Chapter 6 #2
Seamus put his glass in the dishwasher and gave us an awkward goodbye before slipping back out the door. Chelsea’s eyes were trained hard on the screen, even though I knew she couldn’t care less about Eli and Jude’s conversation about various beaches on the Canary Islands.
“Alright Dad,” I said, turning my attention back to the screen. “Eli’s here, and we have to go in ten.”
Dad, who’d been arguing with Eli about something, cleared his throat and leaned in, looking left and right as if someone might be listening.
“For God’s sake, Dad,” Eli said, rolling his eyes.
“Cassandra,” Dad said. “Chelsea told me you’ve hired someone to fix up the hotel.”
I threw a look at Chelsea. It was way easier when Dad didn’t know what was going on. He had a way of getting involved from afar these days that wasn’t helpful.
“What? It’s not a secret,” she exclaimed.
“You said you didn’t want to get involved in the business,” I said to Dad.
“Are they going to renovate the east wing?” he asked. He sipped his drink, making a comically loud slurping noise.
“Dad, they’re not—” It was too difficult to explain what exactly consultants did, and how construction on our shut-down wing wasn’t even in the planning stages yet.
All that would come after the Harringtons’ report.
“They will be,” I said. Dad would probably ask me the same question next month, anyway.
“Okay. This is critical then. I’m glad I caught you. Tell them… not to go into 114.”
I actually placed my hand on my forehead, incredulity growing like a balloon. “This? This is what you called an urgent meeting for?”
“Dad,” Eli said. He looked at me as if to verify he wasn’t hearing things.
I grimaced.
He looked back at our father. “You’re not serious?”
“Wait, is that the haunted room?” Chelsea asked.
“No,” I said. “There’s no haunted room.”
“Of course there is!” Dad said.
On screen, Jude leaned forward on his steepled hands. “Oooh, I haven’t heard this one.”
“Don’t encourage him!” I said, exasperated. “We don’t have time for this, Dad. And we need to develop some code about what’s truly urgent. Falling into a well—that’s urgent.”
“Breaking your hip,” Eli said.
“Knee, even,” snorted Jude.
That surprised me enough that I glanced at him, sharply. But it was too hard to read his expression through the screen. An ACL injury was what had ended Jude’s pro-tennis career a few years ago. He never talked about it.
But Dad was already encouraged. “I told you and Eli on our last call,” he said to me.
I’d called Dad from the office a couple of weeks ago just to check in, and he’d warned us about the same thing—construction on the east wing.
I tried to tell him we weren’t even looking at that yet, but when he started going on about ghosts, I’d crossed over to Eli’s office and tossed my phone at him.
He could deal with Dad’s nonsense. I was frustrated—every call was something ridiculous instead of the fatherly check-in I so badly wanted.
Dad had always been interested in the history of the hotel, but since mom passed, he’d become slightly obsessive.
If he cared so much about this place and its ghosts, why wasn’t he here?
But I didn’t say that. It would be insensitive to the way Dad was still grieving.
Instead, I said, “Dad, we’re meeting the consultants right now for dinner.
I honestly thought something was actually wrong.
I’m going to go, so why don’t you stay on the call with Jude and tell him on his own, seeing as he seems so interested? ”
“I want to hear too,” Chelsea said.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“Fine, Jude and Chelsea,” I said, moving to get up.
But it was Eli who spoke. “Her name was Eleanor Cleary.”
I gaped. “Eli, seriously?” Eli was the biggest skeptic of us all.
“Don’t you remember?” His voice had gone somber. “She was a guest at the hotel in 1922. She was staying with a man she claimed was her husband. But her husband came looking for her the day she was supposed to check out. He found her dead.
“Her lover missing,” Dad added, beaming at Eli.
“Ugh,” Chelsea said. “I don’t like hearing that word come out of Dad’s mouth.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“Wait, so what happened to the lover?” Jude asked.
“Jude’s mouth either,” Chelsea said.
I nodded. “I agree. But apparently he was never found.” Then I realized I’d played right into Dad’s hands.
“And now,” Eli said, holding his hands up, Thriller-style, “Eleanor haunts the east wing, looking for her lover!”
“What did I just say about that word?” Chelsea said.
“Oooooooh!” Jude made ghost sounds on-screen.
At that, even I had to suppress a laugh. “Okay, that’s enough.” I grew serious again. “Dad, this still doesn’t constitute an urgent call.”
