Free Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia Page A

the Bellweather’s nicest rooms, in a corner of the tower overlooking the rear grounds, the old Olympic-size pool and nine-hole golf course sloping low in the distance. Not that the pool or the golf course has been tended very well; he can’t remember when anyone last played a round. Nonetheless, he’s glad Sheila has recognized the importance of making this singular guest feel comfortable, special, and looked-after.
    “We’re here for whatever you need,” Hastings says brightly. “Stop by the desk, give us a call any time, day or night. Enjoy your stay, Ms.—?”
    “Graves.” The girl shoves the key in her coat pocket, looking down at the counter. “C’mon, Aug,” she says to the dog. “C’mon, let’s go.”
    Hastings watches them disappear into an elevator car. Then he turns to Sheila, who shrugs.
    “Made the reservation two months ago,” she says. “Credit card. E-something Graves.”
    Hastings fiddles with his bow tie.
    “What?” Sheila says.
    “What what?” says Hastings, smiling.
    He shakes his head. Sheila grins and dips her hands into the pockets of the hotel’s uniform maroon blazer. The elbows are shiny with age.
    “It’s the damnedest thing,” he says. “The damnedest thing.”
     
    Hastings is back in 130. He’s lived in this room of the hotel since—well, it’s been years now since Jess left him. It was supposed to be a temporary living situation (can’t beat the commute, he used to joke), but Hastings knows this single, smoking room is where he’ll spend the rest of his life. He’s put a few pictures on the walls, a few articles clipped from the newspaper. Detective novels, old library castoffs, fill the drawers of his nightstand. Hastings is a junkie for crime, for mysteries, particularly of the unsolved variety. The closet is full of his blue and brown and tan suits, the closet floor a jumble of his blue and brown and tan wingtips and loafers. The bathroom sink is speckled with reddish-blond hair from his beard, and his toothbrush is perched at an angle on the porcelain.
    Every morning, Hastings inspects himself in the full mirror on the back of the room door, underneath the emergency-egress instruction placard. His face, the face of the Bellweather—unlike the Bellweather itself—has changed little in the past forty-six years. He is still vaguely boyish, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, and friendly, though his short hair is white at the temples. He hasn’t lost much of his six feet two inches and his teeth are all his own, though he has to wear glasses to read anything, big black frames he chose because they reminded him of a young Michael Caine. For all forty-six of those years, Hastings has tied his own bow tie every day. They are dark red and match the carpet of the Bellweather lobby, or they did years ago, before the carpets had been trod to mauve by hundreds of thousands of feet.
    He naps every afternoon from three to four, the slowest time at the front desk, not that the front desk of the Bellweather exactly has busy times anymore, not even during Statewide. Rehearsals last until four-thirty. There’s an hour break before dinner, when Hastings will be back at his post before retiring for good at eight. But today he can’t fall asleep. Today he closes his eyes and sees that girl, that blurry girl he knows he knows.
    Hastings looks at his watch. Three in the afternoon is the perfect time to call Jess.
    His wife, after she left, moved back to England to be with her family. “So who are Caroline and me, some people you used to work with?” Hastings had shouted, and Jessica—God, he could still picture the look on her face: hurt, tired, and a little righteous—had picked up her suitcase without another word. Her father, a widower, had been a doctor in London and retired to a small village somewhere in Wales.
    After years and years of silence, on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday, Hastings had picked up the phone and called his wife to say hello. There was never anything