“Wanda?” Lizbet whispered. She peered into the hot tub, feeling very much like the doomed heroine in a horror film.
It was empty.
Lizbet headed back upstairs, thinking she had dodged a huge bullet—Wanda hadn’t drowned in the pools. Though Lizbet was growing more and more agitated. Where was she?
“Let me get your keys,” Lizbet said to Franny Yates. “I’ll upgrade you to a suite because you’ve been so patient. Here you go. Suite two fourteen. You can take either the stairs or the elevator to the second floor, and then it’s all the way down the hall to the left.”
“What about my luggage?” Franny Yates said.
“As soon as the bellman is free, I’ll have him bring it to you.”
“I want to go to sleep!”
“Ms. Yates, I need to ask for your indulgence. We have a situation here—”
“Your situation is that your hotel stinks,” Franny Yates said. She marched off down the hall.
Lizbet wasn’t sure what to do. Should she try to schlep Franny Yates’s luggage up the stairs herself? Should she go up to the fourth floor to help look for Wanda? Should she call the police? A child is lost. Lizbet wasn’t a mother but she understood how serious this was. Lizbet went down the stairs to the street and looked both ways. No Wanda.
She heard the phone ringing back in the lobby and she hustled up the stairs, taking them two at a time, so when she reached the top, her heart was pounding in her ears. “Hello?”
“We found her,” Raoul said. “She was wandering around the fourth floor.”
“Oh, thank God.” Lizbet paused. “What was she doing there?” The fourth floor had odd roof angles and very small windows, and the Historic District Commission would have had to approve any structural changes that would be visible from the street, so Xavier had opted not to renovate it just yet. Lizbet had ventured up to the fourth floor only once; it was, essentially, a cavernous and dusty attic.
Raoul said, “She said she was looking for the ghost.”
The ghost! Lizbet thought. She had been very careful never to mention the supposed ghost to anyone, and especially not Wanda, but Zeke might have let it slip.
“We have a checkin to suite two fourteen who is very anxious for her bags. There are three of them, and I would deliver them myself but they’re each the size of a small home.”
“I’ll be down as soon as I’m finished cleaning up here.”
“Cleaning up?” Lizbet said.
“Doug was so excited to see Wanda that he had an accident.”
Lizbet closed her eyes. The other line of the hotel phone rang. It was suite 214. “You have to get suite two fourteen her luggage. Please, Raoul. Right now.”
“But the dog—”
“Raoul, please!”
“Yes, boss,” Raoul said.
Lizbet answered the other line. “Your luggage is on its way, Ms. Yates.”
“You’re a liar!” Franny Yates yelled. “I can see my luggage from my window. It’s still on the sidewalk!”
Franny Yates’s review is factually correct—it took Raoul a full thirty minutes to deliver her luggage, both Lizbet and Raoul were harried and distracted, and Lizbet was, perhaps, a bit snippy. But was the checkin an “unmitigated disaster”？ No, an unmitigated disaster would have been Wanda staying missing or found dead.
Lizbet had comped Franny Yates’s entire bill at the Blue Bar （three nights, two hundred and sixty dollars）。 Why didn’t her review mention the comped meals?
Lizbet clicks out of the e-mail from Xavier and rests her head, ever so briefly, on her desk. It’s seven thirty in the morning and she’s so tired, she could sleep until seven thirty tomorrow morning. She’s so demoralized, she feels like crying. Or crying uncle.
She needs a night auditor.
8. Lie, Cheat, and Steal
Grace tightens the belt of her robe and does her usual nocturnal sweep through the hotel, beginning with the room where Louie and Wanda are sleeping. They’ve been taking turns in each of the four bunks; tonight, they’re both in uppers. Wanda has her notepad tucked under her pillow, and Louie has fallen asleep in his glasses, clutching the white queen piece. Grace can hear Doug the dog snoring in the other room. He always lies in front of the door of the suite; if Grace goes anywhere near him, he’ll wake up and snarl. Kimber, the mother, sleeps with her arms and legs in an X; she looks like a blue-and-green-haired angel fallen from the sky.
Grace floats out of suite 114 and pops in to check on the Bellefleurs in room 306—Oops, sorry to interrupt!—then to suite 216, where Mrs. Reginella is scrolling through the text messages on her husband’s cell phone, and then down to room 111, where Arnold Dash sleeps with the urn of his wife’s ashes on the nightstand. Grace wishes there were more action. She hopes that as July gets closer, occupancy will increase. The hotel is so welcoming, the staff so attuned to every detail. What’s keeping the guests away? Maybe there’s too much competition or maybe it’s too expensive. After all, when this was a “family-friendly budget hotel,” it was jam-packed. Maybe the hotel’s reputation is too damaged to rehabilitate. （Is that her fault?） She wonders what ever happened to the article that that lovely young woman, Jill Tananbaum, came to write. As far as Grace knows, it hasn’t been printed.