The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 17

17. Hot-Girl Summer

Business at the Hotel Nantucket has picked up considerably! Grace notes this with delight, and although it feels immodest to say, she knows it’s all thanks to her. By the end of July, every room at the hotel is booked. Word has gotten out that the hotel is haunted by the ghost of Grace Hadley and everyone wants to experience the phenomenon. This is Grace’s fifteen minutes of fame, and she can’t afford to squander it. She’s very busy in the nighttime hours making benign room visits. She knocks on walls, flickers the lights, messes with the electric shades (this is so much fun), and plays the guests’ favorite songs out of nowhere.

These shenanigans delight the guests, but Grace begins to worry that cheap stunts will dilute her brand. Can she put her powers to better use? Yes! For example, seventeen-year-old Juliana Plumb wants to come out to her parents. They’re staying in suite 314 and they’ve just had a lovely dinner at the Languedoc Bistro. As they were walking down the hallway toward their suite, Mr. Plumb teased Juliana about the cute busboy who had been flirting with her at dinner. Juliana looked uncomfortable, and Grace knows exactly why.

She watches Juliana stare at herself for a long time in the bathroom mirror after brushing her teeth. Grace marvels at how wonderful it is that one can just state one’s sexual orientation and

preferences in 2022. Back in 1922, well…Grace had a feeling that the hotel’s GM, Mr. Leroy Noonan, preferred gentlemen, but he could never have said it. He was more “closeted” than Grace was!

Grace follows Juliana as she knocks on her parents’ bedroom

door.

“Come in,” Mrs. Plumb says.

Juliana and Grace enter. Grace hovers close to Juliana, providing as much warmth and support as she can muster.

“I’m gay,” Juliana says.

The Plumbs seem…taken aback. Mr. Plumb clears his throat; he exchanges glances with Mrs. Plumb. Grace nudges Mr. Plumb toward his daughter, and Mr. Plumb gets the hint and holds out his arms. “Juliana,” he says. “We love you, sweetie.”

“Thank you for trusting us enough to tell us,” Mrs. Plumb says.

“We’ll support you any way we can.”

My work here is done, Grace thinks, leaving the Plumbs to a group hug.

Grace discovers that the Elpines in room 203 have been experiencing some problems in the bedroom and that they’re taking this vacation to “spice things up” and “reignite the romance” in their marriage. But despite the mood lighting and the fine linens, Grace reads the room and senses the Elpines are headed for disappointment—and, very likely, some counseling.

She positions herself just so in front of the full-length mirror and within Mr. Elpine’s line of vision. Is he supernaturally sensitive? Let’s hope so, for Mrs. Elpine’s sake. Grace blows cold air toward Mr.

Elpine and opens her robe. He looks over Mrs. Elpine’s shoulder, and his eyes widen. It turns out that being watched by a beautiful, young, and naked female ghost is just the thing to cure Mr. Elpine of his chronic issue. Grace slips out, leaving the Elpines to get down to business.

Kimber goes to the Darya Salon at the White Elephant and returns with her hair dyed flame orange. Richie loves it, Wanda and Louie are nonplussed, and Doug the dog barks so sharply when he sees her that Kimber has to put on his muzzle (Grace is not unhappy about this). Now, nearly every night after the Blue Bar closes and Adam heads home, Kimber slips down the hall to the lobby to visit Richie. Their fooling around has gotten too serious for them to stay out in the open in the lobby—what if a guest should appear or one of the children wander down?—so they are constantly looking for more private places to be together.

Kimber suggests the fourth-floor storage closet, but thankfully, Richie shoots this idea down. “It’s spooky,” he says. He thinks they should go out to the adult pool and get busy on one of the extra-wide chaise longues. They try this, but although the chaises are sturdy, they aren’t that sturdy, and Kimber complains about the mosquitoes.

Kimber tries to lure Richie down to her suite but Richie is concerned about the children. They finally consummate the relationship in the break room. When Richie plays Marvin Gaye on the jukebox, Grace knows what’s coming and floats out.

