She shrieks. The water is ice cold. And then the light goes out.
“Daniella!” she cries.
Daniella is in the master bedroom trying to make the electronic shade go down. Every time she pushes the button to lower the shade, the shade starts to go down, but then, as if it changed its mind, it travels back up. Grace is delighted! The petals of the lilies and peonies in the Surfside Spring bouquet wither and fall to the table, and while Daniella is gasping at this, Grace whips the shade all the way up. Daniella picks up the phone to call the front desk, but there isn’t a dial tone. She flops on the bed, still in her red-soled shoes, and pulls a pillow over her face. Grace goes into the sound system, and an instant later music is blaring: Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize.” Daniella sits bolt upright in bed, and Grace laughs and laughs. She hasn’t had this much fun since girls were gals.
TravelTattler Reviews
The Hotel Nantucket, Nantucket, Massachusetts
Dates of your stay: June 12–15
Number of people in your party: 1
Name （optional）： Franny Yates
Please rate the following areas of the hotel on a scale of 1 to 10
Reception/checkin: 1
Room cleanliness: 10
Style/decor: 10
Concierge: 10
Wellness center: 10
Pools: 10
Room service/minibar: 10
Overall experience: 5.5
Please feel free to leave additional comments about your stay, singling out any staff members who made your visit memorable.
I enjoyed my three-night stay at the Hotel Nantucket; however, I’m only giving it five and a half stars overall because the night of my checkin was an unmitigated disaster, and had the hour not been so late and had every other room on the island not already been booked, I would have left immediately. The front-desk clerk and the night bellman were harried and distracted, and the front-desk clerk was, at one point, snippy with me. Then it took the night bellman thirty minutes to deliver my bags to my room when all I wanted to do was put on my pajamas and go to sleep. Furthermore, when the bellman came, he neglected to explain any features of the room. I didn’t realize until my final day, while chatting with a lovely couple at the adult pool, that everything in the minibar was complimentary.
The Blue Bar, however, was outstanding and the perfect place to eat as a party of one. I went all three evenings of my stay. My compliments to the chef!
This review, forwarded to her by Xavier, is waiting in Lizbet’s in-box when she gets to work on June 16. （She could easily check their TravelTattler reviews herself, but she’s too busy overseeing operations at the hotel, and Xavier has a five-hour jump on the day, which feels like an unfair advantage.）
The comments accompanying this survey read as follows:
Good morning, Elizabeth—
After reading this survey, I checked the schedule and discovered that the night-desk clerk was you and that the night bellman was Raoul Wasserman-Ramirez. I suppose I don’t need to mention that, as the GM, you must uphold our rigorous hospitality standards. The hotel isn’t anywhere near full, so I would urge you to pay close attention to the guests who are in residence. The woman who wrote this review could easily have been Shelly Carpenter. Keep your eye on the fifth key, Elizabeth! The fifth key!
XD
Lizbet is starting to resent Xavier Darling. How dare he judge her when he’s in London and she’s here, chest-deep in the trenches. He checked the schedule, as though he’s Big Brother. Bah! He can send all the admonishing e-mails he wants, but he isn’t going to impress Shelly Carpenter or the second woman, whoever she is, if he doesn’t help her deal with their staffing shortages and low occupancy.
Even so, Lizbet’s indignation （and why can he not call her Lizbet like she’s asked him to?） is mixed with guilt and culpability. That woman—Franny Yates of Trappe, Pennsylvania—checked in three hours late （not her fault; Cape Air was delayed due to fog） during a moment of crisis.
The crisis involved Wanda Marsh. The Marsh children had made themselves quite at home at the hotel. Every morning and every evening, Louie would come down to the lobby in a polo shirt buttoned to the top, his hair wet and combed, wearing his funny little glasses, and he would sit at a chessboard playing against himself, waiting for one of the guests to notice him and offer to play a game. Louie always won, and he became something of a curiosity, a six-and-a-half-year-old chess genius right there in the lobby of the Hotel Nantucket! One of the guests （Mr. Brandon, room 301） had written about Louie in his TravelTattler review, saying how much he’d enjoyed playing chess every morning with Louie while he drank his cup of percolated Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee. Lizbet was just waiting for Xavier to award Louie the thousand-dollar bonus.