The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 16

16. The Cobblestone Telegraph

Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard, has been sitting on Jill Tananbaum’s article about the Hotel Nantucket for well over a month, but he hasn’t been inspired to run it. Part of the reason is his own prejudice about the hotel being owned by a renowned London billionaire who has never even set foot on the island—it feels so wrong—and part of it is that Jordan likes to cover the real issues facing Nantucket. There’s the housing shortage, which causes overcrowded conditions for both seasonal and year-round workers.

There’s the traffic; in the summer, Jordan avoids the intersection by the high school altogether. There’s environmental sustainability, the argument against short-term rentals, and issues with the landfill.

Nantucket is, in Jordan’s opinion, already too popular, so inundated with visitors that the people who live here can’t enjoy it. Jordan realizes this makes him sound like a crochety old-timer. Really what he wishes is that there were a story to the hotel’s renovation that didn’t have to do with money, thread count, or Farrow and Ball paint.

And then, suddenly, that story lands on his desk.

Edie Robbins comes into the office with an article written by an eight-year-old girl, a guest at the hotel. This child, Wanda Marsh, claims to have heard from a ghost living in the hotel’s fourth-floor storage closet. Jordan reads the piece and chuckles—it’s not bad;

maybe he should hire this Wanda Marsh—and then Edie hands over the supporting document, an article published in the Standard a hundred years ago.

“I never knew about this,” Jordan admits. There are, of course, ghost stories all over downtown Nantucket, just as there are in any historic place with creaky old houses. But this one grabs Jordan’s interest. It’s the combination of the hundred-year-anniversary angle, the little girl, and Edie herself, a young woman Jordan has known since birth. Jordan was friends with Edie’s father, Vance Robbins; they served on the Rotary Club scholarship committee together for years, and Jordan was saddened by his passing.

He gives the little girl’s story and the old article to Jill and asks her to write a new piece about the hotel. “Describe the renovation from the point of view of the ghost who has lived there for the past hundred years,” he says. “People will love it.”

And they do! Jill Tananbaum’s article “Hotel Nantucket Haunted by Hadley” appears in the Thursday, July 21, edition of the Nantucket Standard and garners more reader response than any other article they’ve run this year. Summer visitor Donna Fenton, who stayed in the hotel with her family in the 1980s, knew there was something spooky about the place. Blond Sharon is intrigued not by the ghost but by the Matouk linens, the oyster-shell-tiled showers, and the blue cashmere throws from Nantucket Looms. Also, Sharon (who likes to know everything) had no idea there was a new adult pool out back.

How can she get an invitation? She decides to book a room at the end of August for her sister, Heather, who is a world traveler and very discerning.

It just so happens that Yeong-Ja Park, a writer for the Associated Press, is staying on the island at her parents’ home in Shimmo, and after she reads the article in the Standard, she writes an article about the haunted hotel as well. She tracks down half a dozen people who have stayed at the hotel over the past three decades, three of whom claim to have heard and seen things they couldn’t explain. Yeong- Ja’s article gets picked up by forty-seven newspapers across the country, from the Idaho Statesman to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the papers run the article right away; some save it for a slow news day.

Here on Nantucket, the excitement about the haunted hotel lasts only a scant twenty-four hours—because we have other gossip to discuss.

Something very scandalous has transpired on Hulbert Avenue.

Rumor has it that Michael Bick, husband of Heidi Bick and the father of four, had an affair with their next-door neighbor Lyric Layton, and Lyric is now pregnant. This story is so salacious that Blond Sharon will be able to dine out on it all summer long. Apparently, Heidi Bick found Lyric’s eye shadow in her makeup drawer, Lyric’s René Caovilla stilettos in her closet, and Lyric’s positive pregnancy test inside the Jennifer Weiner novel Good in Bed. (Is there symbolism in this choice of book? There must be!) Heidi invited the Laytons over for dinner on the deck, faking normality, but as soon as the first cocktail was poured, she confronted Michael and Lyric. It was a surprise attack so they couldn’t confer and get their stories straight.

Whoa, did this cause an uproar—mostly from Ari Layton, who had been mentally keeping track of how many times Michael checked out his wife these past few years. Ari had always suspected a flirtation

between his wife and Michael but he was enraged to find out it was something far more. Ari had been so happy about Lyric’s pregnancy (he was hoping for a little girl after three boys), but what if it turned out it wasn’t his baby? Ari stood up, fists at the ready.

Both Michael and Lyric vehemently denied the accusation. They had never been together in any capacity, nor would they ever. Lyric was appalled that Heidi thought so little of her. She wasn’t sure what her eye shadow, shoes, and pregnancy test were doing in the Bicks’ house, but for the record, if she were having an affair with Michael, she wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave those things behind!

Here, we had to admit, she had a point.

Michael claimed he was being set up. It was probably someone from his office who had found out he and Rafe were starting their own company. They’d sent a spy into the house. The guy who came to fix the internet, perhaps?

Ari said, “But how would anyone from your company get into our house? How would he know to take the eye shadow, shoes, and pregnancy test, which he must have found in our trash?”

Right, we thought. It made no sense.

Lyric was, by all accounts, calm but emphatic. She was happy to have the paternity of the baby tested as soon as that was an option.

Michael, however, kept spewing conspiracy theories and generally acting like a man with a guilty conscience.

This made us wonder.

There has also been a shake-up at the Deck, one so disruptive that the restaurant announces a temporary emergency closing on

Sunday, July 17. The Deck hasn’t closed on a summer Sunday in fifteen years of operation. What is going on?

Romeo down at the Steamship Authority reports that he saw Christina Cross driving her bright orange Jeep onto the ferry, her belongings packed to within inches of the roof. It’s Romeo’s job to regulate that kind of thing—drivers are supposed to have a foot of visual clearance out the back window—but when Romeo approaches the car, he sees Christina is sobbing, so he waves her on. He has been doing this job for decades and knows a heartbroken woman leaving the island for good when he sees one.

Christina has left the Deck. Is that why they closed? Yes and no.

Christina could easily be replaced by Peyton as hostess and Goose as sommelier. But Goose, who is JJ’s closest confidant, tells his sister Janice, the dental hygienist, that JJ closed the Deck so that he could take a “personal day”—which involved a case of Cisco beer, a couple of three-way sandwiches from Yezzi’s food truck, and a ride with Goose out to Great Point to fish. He told Goose that Christina had left, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem, JJ said, was that he had gotten mixed up with Christina in the first place.

“I had the best woman I could have asked for,” JJ said. “Lizbet was my friend, my confidante, someone I knew I could spend the

rest of my life with. And I blew it.”

“You blew it,” Goose agreed.