The break room becomes the regular site of their sneaky links.

Grace notices that after Kimber heads back to her suite, Richie often

falls asleep on the sofa, then jolts awake like he’s being chased (Grace has nothing to do with this; she suspects it’s his conscience at work). Sometimes he sits for long periods with his head in his hands; sometimes he goes into Lizbet’s office, opens the safe, and stares at the piles of Kimber’s cash (though Grace is happy to report he doesn’t take a single dollar). He stays at the hotel until the birds begin to sing, then he slithers out the side door like a cat burglar.

Kimber tells Richie that she has to go off-island overnight the following week to meet with her divorce attorney, and she doesn’t want to take the children with her. She asks Richie if there’s any way he can sleep in her suite after he’s finished work and spend the two days that Kimber will be away with the children.

Yes, of course! Richie practically shouts. He’d love to!

Kimber tells Richie that the best way to acclimate the children to him staying over while she’s away is for him to stay overnight in their suite on a regular basis while she’s there.

“The children will be fine with it,” Kimber says. She has spent so much time in the sun that her once-wan skin is now subtly golden, and her hair holds appealing beachy waves. She’s also, Grace notes, glowing from within. “They won’t blink an eye.”

“Well, that may be so,” Richie says. “But it’s against the rules.

Staff aren’t allowed to sleep with the guests, Kimber.”

“Let’s go talk to Lizbet,” Kimber says.

“We can’t,” Richie says. “I’ll get fired.”

Kimber laughs. “You work seven nights a week! You barely even go home! She’s not going to fire you, because she’ll never, ever find anyone to replace you. We’re consenting adults. We’ll ask permission. Lizbet will understand.”

Mmm, Grace thinks. This is a gamble. Lizbet has been known to stretch some rules, but to blatantly break one like a stick over her knee? Grace watches as Kimber leads Richie by the hand to the door of Lizbet’s office. They enter together, Richie hanging back slightly, like a delinquent child.

“Good morning, Lizbet,” Kimber says. “Just so you know, Richie and I are having a summer romance and some nights he’ll be sleeping with me in the suite. We know this is technically against the rules.”

“More than technically,” Lizbet says, and Grace thinks she’s going to nip it in the bud, but then Lizbet gazes at Richie and Kimber, and her face softens. “But at this point, you’re more family than guest…”

“Ahh! That’s so sweet of you to say.” Kimber beams. “That’s how the children and I feel too.”

Richie clears his throat. “I promise to put work first, as always.”

“Absolutely,” Lizbet says. “So no bothering Richie at night anymore, Kimber, okay? He can come to your suite when he’s off the clock. Richie, just please be discreet.”

“Of course,” Richie says.

Lizbet clears her throat. “I would never want anything inappropriate happening in, for example, the break room,” she says.

Mario’s Playlist for Lizbet

“Love Walks In”—Van Halen

“Strange Currencies”—R.E.M.

“Kiss”—Prince

“Next to You”—The Police “OMG”—Usher

“Girlfriend”—Matthew Sweet

“Can’t Feel My Face”—The Weeknd

“Dreaming”—Blondie

“In a Little While”—U2

“Killing Me Softly”—The Fugees “Soulshine”—Martin Deschamps “The Guy That Says Goodbye to You Is Out of His Mind”—Griffin

House “Nothin’ on You”—B.o.B.

“Loving Cup”—The Rolling Stones and Jack White

“Are You Gonna Be My Girl”—Jet

“Sister Golden Hair”—America

“Never Been in Love”—Cobra Starship

“Sleep Alright”—Gingersol

“Here Comes the Sun”—The Beatles

“Sexual Healing”—Marvin Gaye “Summertime”—Kenny Chesney

Lizbet feels like a bubble in a flute of champagne; her outlook is golden and effervescent. It’s as though all of her inspirational memes have come true at once.

