The Hotel Nantucket — Chapter no 3

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.)

The hotel was sold again, this time to a young couple who set out to renovate it “on a shoestring.” Do such endeavors ever succeed?

This one didn’t, though the hotel operated, sluggishly, into the new millennium. It next changed hands in 2007, sold to a man without taste (Grace had peered over the interior decorator’s shoulder and saw plans for round beds and beveled mirrors). But the hotel never opened under this particular owner; he had invested with Bernard Madoff, and he lost everything.

After that, the hotel lay fallow and Grace again grew bored. During Hurricane José in 2017, she cracked a window, which caused a section of the roof to blow off and cartwheel down North Beach Street.

After the storm, the abandoned hotel’s doors could easily be pried open, and the lobby became the site of many a high-school party.

Grace received quite an education—she listened to the kids talk; she watched them pair off and head down the shadowy halls to find privacy in the guest rooms. She became a fan of their music (Dua Lipa, “Levitating”!). She learned about Instagram, Venmo, Tinder, Bumble, YouTube, TikTok—and the greatest platform of them all, Snapchat (the ghost!). Grace listened to debates about social justice and found herself growing impassioned. Every human being had dignity, even the maid/mistress kept in an attic closet!

Grace and the kids got along just fine until a girl named Esmé body-shamed a girl named Genevieve by posting a picture of Genevieve in her underwear in the gymnasium locker room. The next time Esmé entered the hotel, Grace’s face appeared on the screen of her cell phone—her hair was still curly and dark under her

white frilled cap, but her eyes were two infinite black holes, and when she opened her mouth, fire came out.

Esmé fainted dead away. When she came to, she swore to everyone that she’d seen a zombie on her phone; some real-life Twilight sh*t, she posted, a f**king ghost! A few kids googled Hotel Nantucket and haunted. But nothing came up; the digital records of the Nantucket Standard went back only to 1945. To get more information they would have to delve into the physical archives. The mere word evoked piles of dusty papers and more effort than they wanted to invest.

Grace had lost a chance to be recognized. And not only that, but the high-school parties came to an end and she was alone again.

Grace is, as the kids liked to say, hyped that a gentleman of tremendous wealth has bought the hotel and hired competent (and speedy) contractors and a decorator with impeccable taste. Grace zips around the first three floors trying to remain unobtrusive, though sometimes when she enters a room, an occupant will shiver and ask, “Did it just get cold in here?”

Grace is visible to certain people; she thinks of them as “the supernaturally sensitive.” They can see Grace reflected in mirrors and glass, but most people see nothing at all. Grace can also pull off spooky-but-harmless manipulations. If she were to summon all her energy and strike out, she could probably hurt someone. (She fantasizes, of course, about walloping Dahlia Benedict, once on her own behalf and once for the cat, Mittens.)

In room 101, Grace catches a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror that has just been mounted to the closet door and thinks, No, this won’t do. Her long dove-gray dress and yellowing pinafore make her look like an extra in a Merchant Ivory film. She solves the problem of her dated outfit when she happens across an open box of the hotel’s new bathrobes. They’re white waffled cotton lined in a soft, absorbent terry cloth. Grace slips off her dress—naked, she still looks like a nineteen-year-old, full in both the chest and buttocks; she might even be considered “a dime”—and tries on the robe. It’s as warm and delicious as a hug—and it has pockets! Grace decides to keep it. If someone caught sight of her in a mirror, what would that person see? Maybe a ghost wearing a bathrobe. Or maybe just a levitating robe wrapped around an invisible body.

Terrifying!

Grace is delighted by the thought.

When the new general manager, Lizbet Keaton, walks through the restored front doors of the hotel, holding a milk crate full of belongings, Grace thinks, Finally, a woman in charge! Lizbet is looking fit and sporty in yoga pants, a windbreaker, and a Minnesota Twins baseball cap that she wears over her blond braids. Although her face is as wholesome as a child’s—she wears no makeup— Grace would place her age somewhere between thirty-five and forty.

Lizbet sets her crate on the new front desk and turns around, arms raised, as if to embrace the lobby. Grace sees bright sparks of grit and resolution flying off her. She is a person determined to

succeed where so many others have failed—and Grace can’t help but fall a little in love with her.

Hey there, Lizbet, Grace thinks. I’m Grace. Welcome to the Hotel Nantucket.