Well, she thinks.
The last Friday of the month is only two days away—which means a new Hotel Confidential post. Either Shelly Carpenter has stayed with them or she hasn’t. If she has and she gives them less than five keys, or if she hasn’t and doesn’t review them at all…what will happen?
24. Heartbreaker
Xavier Darling is out to dinner and so Grace spends the evening doing a few minor hauntings. She’s able to delight Mary Perkowski from Ohio by flickering the lights, then playing Mary’s favorite song, “Thunder Road,” spontaneously over the sound system, then by making the sheers of the canopy bed sway like the dress in the song. Next, it’s off to suite 114, where Grace peeks in on the Marsh children, who will be leaving in the morning. Today marked Louie’s last chess lesson with Rustam, and Wanda returned her Nancy Drew books to the library. （She made it all the way to number forty-five, The Spider Sapphire Mystery.） Kimber isn’t exactly an organized packer; she has been stuffing things in bags indiscriminately, a process that was interrupted by moments of her sitting on the bed with her face in her hands or writing her “memoirs” on her laptop with tears streaming down her face.
Grace has grown attached to Kimber—and Wanda and Louie, and even Doug. She can’t imagine the hotel without them, but it’s the very nature of a hotel to be impermanent. Hello, then goodbye; that’s how it goes. If people stayed forever, it would be a home.
Grace moves in close to Wanda, the only supernaturally sensitive person in the past hundred years who has wanted to understand her. Grace kisses her cheek, leaving behind a cool damp spot.
Wanda’s eyes flutter open. “Grace?”
I’m here, sweet child, Grace thinks. Then Doug growls—he’s such a crank with her, though Grace likes knowing he’ll protect Wanda—and Grace leaves the room.
Nighty-night.
She floats up two floors and across the hall to the owner’s suite, a place she has consciously avoided all summer long—and sure enough, it triggers her right away. Despite the fact that it’s bright and white and beachy modern now, Grace can picture her nineteen-year-old self crouched on the ground, trying to coax the damn cat, Mittens, out from under the bed. She’s thinking that a woman who would throw a silver candlestick at her own pet is a woman with a turd for a heart. Grace hears the door open. In her mind, it’s Jackson Benedict, come to sweet-talk Grace, kiss her and press her hand to his crotch, and she will, in that instant, know she’s ruined. But she will not yet know that she’s doomed.
It’s not Jackson Benedict who steps into the suite—obviously not; Jack has been dead for decades—but Xavier Darling with none other than Magda English.
Well! Grace thinks. This is something of a reprise—the owner of the hotel with the housekeeping staff. Except Magda isn’t merely “housekeeping staff”; she is, in modern parlance, a “girl boss.” No one pushes Magda around or tells her what to do, not even a man with as much money as Xavier Darling.
Xavier turns on the lights in the living area; they’re on dimmers and cast a romantic, honeyed glow. He raises the room-darkening shades on the picture window so they can see over Easton Street to Nantucket harbor and the ruby beacon of Brant Point Light.
“Champagne?” Xavier says. There’s a bottle of Pol Roger relaxing in an ice bath on the burled-walnut coffee table, and Magda says, “You know I never turn down champagne, Xavier.”
Xavier opens the bottle with a flourish. He pours two flutes, then he and Magda settle on the sofa together and raise their glasses.
“To the hotel,” Magda says. They drink.
“I bought it for you, you know,” Xavier says.
This makes Magda hoot with laughter.
“I’m serious,” Xavier says. “When you worked on my ships, I knew where to find you.”
“You were always so subtle about it,” Magda says. “Landing your helicopter on the bow or hotdogging in your cigarette boat. I’ll never forget you pulling up to the docks in that devil when I went ashore in Ischia.” She caresses his face. “You used to be so dashing.”
Xavier sighs. “I’m still pretty dashing, no? As soon as you told me you were retiring and moving to Nantucket, I did some research and found the hotel. I wanted to make it grand for you.” He sips his champagne. “Another woman might be flattered.”
“Another woman might think you were trying to control her.”
“No one can control you,” Xavier says. “Of all the women I’ve known in my life, you are the one who has haunted me.”