First of all, the hotel is thriving. The article written by Wanda Marsh—an eight-year-old kid; you just can’t make this stuff up— started a chain reaction that led to stories about Grace Hadley’s ghost being printed in newspapers across the country! The phone rang nonstop and the website crashed from all the traffic. (Lizbet was tickled by this development, inconvenient though it was. The Hotel Nantucket had broken the internet!) Having a busy hotel feels joyous; it feels like a celebration. Every day when Lizbet walks into

the lobby, she’s entering the buzziest, most interesting room on the island.

Guests gather in the lobby for the percolated coffee (the richness of the coffee is mentioned time and again by guests on TravelTattler) and the almond croissants (ditto). They read the paper, start conversations, admire the James Ogilvy photograph, and watch Louie play chess (Louie shows up every morning at seven o’clock sharp, hair combed, glasses polished, little polo shirt buttoned to the top). The chaises by the pool are claimed by ten a.m.; the complimentary shuttles that run to the south shore’s beaches are full.

Lizbet has had the piano tuned and every night before his shift, Adam comes in and plays show tunes while the guests enjoy the wine and cheese hour; people make requests, sing along, and slip Adam tips. After dinner, many guests forgo the lines at the Chicken Box and the Gaslight and instead choose to sit on the front porch of the hotel. They light up the fireplace tables, buy s’mores kits from the front desk, and indulge in their gooiest marshmallow dreams.

Lizbet would like to believe the hotel has finally hit its stride, but she knows the reason for the renaissance is…the ghost. But once potential guests have their interest piqued by the story of Grace Hadley, they check out the website and see the driftwood-and-rope canopy beds with the dreamy white sheers, the lavish bouquets of lilies and Dutch hydrangeas, the slipper tubs, the adult pool with the wall of climbing roses, the free minibar, and the carved teak ceiling in the yoga studio, and they think: I’d like to stay here.

The influx of guests includes the poet laureate of New Mexico, a family of ranchers from Montana, a mushroom grower from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, a neurosurgeon from Nashville, the owners of

an NHL expansion team, a renowned hip-hop producer, a YouTube phenom, and a prominent editor from one of the Big Five publishing houses in New York City. This editor reads Lizbet’s Blue Book and says she’ll pitch it. She gets Lizbet’s e-mail address.

The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

Lizbet is so busy that hours and even days go by when she forgets to be on the lookout for Shelly Carpenter. Now is when Shelly Carpenter will show up; Lizbet is sure of it—and Lizbet is also sure that if Shelly slipped in under the radar in the past couple of weeks, she was met with exceptional service. Edie, Alessandra, Richie, Zeke, Adam, and Raoul are all at the top of their games.

The only thing going better than Lizbet’s professional life is her love life. Every day Lizbet goes to Mario’s cottage on her lunch hour.

They make love and then he cooks for her—composed salads with grilled shrimp and creamy chunks of avocado and a side of the homemade cheddar crackers that they used to serve at the Blue Bistro or, on a rare day of rain, clam chowder and giant popovers pulled straight from the funny little oven. Sometimes Lizbet brings a bathing suit and they swim off of Mario’s front porch, and then she showers and braids her damp hair. When Mario comes in to work at four o’clock, he swings by her office with a double espresso—he figured out that the way to her heart is caffeine—and he often brings her a little gift: a cluster of roses, a perfect quahog shell, a grape Popsicle. He makes her a playlist to replace her breakup playlist.

Lizbet closes her office door and they kiss like a couple of teenagers for a few stolen minutes before Lizbet straightens her skirt and Mario his chef’s jacket and they get back to work. When Mario gets home

from the bar at night, he sends Lizbet a text: I’m home, Heartbreaker.

Or Sweetest dreams, Heartbreaker. He has her in his phone as HB.

Breaker, not broken! she thinks. She’s healed. She’s so healed that when she hears that Christina left JJ, she feels only a pang of pity for JJ; she could have told him that relationship would end badly. She considers calling to see if he’s okay but decides it’s best not to. She’s consumed with her romance with JJ’s idol, the man whose picture she gazed at on the wall of JJ’s office for fifteen years. It’s the kind of crazy plot twist that happens only in novels and movies—but she’s living it. She can’t believe how happy she is.

