). Yolanda also visits the kitchen in the late afternoon right before service starts, so this is when Lizbet watches her most closely. Does she seem ravished? Not really. She’s as serene as always, and she’s never weird or tense around Lizbet. One day, she stops at the desk and gives Lizbet an appraising look, and Lizbet thinks, Here it comes. She’s going to say: I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize, I hope you can forgive, I never meant to hurt…
Yolanda says, “You look like a person in need of a yoga class. How about thirty minutes in savasana pose?”
Lizbet manages a smile. Although Yolanda is right, Lizbet can’t imagine ever practicing with her again, not after all this. “I’m fine, thanks,” she says. “It’s just August.”
Lizbet worries beads along a mental string: Mario, Mario, Yolanda, Mario, Yolanda.
But then something steals her full attention.
It’s eleven o’clock on Thursday, August 4, and the lobby is popping. Louie is playing Mr. Tennant from room 201 in chess and the match is so close, there’s a little crowd around them; it includes Richie and (an exasperated) Kimber Marsh, who are waiting for Louie to finish so they can all go to the 167 Raw food truck for tuna burgers and then to Cisco Beach. Edie is on the phone with the Galley, trying to secure a beachfront lunch reservation for room 110, and Alessandra is calling the Hy-Line to make a reservation for the Keenan family, who somehow neglected to arrange for their transport home.
Lizbet is about to head to the percolator—it will be her eighth cup of coffee, which is a lot, even for her—when she notices a woman enter the lobby. This woman is dressed in the best kind of casual way: cute jeans, a white blouse that’s as crisp as paper, and gladiator sandals. She’s rolling in a hunter-green Away carry-on, which is the exact same bag that Lizbet travels with. Her dark hair is cut in a bob at her jawline and she’s wearing chic glasses. None of this is particularly remarkable, but Lizbet gets a feeling. The woman stops just inside the entrance to the lobby to look around. She whips out her phone and begins to take pictures and type notes. Lizbet hurries over.