“I…did,” Alessandra says. She was so happy to have the Chungs gone (Duffy was “triggered”—Alessandra still hasn’t processed that one; if either of them should have been triggered, it was Alessandra, and what was that crack about the nice normal home?) that she completely spaced on the fact that she would have to explain the comped night. The desk staff are allowed to comp a night if something goes wrong—if guests have an unusually bad experience or if they can’t check in until after five o’clock—but staffers are not allowed to do what Alessandra did and comp at will. Every single comp must be run past Lizbet. Still, Alessandra had expected Richie to let it slide. He has never said a word about her taking five or ten bucks every few days from petty cash to pay for her lunch, though it’s possible he doesn’t know she does this. “Is it really that big of a deal?”
“It was a six-hundred-and-forty-five-dollar room rate,” Richie says. “That needs to be paid. By you. You made a unilateral decision to comp the room.”
“Okay?” Alessandra says. “I’ll point out that Edie upgraded the Marsh family for the summer without anyone’s permission. That adds up to a lot more lost revenue than six hundred and forty-five dollars, and no one is making her pay.”
Both Richie and Edie are silent.
Richie huffs. “Fine. I’ll let this go but don’t do it again, either of you.” He disappears back into Lizbet’s office.
Alessandra turns to Edie. “I should have just gotten them a toaster,” she says.
Edie gives Alessandra a withering look.
“I’m sorry, Edie,” Alessandra says. She pauses. “Is it a desk thing to throw your helpful, kind coworker under the bus?”
“Your desk thing,” Edie says, and Alessandra is more relieved than she can explain when Edie lets the tiniest smile slip.
15. Behind Closed Doors
Adam drags Raoul into the break room, and Grace follows them because it looks like trouble!
“We need to speak to Lizbet about the schedule,” Adam says. “It’s not fair that she switched our shifts. You need to talk to her. She likes you better.”
“I don’t want to talk to her,” Raoul says. “Because, believe it or not, I’m ready to stop working nights. I did it for an entire month. Now it’s your turn.”
“You just want to spend all day with Zeke,” Adam says.
Raoul blinks. “Or you do, and that’s why you’re kerking.”
“I hope you’re not accusing me of anything,” Adam says. “Because I don’t need to remind you which one of us was caught making out with that busboy at Nikki Beach.”
“That was before we were even together,” Raoul says. “I’ve been faithful since our first date. And working with Zeke isn’t going to make me unfaithful. If you think that, then you have trust issues.”
“I have trust issues?”
“Do you have a thing for Zeke, Adam?”
At that moment the door to the break room swings open and Zeke steps in. “Adam, you’re on tonight? I’ve gotta bounce.”
“I’ll be right there,” Adam says. “Just chatting with my husband whom I never see.”
Zeke looks from Adam to Raoul and must sense something because he steps back out and closes the door.
“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—again at quarter past one in the morning (coincidentally after Adam has left and the Blue Bar has closed), again wearing 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’s behind the 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 be plagued?—‘with difficulties for nearly a century. Girl sleuth Wanda Marsh has uncovered the reason. There’s a ghost who 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 the Nantucket Standard on 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’s not attracted 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—”
Kimber puts a finger to his lips. “I’m probably not the person you think I am either,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s summertime and we’re on an island thirty miles out to sea.”
Richie gazes at Kimber. He seems to be deliberating, and Grace, quite frankly, is on the edge of her seat. Finally, Richie puts his arms around Kimber and pulls her close. Kimber raises her face, Richie takes his glasses off and sets them on the desk—a nice touch, Grace thinks; things are about to get steamy—and kisses her.
Grace cheers silently, even though she fears the relationship won’t last. But who doesn’t love a little summer romance? She just hopes they don’t forget about that article. If they solve her murder case, she’ll finally be able to get some much needed rest. It has been an exhausting century.