But then.

Then a night comes when Mario doesn’t text when he gets home from work. Lizbet wakes up at three in the morning to use the bathroom, checks her phone, finds nothing. What? she thinks. She can’t fall back to sleep. The room is too hot; her mind is aswirl. Did something happen? Is Mario okay? Should Lizbet call him? Should she go to his cottage? She somehow knows she should do neither.

She wonders then why Mario never asks to spend the night at her cottage. She lies awake until the birds start to sing, thinking that this was why Mario said they should be careful. (What he’d meant, of course, was that she should be careful.) He was probably tired, she thinks. He forgot to text. So what?

The next day, Monday, Lizbet goes to the cottage for lunch as usual and everything is fine. The Blue Bar is closed on Tuesdays, and Mario asks if Lizbet can take the day or even just the afternoon off so they can spend it together.

It’s exactly what she’s craving, but the hotel has seventeen checkouts and seventeen check-ins, and Yolanda long ago

requested every Tuesday off and Lizbet needs to be around to manage Warren, the fitness instructor who fills in, because he can be a little ditzy.

On Tuesday evening, the Blue Bar has a softball game against the Garden Group. After Lizbet finishes work, she drives out the long stretch of Milestone Road to the Tom Nevers Field to catch the last couple of innings. It’s a close game even though the landscapers are young and in shape and play like real athletes. Mario is wearing an old Ramones T-shirt and his White Sox cap and when he gets up to bat with the bases loaded, he winks at Lizbet. She flushes, feeling like she felt when she was sixteen and watching her boyfriend, Danny LaMott, play for the Minnetonka Skippers football team.

Mario strikes out swinging and Lizbet is almost relieved that he didn’t hit a home run and win the game, because she realizes she’s dangerously close to falling in love with him.

Yolanda is up next. As Lizbet is wondering why Yolanda is on the Blue Bar softball team—and then if the hotel should field its own team, and then who would work if they did field a team—Yolanda wallops a pitch over the centerfielder’s head and everyone on base scores. Lizbet is on her feet cheering along with the rest of the crowd when Yolanda crosses the plate, jumps into Mario’s arms, and gives him a kiss on the lips. Suddenly, Lizbet feels not only like an outsider but also really freaking jealous.

From that moment on, Lizbet becomes hyperaware of Mario and Yolanda. Yolanda has always made frequent visits to the Blue Bar kitchen, and Lizbet assumed that Yolanda needed frequent snacks to fuel her exercise. Yolanda often walked past the desk holding an acai bowl or chia pudding, neither of which was on the menu. The

Wednesday after the softball game, Yolanda emerges from the Blue Bar holding a tiny pavlova on the flat of her palm like it’s a baby bird.

She shows it off to Lizbet and Edie. It’s filled with rose-scented pastry cream and topped with candied rose petals. “Is this not the most exquisite thing you’ve ever seen? Mario made it for me.”

“Did he?” Lizbet says.

Yolanda strolls away, taking a lusty bite of the pavlova; she can eat whatever she wants and still maintain that slender, supple yoga body, which is reason enough to envy her. Zeke joins Lizbet and Edie in watching Yolanda descend the stairs to the wellness center.

“You know why she spends so much time in the kitchen, right?” he says.

“Why?” Lizbet and Edie say together. Lizbet gets the distinct feeling the bubble she has been living in is about to pop.

Zeke arches his eyebrows and takes a breath to say—what? But then a large party enters the lobby and Zeke, Edie, and Lizbet snap into guest-service mode.

A couple of days later, Lizbet is at Mario’s cottage for lunch. It’s too hot to cook, so Mario slices up a ripe, juicy melon and serves it with burrata and some salty prosciutto. They go for a swim and shower together afterward. Lizbet is delirious with happiness, thinking, Yolanda who? Yolanda what? Poor Yolanda has been mistakenly cast as the villainess in Lizbet’s mind. She’s going to let the Yolanda thing go.

