Beatriz appears behind the bar, holding a tray of chilled shot glasses.
“Here’s our whipped cream concierge,” Petey says.
Whipped cream concierge! The third Heartbreaker has gone to Lizbet’s head and she gives a little shriek. What a gifted idea!
“Our flavors tonight are coconut and caramel apple,” Beatriz says. “Would you like one?”
“You betcha!” Lizbet says. “One of each, please and thank you!”
Beatriz arranges the shot glasses in front of her and hands her a demitasse spoon. Lizbet starts with the coconut, which tastes like a mouthful of coconut cloud, then moves to the caramel apple.
A man takes a seat two over from Lizbet. “Hey, hot stuff,” he says to her, extending a hand. “I’m Brad Dover from Everett.”
“Hi?” Lizbet says. Brad Dover has a thick Southie accent and a meaty face and, no doubt, a closet filled with Bruins jerseys and a bone to pick with Tom Brady.
He turns to Petey. “I’d like an Irish car bomb, please, dollface.”
The only problem with the Blue Bar, Lizbet decides, is that it’s open to the public, including people like Brad Dover from Everett, men who order Irish car bombs and call complete strangers “dollface” and “hot stuff.” It’s definitely time for her to go.
“I’ll take my check, please and thank you,” she says.
Petey raises her palms. “Everything is on the house.”
“You’re kidding,” Lizbet says. “Well, thank you, it was extraordinary.”
“You can’t leave yet,” says Brad Everett from Dover—or is it Brad Dover from Everett? She neither knows nor cares. “I just got here.”
Exactly, she thinks. She pulls out two twenties to leave for Petey as a tip, swivels away from Brad Dover, and comes face-to-face with the person who has taken the seat on the other side of her, and that person is Mario Subiaco. He’s in a white chef’s jacket and a White Sox cap, and he’s a little sweaty, which only serves to make him even hotter than she remembers.
“Hey there, Heartbreaker,” he says.
She reels back in surprise. “I thought you didn’t come out of the kitchen.”
“There’s an exception to every rule,” he says. “How was your food?”
“It was…it was…”
“That good?” he says.
“Better than that good,” she says—and to her mortification, she feels tears gathering. It’s the vodka, obviously; she’s had three Heartbreakers in just over an hour—who does that? A woman who is eating out for the first time in months, a woman who has had her shoddily stitched-up heart ripped apart at the seams again. It’s not Christina’s gloating that’s making her cry. It’s kindness—the food itself and someone caring what she thought of it.
Mario smiles into his lap. “Well, thank you. I know you have high standards, so I was trying my hardest. I wasn’t sure about the cafeteria tacos.”
Lizbet laughs and discreetly wipes under her eyes. “They were a hell of a lot better than the ones our lunch lady Mrs. MacArthur used to serve up.”
“Good, good,” Mario says. He clears his throat. “So, listen, I have the night of the fifth off and I was hoping I could take you to dinner.”
“Hey, buddy boy,” Brad Dover from Everett says. “Buzz off. I’m taking her out.”
“No,” Lizbet says to Mario. “He’s not. And yes, I’d love to have dinner.” She grins. There’s no point trying to keep her cool, if she ever even had any, because Mario Subiaco is asking her out, which is a sentence that should be punctuated by ten exclamation points. “Where shall we go?”
“I was thinking about the Deck,” Mario says. “How does that sound to you?”
Ha-ha-ha-ha! Lizbet thinks. Is this happening? Is this happening?
“Sounds perfect,” she says.
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Mario says. “We have a reservation at eight.”
12. Graveyard Shift
Grace can’t believe it. She can’t believe it!
It has taken an entire century, but someone is finally doing the digging necessary to arrive at the truth about Grace’s death.
This someone isn’t Lizbet Keaton, and it isn’t Richie Decameron, who showed such enthusiasm about a ghost in his interview and then promptly forgot about it. This someone is eight-year-old Wanda Marsh. Wanda has become, in modern parlance, obsessed with the hotel’s ghost. Zeke mentioned the ghost in an offhand remark while Wanda was searching for a mystery to solve, and Wanda seized on the topic. She begged Kimber to take her to the Nantucket Atheneum, where she and librarian Jessica Olson dug into the archives of the Nantucket Standard and found the article published on August 31, 1922. Jessica made a photocopy for Wanda, who tucked it into the back of her notebook.