Page 54 of The Hotel Nantucket
“Why can’t we work together?” Adam says. “Zeke can work nights.”
“You know why we can’t work together,” Raoul says. “George said he’d recommend to any future employer that we be scheduled opposite each other.”
“Well, I’m lonely. I made dinner plans with Alessandra three times and she ditched me all three,” Adam says.Surprise, surprise,Grace thinks. There was Mr. Brownlee in 309, Mr. Yamaguchi in suite 215, and Dr. Romano in room 107. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too, boo.”
Suddenly, Adam and Raoul embrace and start kissing. Grace is delighted the fight is over and the making up has begun. She heads over to the jukebox and plays “Take My Breath Away,” by Berlin, and then she lights up the pinball machine.
The gentlemen don’t even seem to notice.
Could Kimber Marsh be any more obvious?Grace wonders. She comes down to the lobby—againat quarter past one in the morning (coincidentally after Adam has left and the Blue Bar has closed),againwearing her shorty pajamas, cardigan, and the hotel slippers.
“Richie?” Kimber whispers—but Richie isn’t at his usual post out front. Richie, Grace sees, is in Lizbet’s office with the door not only closed but locked. He’s on his cell phone (forbidden at work unless you need it to conduct hotel business), having a terse conversation. What can Grace think but that he’s speaking to his ex-wife? Who else would he be talking to at one fifteen in the morning? Then Grace sees what Richie has on the desk in front of him and she hears what he’s saying into the phone.
Oh, dear,she thinks. This is what he’s up to. What a disappointment.
Grace blows the paperwork off the desk in an attempt to be disruptive but Richie doesn’t seem to care. Then she tries to mess with the phone connection but it’s too late, the conversation is over. When Richie hangs up, he slumps back in his chair and grabs his head.
There’s a tap on the office door. “Richie?”
The inevitable has happened, Grace thinks. Kimber has grown so comfortable at the hotel that she has crossed the border between guest and staff. She’sbehindthe front desk—and now she’s knocking on the office door. If it weren’t locked, Grace suspects she would have marched right in and caught Richie at his odious business.
Richie jumps to his feet, and Lizbet’s desk chair shoots back into the wall. Richie stuffs the paperwork into his pants pocket. He inhales a breath and exhales with a smile. He once again looks like the charming, affable dad everyone thinks he is. “Kimber!” he says, opening the door. “What’s up?”
“Can’t sleep,” Kimber says. She seems to realize she’s crossed some kind of invisible line because she scurries out from behind the desk. She waves what looks like a piece of notebook paper. “Also, I wanted to show you something.”
What Kimber wants to show Richie at one fifteen in the morning is an article Wanda wrote entitled “The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel.”
Richie reads aloud: “‘The Hotel Nantucket has been plaqued’—is this supposed to beplagued?—‘with difficulties for nearly a century. Girl sleuth Wanda Marsh has uncovered the reason. There’s aghostwho inhabits the hotel’s fourth-floor storage closet.’” Richie stops. “Did Wanda write this herself?”
“Edie helped her a little.”
“‘The ghost is the spirit of Grace Hadley, a chambermaid who died in a fire in the summer of 1922 in that fourth-floor closet.’” Richie looks up. “Is this true?”
“Wanda insisted we go to the Atheneum to look it up. They had old issues of theNantucket Standardon microfilm.”
“Your kids are incredible,” Richie says. “Louie is a chess prodigy and Wanda is a burgeoning detective and investigative reporter. My three spend all their time playing Fortnite and watching YouTube.”
“Wanda told me that she asked the ghost to knock, and the ghost did.”
“Well, that’s exciting,” Richie says. He subtly plucks his shirt away from his body. His extracurricular activity in the back office has made him perspire.
“The thing is, she really believes it,” Kimber says. “Shall we go up and check out the fourth-floor storage closet?”
Richie frowns. “I shouldn’t leave the desk.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“I can’t afford to lose my job,” Richie says.
“I’m beginning to think you don’t like me,” Kimber says. “You practically ran away from me the other night.”
“I do like you,” Richie says. He reaches across the desk for Kimber’s hand. Is he being patronizing? Grace wonders. “I have a lot going on in my personal life right now.”
“You can tell me if you’re not attracted to me,” Kimber says. “I’ll survive.”
Richie lets go of Kimber’s hand—he’snotattracted to her, apparently—but then he comes out from behind the desk. “I’m not the person you think I am,” he says. “I know I put on a good act of being nice-guy Richie—”
