Five hundred dollars. Edie checks the date. It’s exactly three weeks since Graydon’s last Venmo request, which came exactly three weeks after his first Venmo request. The regularity of the extortion gives Edie an odd comfort. Graydon isn’t asking more frequently or asking for more money. Edie wonders if she can just think of this like a car payment or a stupidity tax.
But no, sorry, that’s absurd! She has lost a thousand dollars of her hard-earned money already and she’s not going to buckle this time. Graydon is angry about the breakup and maybe he’s lonely out in Arizona, but even so, he would never send those videos out. They would embarrass him as much as her.
She deletes the Venmo request—but then, as though he’s watching her somehow, a text comes in from him.
It’s her mother’s cell phone number and e-mail.
Edie stops breathing for a second. She sends him the money.
16. The Cobblestone Telegraph
Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard, has been sitting on Jill Tananbaum’s article about the Hotel Nantucket for well over a month, but he hasn’t been inspired to run it. Part of the reason is his own prejudice about the hotel being owned by a renowned London billionaire who has never even set foot on the island—it feels so wrong—and part of it is that Jordan likes to cover the real issues facing Nantucket. There’s the housing shortage, which causes overcrowded conditions for both seasonal and year-round workers. There’s the traffic; in the summer, Jordan avoids the intersection by the high school altogether. There’s environmental sustainability, the argument against short-term rentals, and issues with the landfill. Nantucket is, in Jordan’s opinion, already too popular, so inundated with visitors that the people who live here can’t enjoy it. Jordan realizes this makes him sound like a crochety old-timer. Really what he wishes is that there were a story to the hotel’s renovation that didn’t have to do with money, thread count, or Farrow and Ball paint.
And then, suddenly, that story lands on his desk.
Edie Robbins comes into the office with an article written by an eight-year-old girl, a guest at the hotel. This child, Wanda Marsh, claims to have heard from a ghost living in the hotel’s fourth-floor storage closet. Jordan reads the piece and chuckles—it’s not bad; maybe he should hire this Wanda Marsh—and then Edie hands over the supporting document, an article published in the Standard a hundred years ago.
“I never knew about this,” Jordan admits. There are, of course, ghost stories all over downtown Nantucket, just as there are in any historic place with creaky old houses. But this one grabs Jordan’s interest. It’s the combination of the hundred-year-anniversary angle, the little girl, and Edie herself, a young woman Jordan has known since birth. Jordan was friends with Edie’s father, Vance Robbins; they served on the Rotary Club scholarship committee together for years, and Jordan was saddened by his passing.
He gives the little girl’s story and the old article to Jill and asks her to write a new piece about the hotel. “Describe the renovation from the point of view of the ghost who has lived there for the past hundred years,” he says. “People will love it.”
And they do! Jill Tananbaum’s article “Hotel Nantucket Haunted by Hadley” appears in the Thursday, July 21, edition of the Nantucket Standard and garners more reader response than any other article they’ve run this year. Summer visitor Donna Fenton, who stayed in the hotel with her family in the 1980s, knew there was something spooky about the place. Blond Sharon is intrigued not by the ghost but by the Matouk linens, the oyster-shell-tiled showers, and the blue cashmere throws from Nantucket Looms. Also, Sharon （who likes to know everything） had no idea there was a new adult pool out back. How can she get an invitation? She decides to book a room at the end of August for her sister, Heather, who is a world traveler and very discerning.
It just so happens that Yeong-Ja Park, a writer for the Associated Press, is staying on the island at her parents’ home in Shimmo, and after she reads the article in the Standard, she writes an article about the haunted hotel as well. She tracks down half a dozen people who have stayed at the hotel over the past three decades, three of whom claim to have heard and seen things they couldn’t explain. Yeong-Ja’s article gets picked up by forty-seven newspapers across the country, from the Idaho Statesman to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to the Tampa Bay Times. Some of the papers run the article right away; some save it for a slow news day.
Here on Nantucket, the excitement about the haunted hotel lasts only a scant twenty-four hours—because we have other gossip to discuss.