While Mario is in his bedroom getting dressed, his cell phone on the kitchen counter, right next to where Lizbet is winding the last strip of prosciutto around the last crescent of pale green melon, dings with a text. The screen says Yolo. The text is printed in the alert: Hey, can

you help me with a thing later? Followed by the winking-tongue-out emoji.

Lizbet feels the prosciutto repeat on her. She has to fight the urge to pick up the phone and check the text stream—Mario has no passcode, so she could easily do this, and then at least she’ll know what’s going on rather than stumbling around in a dark uncertainty— but at that moment, Mario calls out, “You getting ready to leave, HB?

It’s ten of two.”

Lizbet doesn’t respond. Mario pokes his head out of the bedroom

and says, “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Lizbet says. “You got a text.”

Mario takes his time ambling across the room. He scoops up his phone, checks the text. There’s no change in his expression; he just slips the phone into the pocket of his houndstooth pants and heads for the door. He always walks her out the creaky dock back to her car. Lizbet tries to keep her panic on a very short leash. Hey, can you help me with a thing later? What kind of thing? Lizbet wonders.

What kind of help? How much later? What about that emoji? It’s the lewd face, the wink and lolling tongue. It can only mean something naughty. And what’s up with “Yolo”? Has Lizbet ever heard anyone call Yolanda this? No. Lizbet is so consumed with these thoughts that she doesn’t speak, and when Mario squeezes her hand and asks again if everything is okay, she lies and says yes.

The following Tuesday, Lizbet can’t take off because the plumber is coming to fix a leak in the laundry room, and the water throughout

the hotel has to be shut off for ninety minutes. Lizbet needs to be there to field the inevitable complaints.

Mario goes to Nobadeer Beach with his staff and when he comes to pick Lizbet up for their dinner date that night—they’re going to the Pearl—he’s not only deeply tan, he’s a little drunk.

Lizbet teases him about it and he says, “I played beer die on the beach with some of the kids from the kitchen. It was a good day. And

man, Yolanda can really surf.”

“Oh,” Lizbet says. “Yolanda was there?”

“She was shredding like Alana Blanchard.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Lizbet snaps.

Mario doesn’t notice her tone because they have entered the tranquil garden setting of the Pearl chef’s table. It seats ten but Mario has reserved it for just the two of them, a lavish gesture. Lizbet has sat at this table before with JJ and some of the staff of the Deck and she’s eager to replace those memories. Mario pulls out her chair.

He’s here with her, she reminds herself. Not Yolanda. She orders a passion-fruit cosmo.

The magic of the chef’s table is that dishes just appear—lobster rangoons, tuna martinis with wasabi crème fraîche, the sixty-second steak topped with a quail egg, the wok-fried salt-and-pepper lobster.

Because Mario is, in this world, Super Mario, each course comes with a pitch-perfect wine pairing. Lizbet drinks a little more robustly than she probably should, but who can blame her? Yolanda made it clear when the hotel opened that she wanted Tuesdays off. Is that merely a coincidence? Yolanda is only twenty-nine years old, nearly ten years younger than Lizbet, nearly twenty years younger than Mario. She’s not only beautiful with a perfect body but she has the

kind of luminous personality that draws people in. Why wouldn’t Mario be attracted to Yolanda?

When dessert is set down—glistening chunks of fresh mango served with coconut sticky rice, Lizbet’s absolute favorite—she can only stare at it and think, Don’t say it. But she has held the topic at bay throughout dinner and the wine has done nothing but nourish her fears.

“You know what I was thinking?” Mario says. “You should add caramels to your s’mores kits. Take it up a notch.”

Don’t say it, she thinks.

“I don’t mean to overstep. I know the hotel amenities aren’t mine to tweak, but you have to admit, a caramel s’more? That sounds pretty damn good.”

“Mario?” she says. “Are you dating other people?”

Mario’s eyes jump up from the dessert plate to meet hers. “Why are you asking me that?”

