Read Online The Beach Club by Elin Hilderbrand - Free Book Online

stopped at the wooden bridge named for Madaket Millie. A sliver of blue ocean showed beyond the dune grass to his left, and Madaket Harbor, with sailboats bobbing on their bright red moorings, was to his right. Speak to me , he thought. Speak to me now . But it didn’t work this way. He never asked to hear the voice, it just presented itself the way it had his first day on Nantucket. Mack listened, hoping. He needed help—anyone could see that. But Nantucket was quiet. All Mack heard was the wind in his ears.

2
Memorial Day
     
    May 25
    Dear S.B.T.,
    So, we’re at it once again this year! While it’s true I’m not getting any younger, I still have no interest in selling the hotel. My staff is in place, Mack is back running the show, and my wife, Therese, is sitting next to me at the helm. The hotel has been buffed and polished and we look forward to a stellar season. As ever, you are invited to reveal your identity to me and come sit in my office, take in the view and talk. I feel we would have a great deal in common, and maybe after an hour or two of face time you will understand why my response to your offer has to be no, thank you. We’re doing fine .
    Cordially ,
Bill Elliott
    Therese Elliott was only interested in the unhappy people who stayed at her hotel. She, like Tolstoy, found happy people all alike; they were boring, dullards, plukes. And so, Mack dealt with the happy guests (except for Andrea, the woman with the autistic son, but Therese sensed this was a different matter altogether) and he left Therese with the damaged and wounded, the guests who suffered despite their money. They had lost a wife, or a child, or their leg or their breasts to cancer. They assumed responsibility for a parent with Alzheimer’s. They were divorced, widowed, married but alone. They had been abused. They fought suicide, depression, alcoholism.
    Therese worked the reservation phone over the winter in Aspen and she heard all kinds of stories as she booked the rooms. She vividly remembered the day she spoke to Leo Hearn—February 6—it snowed eleven inches the night before, fresh powder, and Bill left the house at nine-thirty for Buttermilk Mountain. Therese’s daughter, Cecily, called at ten—noon on the East Coast where she went to boarding school—to say she had the flu and was puking her guts up. Therese felt both upset and angry—upset that Cecily was sick and so far away, and angry that Bill wasn’t home to worry with Therese because he was too busy skiing the green slopes. It was horribly sad to think of Bill, who had once raced down Jackpot with the best of them, limited to skiing with awkward beginners. Why don’t you stay home with me? Therese had asked. We’ll play cards, go shopping . But Bill got a thrill out of feeling his skis cut through the snow, just a few sweet turns. Therese imagined Bill falling, his body shattering like a teacup. She would be a widow, left to raise a headstrong teenage daughter and run the hotel all alone. Tragic possibilities always lurked near the front of Therese’s mind, just behind her common sense.
    At one o’clock, Leo Hearn called.
    Leo Hearn wasn’t a new client. He’d been coming to the hotel for four or five years and he’d always been Mack’s domain—he was hale, robust, a Man’s Man. He had started a second family in his late fifties: a young wife, two small children. He was a lawyer. In other words, someone who held very little interest for Therese, until this phone call.
    She noticed something new in his voice right away. A softening, a surprising deference.
    “Hello, I’d like to make a reservation for Memorial Day weekend, please,” he said. “I might be too late, but, oh, heck, I hope not. This is Leo Hearn calling from Chicago.”
    “Leo Hearn?” Therese said. The man whose voice boomed through the lobby, making the staff cringe? The man who broke one of Mack’s fingers with his crushing handshake? “Leo, this is Therese Elliott.” She flipped