“Wait,” Jude said. He hesitated, and we all waited. “Was room 114 the one that flooded the rest of the rooms?”
“That was 220,” I said. “A totally different nightmare. But not as much of a nightmare as I’ll be if you don’t get dressed in some proper clothes and be in the lobby at five to!” Then to my father, “Dad, write us an email, okay? I’ll share it with the… contractors.”
“I will. I’ll share my research too. But you need to know the most important thing.
It’s the whole reason I needed to talk to you.
It’s about spending time in that room. Anyone who does, whether they’re sleeping there or whether it’s under construction, working on it.
Something always goes terribly wrong. It’s why the previous owners hid it. ”
At that, even I felt a chill go over me. “Hid it?”
“Oh yes, it’s been walled over.”
“What?” Eli said. “Does Griffin know about this?”
Griffin, while he didn’t officially work at the hotel, was our go-to for anything like that. He’d hired our facilities manager, Gus, and even though he didn’t report to him, he didn’t do much without his say-so.
“Oh yes,” Dad said. “He knows.”
That surprised me. I’d have to ask Griff about it tonight.
“In any case,” Dad said, seeing he was losing me. “I needed to tell you right away before any workers started meddling in the supernatural. It could sink the whole place.”
“Dad, what have you been reading lately?” Eli said.
“I’m glad you asked,” he said, holding up a stack of books. They all had glossy covers and were filled with tabs where Dad had marked off important pages. He showed us Ghosts and their Secrets; Hidden Vermont; and A Biography of Richard Remington.
“That’s the tycoon, right?” Jude said.
“Alright,” I said. This had gone on long enough. “Dad, I’m going to end this call now.”
“I love you,” he said to me—I knew it was to me, because it’s what he said anytime he wound me up and wanted me to get back onside.
When he said it, he sounded like the Dad I used to know, the one who helped me with my math homework and psyched me up before my softball games.
Who held me when I fought tears every night for half a year in the fifth grade when the kids called me Cass-man-dra for how tall I’d grown over the summer.
“I love you too, Dad,” I said, partly annoyed and partly awed at how he could still do that to me. Despite his irritating idiosyncrasies over the past few years, he was still my dad, and I still loved him to death.
Fifteen minutes later, after kicking Eli out to shower, I stood in front of the closet, my mind muddled with everything that had been going on.
There was no time to try a bunch of stuff on now.
Plus, my heart ached—I was worried about Dad.
He was all alone, clinging to stories about ghosts, I think because he wanted to believe somehow that Mom was still here.
I wish you were, Mom. Every day I wished she was.
I pulled on the first dress I saw—a scoop neck black number that ended at my knees. Ned never wanted me to wear this dress, I remembered. Or maybe it was the heels that went with it. Ned had hated that I wore heels. He didn’t like me being taller than him.
Go to hell, Ned, I thought as I headed for the bathroom.
“Hey,” Chelsea said from the couch, her eyebrows slanted in concern. She was still talking to Dad and Jude. “You okay?”
Had I said that out loud?
“Fine,” I smiled. “I’m good.”
I heard Chelsea speak softly as I crossed the room.
She was talking to Dad with a kind of reverence.
“It’s all bullshit,” I mouthed, but when she understood what I’d said, she looked so wounded a slice of guilt hit me.
Sometimes I forgot that Chelsea had lived with our parents the longest; that she’d had a special relationship with them that wasn’t the same one I’d had.
It had just been her at home after Jude left, and there hadn’t been the franticness of all the little kids to help raise.
And now I was too far away from her to apologize.
What was the matter with me? It was like that moment on the island with Blake—before I knew it was him—had thrown my whole life off-kilter. Like the universe was teasing me with something I couldn’t have.
In the bathroom now, I grimaced at myself in the mirror. My hair was all over the place—Ned would have laughed if he saw me. I had a flashback to him sitting me down on the couch in our apartment, that moment. “I’m leaving you, Cass.”
I’d smoothed down my hair then, too.
You met someone else, didn’t you? I’d asked.
It was my worst fear. Worse, it was like a premonition had come to fruition.
Like this was always how it would end—with my humiliation.
After all those years talking myself into staying with him, thinking he was a good guy—or at least the best I could get.
I didn’t exactly meet her…
Anger, as hot as it had come that day, shook me. I gripped the tube of lipstick I’d picked up, startling as the lid popped up and clattered into the sink.