She holds his gaze. Their relationship is still so new that she’s made a little dizzy by how attractive he is—those bedroom eyes, the sly smile—but she realizes she doesn’t know him well enough to tell if he’s been hiding something.

She shakes her head. “Never mind. I’m drunk, I think.”

“Okay,” Mario says. “I’ll get the check.” He turns around, the check appears; Lizbet tries to give him her credit card but he hands it back without saying anything. Is he upset? Has she ruined the evening?

There’s no way Yolanda’s myriad daily visits to the kitchen and her presence with the Blue Bar staff on their day off is a coincidence.

Something is going on. Hey, the text said, indicating a previous conversation, a context, can you help me with a thing later? The help

is sexual, the thing is Yolanda’s desire for him, and later is after service at the restaurant. The smutty emoji speaks for itself. Why doesn’t Mario ever ask to come to Lizbet’s cottage after work?

Because he’s dating Yolanda as well. He has Lizbet for lunch and Yolanda for a midnight snack. Why are you asking me that? That answer isn’t a firm no—it isn’t any kind of no. Lizbet wants to press him, but she’s not sure she’ll believe him if he says he’s not seeing anyone else and she won’t be able to bear it if he says yes, he is dating other people, because they never explicitly stated that they were exclusive.

Mario warned Lizbet to be careful but she dove headlong into a new relationship. As if her previous relationship hadn’t hurt her badly enough. She’s such an idiot. She hasn’t learned a thing. And she hasn’t changed.

Lizbet makes it out of the restaurant and down to Mario’s pickup.

Once they’re both sitting in the dark truck, he looks at her. “What’s going on, Heartbreaker?”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, though she loves the nickname.

“Do you want to come back to my place so we can talk this through? Or would you like me to take you home?”

Lizbet stares into her lap. Talk this through. That seems to indicate there’s something to talk through. Of course there is. All Lizbet can see when she closes her eyes is Yolanda jumping into Mario’s arms at home plate, Yolanda kissing him right on the lips.

And the blasted text: Hey, can you help me with a thing later? That hideous emoji face (it’s the emoji that bothers her the most). “Home, please.”

They drive in silence to Bear Street and Lizbet can feel the cab of the truck filling with his confusion, but he says nothing and she’s grateful. When they pull into her driveway, she knows she can still salvage things—invite him in, hope he stays the night. But instead she says, “I haven’t been careful. I let myself feel too much too soon.

And because of what happened with JJ, I need to take a step back.

It’s for my own mental well-being.”

Mario covers her hand with his. “I’m feeling a lot of things too, Lizbet.”

Lizbet shakes her head. “You’re not feeling the same things I’m feeling.”

Mario laughs. “You don’t know that. Why did you ask if I was seeing other people?”

Lizbet shrugs. She can’t say Yolanda’s name. “It’s just a sense I

get.”

“Your sense is wrong.”

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, Lizbet thinks. “I can’t get hurt again, Mario.”

“Lizbet, come on. How about a little faith?”

She glares out the windshield at her tiny shingled cottage, a cottage she bought with someone else. She had faith once upon a time. It didn’t work out.

Mario sighs. “Is it okay if I walk you to the door?”

She doesn’t answer but he does it anyway, giving Lizbet one last chance to change course. Why can’t she just treat this relationship like an easygoing summer romance with great sex, water views, and delicious meals? It started out that way…but then there were the roses he brought her in the Tom and Jerry jelly jar and the lunch

when he cried telling Lizbet about his cousin Hector who died of liver cancer. At another lunch, Lizbet was so tired that she skipped sex and skipped eating and just fell asleep on Mario’s bed, and she woke up an hour later to him kissing her eyelids, and he handed her a brown paper bag with a homemade pan bagnat for her to take back to the hotel. She thinks about how he called Christina “Tina” and how he never starts the car unless she has her seat belt fastened and how he holds her face when he kisses her, his fingertips always grazing her earlobes. All of these things accumulated and now, suddenly, Lizbet finds herself losing her grip on her good sense.

