5. Junie
JUNIE
I wasn’t cut out for this hotel thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the inn. Ever since my grandparents renovated everything—added rooms, added the spa, basically sequestered my childhood home to something hidden behind closed doors—it had been an adventure.
But two of my people had recently quit. Mom went snowbirding in southern Utah. (I couldn’t blame her for that one. She had health issues, and she needed the warmer climate.)
Boone refused to exist during the holiday and hid himself away doing who knew what, so I had a backup sleigh driver in place—only to have him get injured? One guest showed up and I couldn’t find her reservation, so I basically snuck her into Boone’s old room.
And now this? If one more thing went wrong, I was going to lose it.
“He’s not my husband,” a guest named Lacie, with red hair and a fiery personality said the next morning. Only minutes before, I’d snatched a top hat for the man I knew to be her husband to take out and put on the snowman they were building together.
And now, she was claiming not only were they not married, but that they had separate rooms when I remembered giving them only one key.
One. Uno. Singular.
She was demanding I get her a new key…for a room we didn’t have.
“But you checked in yesterday,” I said, turning my attention to the computer. What kind of game was she trying to play?
Were they having some kind of quarrel?
“We arrived together, but that doesn’t mean we’re together,” she said. “Remember? You thought we were married, and then I corrected you. My very single-status name. Lacie Sorensen.”
My brows rose. What was she drinking? Either she was cuckoo, or I was because I had no memory of that instance.
In my mind, the two of them checked in together as husband and wife.
“I’m not remembering any Sorensens this year,” I said, clicking through my recent guest list and searching the contacts. This was so much like the blunder with Grace Eastland’s room, it wasn’t funny.
Once I found Lacie’s name, I not only felt relief that I wasn’t going crazy, but I turned the screen so she could see what I was looking at.
“See? There you are right here. Jared and Lacie Kingston.”
“I think you’ve got it all wrong. My last name is Sorensen, Not Kingston. Check again, please.”
I forced my spine to remain straight instead of slumping it. I stayed on my stool instead of cowering beneath the counter like I wanted to. I took slow breaths even though my heart was a freshly freed reindeer on its first flight.
Reindeer of the Christmas variety, that is.
And I skimmed over the scheduling records. Again.
Seriously. First Grace Eastland wasn’t anywhere in here, and now Lacie Kingston was claiming she’d had a different name?
“We’re not married,” Lacie said, growing exasperated. “No matter what the snowmen around here say.”
O-kay then. Someone needs a trip to the spa. Or the psych ward.
That was neither fair nor kind. I shook the thought away, but before I could say anything else, she’d stormed away.
This was exhausting. I couldn’t fully wrap my head around the room debacle. As of yesterday, we’d been fully booked. There were no available rooms.
But now? Where had this room misjudgment come from?
I skimmed through the appointments, the guest’s information, and the room reservations, trying to find a hint about where scheduling had gone wrong. Most of the time, online reservations and those that were made manually were able to sync without any problems into the system.
But this…
“Santa’s sleigh,” I grumbled.
I blinked a few times. I even rubbed my eyes.
This was unreal, but sure enough, there it was. The reservation I’d scoured the system for countless times yesterday. It didn’t say Lacie Sorensen or even Lacie Kingston.
It said Grace Eastland. Room 11.
“How?” I muttered to the screen.
How was that even possible? She wasn’t in here the last time I checked. And believe me, I’d checked.
And now a pair of guests were claiming not to be married when the system showed that they were? When her own ID showed that she was?
It made no sense.
Had Boone messed with the system somehow? I wasn’t sure he knew how to. But he definitely hadn’t been happy when he’d found Grace in his room last night.
I should have given him a heads up, that was true. But he would have told me no, and I couldn’t just let Grace leave. Something had told me she needed my help. She’d looked way too sad and desperate for me to let her walk out the door with nowhere else to go.
In this weather?
Lacie looked way too thrown off about this. And I could think of only one other reason everything would be so upside down right now.
The radio.
I snatched the key to room 11, but before I veered down the hall to give Grace the good news, I took a side rail to the living room. Lobby. Whatever we called it these days.
My brain still called it the living room, since that was what it had been when I’d been a kid.
The radio had always occupied that spot on that table. We’d gathered in here for late-night talks with Grandma and Grandpa, for game nights, and snuggling with mugs of cocoa. And there it had always sat. Silently. A quiet addition to the room, but one that had always fascinated me.
I stared at the radio now. Feeling silly, I bent low and pressed my ear, but I heard nothing.
“Just what are you up to?” I whispered.
And the radio seemed to say, If you only knew.