“We have a complimentary continental breakfast, which you can enjoy on the porch, or I can have it delivered to you at the adult pool,” Edie said. “Or, if you’d like to stroll into town for breakfast, we highly recommend the Lemon Press on Main Street.”
“I’m not ‘strolling’ anywhere,” Bone said. “I want to check into my room, not wander the property like a hobo when I’ve paid good money to stay here. And I need a secure spot for my Stingray.”
“I’ll contact you as soon as your room has been cleaned,” Edie said. “Unfortunately, the guests in that room haven’t checked out yet.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” Bone said. “Let me speak to your manager.”
At this point, Edie smiled. “Certainly.” She turned to Alessandra. “Mr. Williams, this is Alessandra Powell, our front-desk manager.”
Alessandra said, “You drive a Corvette Stingray? Wasn’t that the pace car for last year’s Indy Five Hundred?”
Bone’s demeanor instantly changed. “It was, yes.” He slid over to Alessandra’s position at the desk and drank in her appearance. Her hair was braided with a hydrangea-blue scarf woven through, and she was wearing the white eyeliner and eye crystals that seemed to mesmerize every man she spoke to, including Bone Williams. “Hey, your name tag is upside down.” He did the unfunny shtick of craning his neck, trying to read it. “Alessandra.”
Grace gave a ghostly eye roll. Every single man Alessandra has checked in this summer has said exactly the same thing.
Alessandra jotted something down on a yellow sticky note and Grace read it over her shoulder: Yes, followed by a phone number.
“I’m fairly certain that the couple staying in suite two seventeen have come with bicycles only,” Alessandra says. “So let me see if you might be able to use their parking spot.”
“Oh, man,” Bone said. “That would be…amazing.” He plunked down his Centurion card and his driver’s license, which gave a Park Avenue address in New York City.
Humph, Grace thought.
“I’m afraid Edie was correct about your check-in,” Alessandra said. “But a Bloody Mary by our pool is a very pleasant way to start your Nantucket vacation, and I can pop out in a little while to check on you.” Alessandra ran the Centurion card and matched the picture on his license to his face with a wink.
Bone softened like a butter statue in the sun (Grace had learned about butter statues from listening to Lizbet; it was a Minnesota thing). “I don’t care about the room. Just please tell me you’ll have dinner with me tomorrow night at Topper’s. I’ll take you up there in the Ray, but I can’t promise I’ll stick to the speed limit.”
Alessandra pressed the sticky note to Bone’s license before handing it back. “I’m afraid dating the guests is against our rules. I wish I could. I love Topper’s, and who wouldn’t want a ride in that car?”
Bone read the sticky note and grinned. “My loss, then,” he said. “Figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
Alessandra secured suite 217’s parking spot for Bone Williams’s Corvette, and Grace assumes they did go for dinner at Topper’s. Now Grace watches Bone and Alessandra going up the side stairs—most likely, Alessandra wants to avoid Richie and Adam, who are working in the lobby. When they reach room 310, Bone shoves her inside.
Grudgingly, Grace follows them.
Bone Williams is drunk. (Topper’s is almost ten miles away along the curving Polpis Road, and Grace shudders to think about him driving home in that sports car in this state; Alessandra, frankly, is lucky to be alive.) Bone pushes Alessandra onto the bed and reaches under her dress, a vintage Diane von Furstenberg wrap in a gorgeous print (Alessandra has impeccable taste, Grace has to give her that). Alessandra deftly knocks his hand away and says, “Hey, now, play nice.”
“You ordered a five-hundred-dollar Barolo at dinner,” he says. “You owe me.”
“You asked me to pick the wine,” Alessandra says. “You told me you wanted something extraordinary. And, as I’m sure a man like you knows, extraordinary comes at a price. If I was on a budget, you should have told me.”
“Budget?” Bone says like it’s a dirty word. He pulls Alessandra across the bed toward him as she tries to scoot to the other side. “You little whore.” He rips open the front of her dress and Grace winces but doesn’t intervene. Some people like rough sex; she has been haunting the hotel long enough to know this.
When Bone unzips his pants, Alessandra says, “No. I’m saying no. I’m leaving, Bone.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Bone says. He grabs Alessandra’s wrists and pins them over her head. Despite Alessandra’s thrashing—she isn’t screaming, so she must be worried about getting caught—Bone holds her tight. He reaches up her skirt. This is such a drastic situation that Grace knows lights and music and the shades won’t stop him. She coils all of her energy until it’s as dangerous as a packed snowball with an icy core and hits Bone Williams in the jaw. Bone staggers back, giving Alessandra a chance to scramble off the bed. When he grabs her shin, she kicks him in the face, bloodying his nose. She runs out the door and down the hall to the third-floor storage closet, where she catches her breath and assesses the damage. She has bracelets of red fingerprints around her wrists; her dress is in shreds; she has lost a shoe. Alessandra strips down and puts on one of the hotel robes and a pair of slippers. Tears are streaming down her face, and when she wipes them away, she stares at her fingers as though she can’t figure out why they’re wet.
She peeks out the closet door. She wisely decides not to go past room 310, instead sneaking down the stairs at the opposite end of the building and, from there, out into the night.
You owe me one, missy, Grace thinks. She feels depleted. She’s getting too old for this.
But even so, Grace can’t resist the urge to mess with Bone Williams’s lights, play Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” at top volume, raise and lower his shades, and blow arctic air into the space where his heart is supposed to be.
18. Last Friday of the Month: July
The first shot of Shelly Carpenter’s July Instagram post is of a mannequin bust sitting on an antique trunk in slanting rays of sunlight—and Lizbet wonders if maybe she has the wrong account. But then she double-checks the header and reads the caption. Ahh, she thinks. She clicks on the link in the bio just as Adam (who has come to the hotel specifically so he can dish with them) and Edie step into her office.
Together, they read.
Hotel Confidential by Shelly Carpenter
July 29, 2022
Sea Castle Bed-and-Breakfast, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts—3 KEYS
Hello again, friends!
There are bed-and-breakfast people…and then there is yours truly. However, in the spirit of reviewing every kind of lodging, I bring to you my thoughts on the Sea Castle B and B in the bustling hamlet of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, on storied old Cape Cod.
Sea Castle is a Victorian mansion that was restored by its owners to meticulous period detail in 2015. It has eight guest rooms and a first-floor living-and-dining common area that offers a breakfast of champions each morning between eight and nine.
My room, on the second floor, had a king-size canopy bed that was so high off the ground, an actual wooden step was provided. There were, in my humble opinion, too many layers of bed linens for summertime—a top sheet, a velveteen blanket, a duvet, and a heavy brocade coverlet. The other furnishings were straight out of Grandmother’s house in a fairy tale—an Eastlake dresser covered with a faintly stained doily, a rocking chair, and a trunk at the foot of the bed. When I opened the trunk, I found a bald, featureless bust that startled me so badly, I dropped the lid of the trunk and smashed a finger. What was a bust doing in the trunk of my room? When I asked the proprietress, she told me the original owner of the house had been a milliner, and that was her hatmaker’s dummy.
This, friends, is my number-one issue with a B and B: you’re living in someone else’s home.