Something secret is going on with Yolanda; maybe it’s unspoken or unpursued, but there’s a fondness, a flirtation, and Lizbet is both jealous and disappointed in herself for being jealous. She has to get out. Now.

Mario gives her a kiss that is tender enough to make her change her mind—and she nearly relents. How can she give this up? But in the end, she pulls away. “Good night, Mario.”

“Good night, Heartbreaker,” he says.

July 25, 2022

From: Xavier Darling ([email protected])

To: Employees of the Hotel Nantucket

Good morning! I just want to let you know how encouraging it is that the world has discovered the hotel and that reservations are where they should be: at 100 percent occupancy. The reviews on

the TravelTattler website are a testament to everyone’s hard work and dedication. But this week, one staff member was mentioned above all others, and once again that was Alessandra Powell.

Keep up the good work, everyone!

XD

Every time Grace sees Alessandra enter a gentleman guest’s room at night, she steers clear. Alessandra is sleeping with the guests— Mr. Brownlee, Mr. Yamaguchi, Dr. Romano—in exchange for them writing TravelTattler reviews that specifically mention her, a ploy that has so far earned her four thousand dollars in bonus money.

However, when Grace sees Alessandra go up the side stairs with a man named Bone Williams, she gets a dreadful feeling. She’s annoyed by this—the last person she wants to rescue is the little witchy-witch Alessandra—but her foreboding is too strong to ignore.

When Bone Williams checked in, Grace saw flashing red lights and heard an obnoxious alarm sounding, but she chalked this up to toxic masculinity. (Bone, what a name, she thought. Another man referencing his penis!) He arrived on the first car ferry of the day, stormed into the lobby at half past nine, and asked Edie why the hell there was no valet parking and what was he supposed to do with his Corvette Stingray because he couldn’t just leave it on the street!

Edie was the model of calm patience. She told Mr. Williams that the hotel had only twelve parking spots and those were reserved for people staying in the suites. Bone then told Edie with a barely concealed snarl that he had tried to get a suite but they were all booked!

“You can’t penalize me for that!” Bone Williams was on the short side but very muscular (he probably “lifted”). Grace would put him at thirty-five or so, which felt young for his level of entitlement. “My room had better be ready.”

“It’s nine thirty,” Edie said. “Our guaranteed check-in time is three p.m. But we’ll do our best to get you in long before that, Mr.

Williams.”

“Three o’clock!” Bone shouted. “You have got to be”—he swallowed a word—“kidding me!”

“We have a complimentary continental breakfast, which you can enjoy on the porch, or I can have it delivered to you at the adult pool,” Edie said. “Or, if you’d like to stroll into town for breakfast, we highly recommend the Lemon Press on Main Street.”

“I’m not ‘strolling’ anywhere,” Bone said. “I want to check into my room, not wander the property like a hobo when I’ve paid good money to stay here. And I need a secure spot for my Stingray.”

“I’ll contact you as soon as your room has been cleaned,” Edie said. “Unfortunately, the guests in that room haven’t checked out yet.”

“Don’t give me that crap,” Bone said. “Let me speak to your manager.”

At this point, Edie smiled. “Certainly.” She turned to Alessandra.

“Mr. Williams, this is Alessandra Powell, our front-desk manager.”

Alessandra said, “You drive a Corvette Stingray? Wasn’t that the pace car for last year’s Indy Five Hundred?”

Bone’s demeanor instantly changed. “It was, yes.” He slid over to Alessandra’s position at the desk and drank in her appearance. Her hair was braided with a hydrangea-blue scarf woven through, and

she was wearing the white eyeliner and eye crystals that seemed to mesmerize every man she spoke to, including Bone Williams. “Hey, your name tag is upside down.” He did the unfunny shtick of craning his neck, trying to read it. “Alessandra.”

Grace gave a ghostly eye roll. Every single man Alessandra has checked in this summer has said exactly the same thing.

Alessandra jotted something down on a yellow sticky note and Grace read it over her shoulder: Yes, followed by a phone number.

