On the morning of April 12, Lizbet is, unfortunately, back to fighting the old—specifically, she’s remembering how it was Christina who called her to explain away the sexting (Those texts are nothing, Libby, JJ and I were only kidding around)—when she gets a message from Xavier Darling; he’s requesting a meeting. It’s six thirty a.m.—Xavier, in England, is oblivious to the time difference—and Lizbet sighs. She was planning to get on the Peloton. But she has agreed to be at Xavier’s beck and call, so she pulls a blouse on over her workout tank, drapes her braids over her shoulders, and fluffs her bangs.
Join meeting with video.
“Good morning, Elizabeth.” (Xavier refuses to call her Lizbet, even though she has asked him to twice, telling him that the only person who called her Elizabeth was her late grandmother.) Behind Xavier, Lizbet sees Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, a view so iconically London, it might as well be a Zoom background.
“Good morning, sir.” Lizbet tries not to worry about his stern tone of voice, though she briefly wonders if today is the day the hammer drops and the hopes she has invested in the hotel will collapse, the whole thing a belated April Fools’ joke.
“I’m calling to shed some light on things that might have been unclear.”
Lizbet steels herself. What is Xavier going to tell her?
“You’ve never asked me—in fact, no one has asked me—why I bought this hotel. After all, I live in London and I’ve never visited Nantucket.” He pauses. “Have you wondered about this?”
Lizbet has, in fact, wondered, but she chalked it up to her understanding of the very wealthy: They buy things because they can.
“I bought this particular hotel,” Xavier says, “because I’m trying to impress two women.”
Whoa! Lizbet pinches her thigh to keep from gasping. This is probably the only answer worth sacrificing her thirty-minute hip-hop ride with Alex Toussaint for.
“Two women?” Lizbet says. She checks her image on her laptop screen; she’s maintaining a sort of straight face. Lizbet has, naturally, googled Xavier Darling. According to an article in the Times (London), he never married and has no children. The internet showed pictures of him at the Royal Ascot and the Cartier Queen’s Cup with young, combatively beautiful women on his arm, but never the same one twice. Who are the lucky two, and will they both be coming to Nantucket? Because that will get the island talking! She would love to remark that buying each woman a private plane or a minor van Gogh might have been cheaper.
“Yes,” Xavier says. “I’m going to share with you now who one of the women is.”
“Wonderful, sir.”
“One of the women I’m trying to impress is Shelly Carpenter.”
Shelly Carpenter, Lizbet thinks. Of course.
“Do you know who Shelly Carpenter is?” Xavier asks.
“‘Stay well, friends,’” Lizbet quotes. “‘And do good.’”
“Precisely,” Xavier says. “Elizabeth, I want a five-key review from Hotel Confidential.”
Again, Lizbet checks her image. Does she look incredulous? Yes—yes, she does. Along with eighteen million other people, Lizbet follows Shelly Carpenter on Instagram. Her account @hotelconfidentialbySC has become a national obsession. Shelly Carpenter posts at noon eastern time on the last Friday of every month—a ten-picture carousel of each property (she’s rumored to take these photos with her iPhone)—and the link in her bio takes you to her blog Hotel Confidential, where she awards properties anywhere from one to five keys. The secret to her success is her witty, brilliant writing, her razor-sharp intelligence, and her refined sense of what works and what doesn’t where hotels are concerned—but there’s also mystery involved. Nobody knows who she is. The internet agrees on only one thing: Shelly Carpenter is a pseudonym.
Whatever her real name is, she travels the globe, reviewing the Hampton Inn in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, with the same critical eye that she does the Belmond Cap Juluca in Anguilla. (Both received four keys out of five.) It’s well known that Shelly has never given a five-key review. She claims to be on a quest for that elusive five-key property, but Lizbet thinks this is a feint. Shelly will never give a five-key review; withholding it is her currency.
“Well, sir, we’ll try our best,” Lizbet says.
“That’s not going to cut it, Elizabeth,” Xavier says. “We are going to do what it takes to be the only hotel in the world that woman deems worthy of the fifth key. We are going to leave no doubt in her mind. Am I understood?”
“Yes, sir, you’re understood.”
“So we will get five keys from Hotel Confidential by summer’s end?”
A competitive spirit that Lizbet hasn’t felt since she raced her brothers swimming across Serpent Lake in Crosby, Minnesota, surfaces.
Building the new! she thinks. In that moment, Lizbet believes she can achieve the (highly) improbable—no matter what obstacles she encounters.
“We will get the fifth key,” she says.
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.