“You okay?”
I startled, looking up to see my sister in the mirror. I turned to look at her in person. “I’m sorry, Chels, about Dad—”
But she shook her head. “It’s okay. He’s definitely gone a little off his rocker since Mom, but hey, so have I, right?”
I opened my mouth to protest, but she glanced at my lipstick. “That’s a power shade.” She hated talking about what she was going through, even if she acknowledged it herself.
I fought the urge to ask again what I could do to help her. It would end the conversation fast. Instead, I extended the color out of the tube. “Ned hated this shade. Told me it looked like I was trying too hard.”
“He was the king of negging, Cass. I wish we’d have known.”
“I wish I’d seen how twisted it was when I was in it.”
She smiled sadly. “It’s hard to see when they’re your whole world.”
Was she talking about one of us now? I looked at my baby sister in the mirror. “You know, I’m supposed to be the older, wiser one.”
Chelsea shrugged. “Maybe you were wise in not telling our brothers everything about Ned, at least. Griffin would have kicked his ass.”
I laughed, but a lump had formed in my throat, tears pricking my eyes. “All of them would.”
Chelsea nodded, brushing my hair back with her hands.
I studied her for a moment. She’d been out again last night. She’d painted over the exhaustion under her eyes with concealer, but I could tell.
“Sometimes brothers are good for something, huh?” she took the lipstick from me. She was pre-empting my asking her what was going on yet again.
This time, shamefully, I didn’t have the energy to fight it.
Chelsea kicked the toilet lid down and guided me over to sit on it. “Let me help.”
For the next five minutes, I let Chelsea brush and style my hair and put makeup on me while she chatted about one of the conferences she’d been working on for next month.
I relaxed into the cadence of her voice, knowing she didn’t necessarily need me to hear the words; that she was just distracting me.
But after a long pause, when she was brushing lipstick on my lips, she said, “What spurred this sudden bout of feelings about Ned? Was it Dad?”
I looked up at Chelsea. Her face showed soft concern. But sharing my feelings was not my strong suit. My strong suit was… showing my strong suit. Being the brave one; the leader. Still, what was the point of hiding everything? It would be a relief to let at least the cap off the pressure.
“It’s both of them,” I said. “And… someone else.”
Chelsea’s eyes widened. The hint of a smile played at her lips. “Oh?”
“It’s not like that.” But even as I said it, that little voice in my head contradicted me. It’s exactly like that.
I hesitated. I couldn’t say who it was. Even if I said it was just some guy, the details were too obvious. Not only that, I didn’t know how to explain how much I’d been rattled by Blake.
“Maybe I’ll tell you at some point,” I said.
Her shoulders fell, but she didn’t push it. She knew what it felt like to have a sister trying too hard to help. “I’ll be here,” she said.
My phone buzzed. I picked it up off the counter.
GRIFFIN: Heading out of town. It can’t wait.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was Griffin’s way of telling me he wouldn’t be coming to dinner. “He’s unbelievable.”
Chelsea looked over my shoulder at my phone as she poured product in her hands and smoothed it over my now pinned-up hair.
“Well, at least he’s not technically employed by the hotel,” she said pulling out a few strands around my face. “So he’s not blowing off work.”
“Griff never blows off work,” I said. Social stuff, always. Work, no. Not like Jude, who was the opposite. “At least if he was employed, I could fire him.”
“We don’t report to you,” Chelsea reminded me.
We’d made up very specific contracts when we took over the hotel. None of us reported to each other, instead voting equally if decisions needed to be made about each other. It was the only wise advice about this place Dad had given us.
Right before he took off.
“I could still fire Griff,” I said. “For fun.”
Chelsea laughed. But when I stood up and looked in the mirror, I couldn’t help my mouth falling open slightly.
“How did you do that?” I looked like night and day from when I’d walked into the bathroom only a few minutes before.
“I look…” I didn’t have the words. Chelsea had pushed my unruly hair into a soft, wispy chignon, and given me subtle eye makeup but crimson red lips that looked not like me, but somehow…
“Hot?” she finished for me.
I’d never thought of myself as hot. Sometimes I felt attractive, or powerful, at least when I wore a suit. But hot? That was Chelsea’s domain.
I smiled. “Thanks, Chels.”
“Anytime. Now let’s go celebrate the turning of this new leaf you keep talking about.”