“I’m fairly certain that the couple staying in suite two seventeen have come with bicycles only,” Alessandra says. “So let me see if you might be able to use their parking spot.”

“Oh, man,” Bone said. “That would be…amazing.” He plunked down his Centurion card and his driver’s license, which gave a Park

Avenue address in New York City.

Humph, Grace thought.

“I’m afraid Edie was correct about your check-in,” Alessandra said. “But a Bloody Mary by our pool is a very pleasant way to start your Nantucket vacation, and I can pop out in a little while to check on you.” Alessandra ran the Centurion card and matched the picture on his license to his face with a wink.

Bone softened like a butter statue in the sun (Grace had learned about butter statues from listening to Lizbet; it was a Minnesota thing). “I don’t care about the room. Just please tell me you’ll have dinner with me tomorrow night at Topper’s. I’ll take you up there in the Ray, but I can’t promise I’ll stick to the speed limit.”

Alessandra pressed the sticky note to Bone’s license before handing it back. “I’m afraid dating the guests is against our rules. I

wish I could. I love Topper’s, and who wouldn’t want a ride in that car?”

Bone read the sticky note and grinned. “My loss, then,” he said.

“Figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

Alessandra secured suite 217’s parking spot for Bone Williams’s Corvette, and Grace assumes they did go for dinner at Topper’s.

Now Grace watches Bone and Alessandra going up the side stairs— most likely, Alessandra wants to avoid Richie and Adam, who are working in the lobby. When they reach room 310, Bone shoves her

inside.

Grudgingly, Grace follows them.

Bone Williams is drunk. (Topper’s is almost ten miles away along the curving Polpis Road, and Grace shudders to think about him driving home in that sports car in this state; Alessandra, frankly, is lucky to be alive.) Bone pushes Alessandra onto the bed and reaches under her dress, a vintage Diane von Furstenberg wrap in a gorgeous print (Alessandra has impeccable taste, Grace has to give her that). Alessandra deftly knocks his hand away and says, “Hey, now, play nice.”

“You ordered a five-hundred-dollar Barolo at dinner,” he says.

“You owe me.”

“You asked me to pick the wine,” Alessandra says. “You told me you wanted something extraordinary. And, as I’m sure a man like you knows, extraordinary comes at a price. If I was on a budget, you should have told me.”

“Budget?” Bone says like it’s a dirty word. He pulls Alessandra across the bed toward him as she tries to scoot to the other side.

“You little whore.” He rips open the front of her dress and Grace winces but doesn’t intervene. Some people like rough sex; she has been haunting the hotel long enough to know this.

When Bone unzips his pants, Alessandra says, “No. I’m saying no. I’m leaving, Bone.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Bone says. He grabs Alessandra’s wrists and pins them over her head. Despite Alessandra’s thrashing —she isn’t screaming, so she must be worried about getting caught —Bone holds her tight. He reaches up her skirt. This is such a drastic situation that Grace knows lights and music and the shades won’t stop him. She coils all of her energy until it’s as dangerous as a packed snowball with an icy core and hits Bone Williams in the jaw.

Bone staggers back, giving Alessandra a chance to scramble off the bed. When he grabs her shin, she kicks him in the face, bloodying his nose. She runs out the door and down the hall to the third-floor storage closet, where she catches her breath and assesses the damage. She has bracelets of red fingerprints around her wrists; her dress is in shreds; she has lost a shoe. Alessandra strips down and puts on one of the hotel robes and a pair of slippers. Tears are streaming down her face, and when she wipes them away, she stares at her fingers as though she can’t figure out why they’re wet.

She peeks out the closet door. She wisely decides not to go past room 310, instead sneaking down the stairs at the opposite end of the building and, from there, out into the night.

You owe me one, missy, Grace thinks. She feels depleted. She’s getting too old for this.

But even so, Grace can’t resist the urge to mess with Bone Williams’s lights, play Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” at top volume, raise and lower his shades, and blow arctic air into the space where his heart is supposed to be.