Ro’s days were filled with monotony: get up, go to school, go to work, fit in homework, drop off to sleep. Repeat. Although Ro wasn’t quite sure what she was accomplishing, she knew it was something, because within a few days the hatch of her car was filled with two boxes of paper. She didn’t know how to decipher what she had, but at least she had it. Pearl and Tomas were more than happy to have help. Then, out of nowhere, it appeared, as if Ellen were guiding with a celestial hand: Gary the Ghoul needed a few days off for his grandfather’s funeral back east. Tomas proudly presented Ro as a competent substitute to Elaine—a woman in her thirties, short, squat, with a round face, dark eyes, and short dark hair. The boss was confused.
“Tomas . . .” Her voice was stern. “You have to be trained to work the desk.”
Tomas squirmed. Ro stepped in. “So Tomas will train me.”
“It takes a while.”
“Look, Elaine, I don’t know how to use your specific programs,” Ro said, “but I’ve done this thousands of times at other hotels. I’m sure Tomas can give me a quick tutorial and I’ll pick it up. And I get off at eleven anyway. I mean, why not?”
“Because you don’t know what you’re doing and you could mess things up.”
“It’s for two nights. Give me a little credit.” Ro shifted her weight from one hip to the other. “I know you’re shorthanded on the weekends. I’d like you to see how competent I am. That way, maybe you’ll consider hiring me as a part-time weekend person.”
“I need you at the lounge.” She looked Ro up and down. “You’ve done a good job there.”
“Because I’m smart.” Ro was bordering on begging. “No one wants to work the graveyard. Give me a chance. I’m already on the payroll.”
Tomas said, “She’s smart. She’ll pick it up. And it’s only two days.”
Elaine relented. “One day at a time. If you make it through the first night to my satisfaction, I’ll let you do the second night.”
She was appreciative but not overly so. “Great.”
After working six hours in the lounge, Ro changed into an official Jackson Lodge uniform and slipped behind the front desk, relieving Pearl of her duties. “Busy?”
“Surprisingly so,” Pearl said. “I’m sure at two in the morning it’ll be dead. You know we have a bell, so you don’t have to stand behind the desk the whole time.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s right. Thanks. I think I’ll be visible for a while. In the meantime, do you have any work you want me to do?”
“Uh, thanks. If you could type in today’s reservations, it would help me a lot. And you know how to program wake-up calls?”
“Yes.”
“Gary usually does follow-ups fifteen minutes later.”
“I can do that.”
“You have one at four thirty, and two at five, two at six, and one at seven thirty.”
“Not a problem.”
She eyed Ro with suspicion. “I don’t know why . . . I keep thinking you’re after something.”
“How about money?”
“Fair enough.” Pearl gathered up her bag. Then she wrote down some numbers. “Call if you need anything. It’s better to ask than to mess up. Then I have to spend time redoing everything.”
“I understand. Don’t worry. I can do this, Pearl.”
“I have a feeling you can do lots of things.”
Ro nodded. “I do have my strong points.”
The need for sleep was overwhelming, but she had to muscle through it. It was the chance of a lifetime—being alone and uninterrupted. Her parents called constantly. She had lied and told them that her job had always been a desk assignment. They didn’t like her working, but put up with it to avoid drama. But with this new assignment—overnight in a hotel—Ro was pushing it. Even after she told them it was temporary, her dad wanted to come down. Eventually she got them to back off, but both of them were rightly concerned. When they called her, Ro made a point to be chipper even though she was dying to get off the phone and hack into files.
They stopped calling by two. By then, the place was a tomb.
The first order of business was her homework. Her brain was groggy but she managed to get through it. After homework, she moved on to inputting the day’s reservations for Pearl. She had to do the job well to get the staff on her side.
An hour later she had finished up the reservations. It was just her and the computer and the back room for privacy. Although Tomas had showed her how to bring up the various convention identifications, it did involve several steps and several windows. Mistakes could be tolerated. But she couldn’t afford to crash the system. If only Vicks were there to help her. He could have done it in a snap.
It took a while of playing with keystroke combinations. After a lot of trial and error, she was finally able to figure out how to bring up conventions and match them to groups. Tomas was right. Many tours booked in the city, mostly in the summer and a few around Christmas and New Year’s. The hotel did a lot of business with travel agents and art museums. During opera and chamber-music season in the summer, it booked musical tours. The companies may have gotten a discount, but there were lots of them to make up the difference in cost.
She experimented with the data, printing out lists of names. Around four thirty in the morning, after dealing with lists upon lists of names, she finally struck gold, finding the code for a group of clients associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The date was a year after Ellen’s abduction.
She almost cried. She now had names—people she could look up and cross-reference. Her phone alarm went off. She jumped in her seat. She had a wake-up call reminder to get out.
She dutifully called the room: Harold Beitman in 204. “Hi, this is Gretchen from the front desk. I just wanted to make sure you got your wake-up call.”
“I got it. Where’s the guy who’s usually here?”
“Mr. Jenkins will be back in two days.”
“He can stay away as far as I’m concerned. You’re a hell of a lot nicer to hear at four thirty in the morning. Are you the same Gretchen who waited on me in the lounge last night?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Ah . . . Gretchen. You can call me anytime.”
“Have a good morning, Mr. Beitman. We look forward to seeing you again at the Jackson.”
“Ditto.”
She hung up and smiled. It was too bad courtesans were no longer in fashion. Ro knew she had certainly missed her calling.
Chapter 15