She meant Octavia and Neves. They speak Portuguese and wear thick gold crosses around their necks. Ms. English refers to Octavia and Neves as the A-team and Chad and Bibi as the B-team, which is probably not a random designation. This might be what fuels Bibi’s dislike of the other girls (Chad doesn’t care; he knows he belongs on the B-team), although Bibi’s vitriol is so intense that Chad wonders if the sisters are mean to Bibi on the ferry. (He can’t imagine this.) By her own admission, Bibi hates people. It’s the one thing, she says, that brings her joy.
Chad announces that he’ll clean the bathroom and deal with the floral bouquets if Bibi wants to vacuum and get started on the bed. She grunts in the affirmative, though Chad was hoping for a thank-you, since he’s taking the more onerous tasks. The flowers are a surprisingly tedious job—he has to wipe up the blue hydrangea dust, trim the stamens of the lilies because pollen stains everything a bloody rust color, and change the smelly brown water in the vase. But the flowers are a picnic compared to cleaning the bathroom. In the two weeks that Chad has been working at the hotel, he’s dealt with bloody pads and tampons in the trash (he appreciates anew that he and his sister never had to share a bathroom), and he cleaned up the puke of some bachelor-party dude who didn’t make it anywhere close to the toilet bowl. Only slightly less repulsive are the globs of toothpaste and stray hairs he has to scrub from the sink.
By dealing with the flowers and the bathroom, he achieves the dual purpose of punishing himself and sucking up to Bibi. Her approval matters, even though she’s not pretty and not sophisticated and not particularly well educated; despite her claim that she is “meant for the finer things,” everything about her demeanor suggests otherwise. She’s a twenty-one-year-old single mother (she hasn’t mentioned the father of the baby and Chad isn’t brave enough to ask), and Chad is both in awe of and afraid of her.
When Chad finishes scrubbing the shower and the tub—he does the tub conscientiously even though it’s clear it hasn’t been used—he pokes his head into the bedroom. The bed has been stripped and remade, the pillows artfully arranged; Bibi always does a really good job with the beds. Chad doesn’t see Bibi, but instead of calling her name, he tiptoes around. He finds her in the walk-in closet, sifting through a suitcase. She holds up a belt first, then an amethyst silk negligée. He notices she still has the tennis bracelet on her wrist.
“Bibi?” he says.
She jumps. “Jeez, Long Shot, you scared me. What the hell?”
“What are you doing?” he asks. “You know we’re not supposed to go through personal stuff. And you need to take that bracelet off.”
“Who are you, the cleaning police?”
“I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Why would I get in trouble? I’m just looking around. I’m not going to take anything. You probably think I’m a thief because I’m not rich like you, Mr. Eel Point Road. Mr. Range Rover.”
Chad blinks. He’s not sure how Bibi discovered what he drives or where he lives. He’s been careful to present himself as a normal-ish summer kid. He parks way up on Cliff Road and told her only that he lived on a “dirt road, out of town.”
“I don’t think you’re a thief, Bibi,” he says. He’s tempted in that moment to offer her part of this week’s paycheck because he knows she has to buy things like diapers and formula, but he’s afraid she’ll find it patronizing. “Do you want me to do the vacuuming?”
The next morning, Ms. English sends Octavia and Neves to clean suite 114—Chad is grateful they’re doing it, because being around Doug the pit bull makes him uncomfortable—but instead of giving Chad and Bibi a roster of rooms and sending them out too, Ms. English closes her office door and turns to them.
“The guests in room one oh five reported something missing,” she says. “A black-and-gold Fendi scarf.”
Chad closes his eyes. Room 105 was the last room they cleaned yesterday; it was a checkout. In room 105, Bibi had been suspiciously on task and Chad thought this was because the guests had left a forty-dollar tip, which Chad told Bibi she could take. Bibi had asked if he wanted to go down to the service kitchen to replenish the items that went in the minibar—the wine, the Cisco beers, the bluefish paté and crackers—which was the best job of all. The service kitchen was adjacent to the Blue Bar kitchen, where Beatriz was usually pulling a tray out of the oven—gougères or homemade pigs in a blanket or the pretzel bread—and she always offered some of whatever it was to the cleaning staff. Yesterday afternoon, Chad hit the jackpot because Beatriz was prepping lobster-roll sliders on homemade milk buns. Chad had eaten lobster growing up the way other kids ate peanut butter and jelly but he had never eaten anything like this slider before. The outside of the milk bun was crisply toasted while the inside was fragrant and pillowy; the lobster meat had been mixed with lemon zest, herbs, crunchy pieces of celery, and just enough tangy mayo. The lobster slider was so…elevated that Chad went back to room 105 feeling inspired. He wanted to do his job as well as Beatriz did hers. He wanted to clean the hell out of room 105!
But when he returned, the room was finished and Bibi was gone. Chad peered out the window to see Bibi heading down North Beach Street toward the ferry with her backpack slung over her shoulder. He was sorry she’d left—he’d brought a slider up for her—but also relieved that he’d survived another day with her.
“Did either of you see a black-and-gold scarf?” Ms. English asks. “Because Mrs. Daley is sure she left one behind. She sent a picture of herself wearing it at Ventuno and she says it’s not in her luggage. Did you find it and put it in the lost and found?” Ms. English pauses. “Did you perhaps mean to put it in the lost and found and forget to?”
She’s giving Bibi a way out, Chad thinks. Because Bibi definitely lifted that scarf.
“I didn’t see any scarves,” Bibi says in a clear, steady voice that sounds so genuine, Chad believes her. “Did you, Long Shot?”
“No,” he says. “And we checked all the drawers like we were supposed to.”
“Yes, I double-checked as well,” Ms. English says. She studies their faces. Ms. English is a handsome woman who has never been anything but nice to Chad; even when she made him fold a hand towel for the sixtieth time, he felt like she was doing it for his own good. She has high standards and a dignity that Chad respects. He does not want to disappoint her.
“Did you look in the laundry?” Bibi asks. “Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Daley were using the scarf in bed—you know, to tie each other up—and it got mixed in with the sheets.”
“Of course I’ve checked the laundry,” Ms. English says. She clears her throat. “I understand how tempting it is when you see something you covet and you think the guest has so many things that she might not miss something like a scarf…”
“It sounds like you’re accusing us of taking it,” Bibi says. “Which is not only insulting, it’s absurd. Chadwick has family money, plus a dude would have no use for a woman’s scarf. And I would never take it, because scarves like that are for boomers. Sorry, for older women. Plus I wouldn’t be able to tell a Fendi scarf from a Walmart scarf.”
That’s a lie, Chad thinks. Bibi loves designer stuff. She makes a game of identifying the designers of bags, belts, and shoes without checking the labels—Chloé, Balenciaga, Louboutin—and she’s always right.
Bibi says, “Besides, I would never steal from a guest. I have a baby at home. I’m a mother.” She pauses. “Did you ask Octavia and Neves if they’ve seen it?”
Chad lowers his gaze to the floor. He can’t believe she’s going there.
“The scarf was missing from room one oh five,” Ms. English says. “That was your room to clean.”
“But they each have a master key,” Bibi says. “It’s not impossible that they took it and tried to make it look like it was us. They have some kind of weird grudge against me that you should be aware of.”
Ms. English is quiet. Chad is quiet. Bibi isn’t speaking but there’s a lot of disruption emanating from her. Or maybe Chad is projecting.
“I’ll let Mrs. Daley know that we haven’t found it but that we’ll keep looking,” Ms. English says. “Maybe it’s in Mr. Daley’s luggage or perhaps she took it off while she was out and left it somewhere. But I do hope nothing else goes missing.”