The Room Over the Boathouse

Camille looked away first. She did not drop her eyes or flinch. She turned her back to the window and went on kneading, as if a delivery had arrived that she had not ordered and somebody else could sign for it.

Gideon had run the drive up from New York in his head a dozen times in the last eleven days. In none of the versions had she done that. It hit him harder than he had allowed for, and he stood in the mud beside the car and took it.

He had known she was here. Her name was on the payroll schedule in the folder on the passenger seat: C. Bouchard, Pastry Chef / Head of Kitchen. He had read that line the day the purchase closed, and then he had cleared his calendar and come himself to do a job that any of four people in his office could have done. He could at least admit that to himself.

“Hallett,” Winnie Ostrander said. She came down the porch steps slowly, a white braid over one shoulder and half a biscuit in her hand. “As in the letterhead.”

“As in the letterhead.”

“And Jamie Rourke was who, exactly?”

“James is my middle name. Rourke is my mother’s maiden name.”

“So you lied to me with spare parts.”

“Yes, ma’am. I did.”

She looked him up and down. She had rented him a room six summers ago on a handshake and a deposit, and she had fed him at the staff table for eleven weeks. She was owed a better answer than that, and so was the woman behind the window. He did not have one that would fit in a driveway.

“You left a note for the kitchen,” Winnie said. “You didn’t leave one for me. I had fourteen children signed up for sailing that Tuesday and nobody to teach them.”

“I know. I’m sorry for that.”

“Hm.” She finished the biscuit. “Well. You own the place now, so I suppose I can’t have you thrown off it. What do you want to see?”

“All of it, and I’d like to start with the parts you’d rather I didn’t.”

That got him a sharper look, and it was a little less cold than the last one. “Get your boots, then,” she said. “Those shoes won’t last.”

He had boots in the trunk. He changed into them in the drive, took the folder off the seat and followed her in.

He was good at this. It was the one thing about himself he was sure of. He had been chief executive of Hallett Hotels since September of 2021, and for most of those five and a half years he had walked buildings. He had walked fourteen city hotels until he knew which elevator stuck and which night manager drank. A building told the truth about itself if you looked at the ceilings, the baseboards and the faces of the staff.

The Larkspur’s ceilings were mostly sound in the main house. The lobby floor was wide old pine, waxed and uneven. A fire was laid in the grate and not lit, and he took that to be Winnie saving on wood. The reservations book on the desk was an actual book.

“May I?”

“You own that too.”

He turned the pages. Tonight there were two rooms taken. Wednesday had one and Friday had nine. He turned back through March and found long white weeks with a Saturday filled in here and there.

“Who books in April?”

“Birders. A couple from Montreal who’ve come every spring since 1998. People who got the dates wrong.”

“What’s your repeat rate?”

“Over half. If they come once, they come back. The trouble is getting them here once.”

“When did Northeast Heritage last spend money on marketing?”

“They sent me a box of brochures in 2019.” Winnie folded her arms. “That was also the last year we were full for a holiday weekend. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, but nobody ever asked me.”

“I’m asking you.”

“I noticed.”

They went upstairs. The rooms in the main house were plain and clean and smelled of line-dried cotton. The mattresses were good. The bathrooms were thirty years old, but somebody had regrouted the tile by hand, carefully. He ran the taps and counted how long the hot water took. He opened windows. He stood in the Champlain Room, which she said she had made up for him, and looked down the long lawn to the lake and the mountains behind it. That view was worth more per night than she had ever dared to charge.

Then they went through the fire door into the north wing.

The smell reached him first, wet plaster and old carpet. There were eight doors, numbered fifteen to twenty-two, and every one of them stood open so the air could move. In Room 19 a brown stain the shape of a continent covered half the ceiling. A plastic bucket sat under the middle of it, a third full.

“Since 2024?” he said.

“March of 2024. It had been dripping for two winters before that. Then a piece of ceiling came down on a made bed and I shut the lot.”

“Is there an attic hatch?”

There was one, at the end of the corridor. Winnie watched him take off his overcoat and jacket and fold them over the banister. She held the ladder without being asked. He went up with the flashlight on his phone and spent ten minutes on his knees on the joists.

When he came down there was a cobweb in his hair and his shirt cuffs were grey.

“It isn’t the shingles,” he said. “The flashing has failed in the valley where this wing meets the main roof. Water’s been running down the inside of that joint for years. Somebody’s patched it from above with tar.”

“Three times. I have the invoices.”

“I’d like to see them. The roof boards are black for about twelve feet either side. That’s a real repair and it will need a roofer to price it. But the rafters I could reach are dry and hard.” He brushed off his knees. “The wing isn’t rotten, Mrs. Ostrander. It has a bad roof, and that can be fixed.”

She did not answer right away. She looked at Room 19 and then at him.

“I had a man from Northeast Heritage up here two years ago,” she said. “He stood where you’re standing, in clean shoes, and wrote ‘north wing, end of useful life’ on a clipboard.”

“Then he didn’t go up the ladder.”

He put his jacket back on and did the arithmetic aloud, because she ought to hear it from him and not from a memo.

“You ran thirty-one percent occupancy last year. On twenty-two rooms, that’s under seven rooms a night. But you’ve only had fourteen rooms to sell. If you filled every bed you have, every night, the best this inn could report would be sixty-four percent. It can’t look healthy on paper while these eight doors are open. How many weddings did you turn away last year?”

“Six. They liked the lawn. I couldn’t sleep the families.”

“And you lost four hundred and ten thousand dollars.”

“We did.” She said it without ducking. “Nineteen people work here year-round, Mr. Hallett. Most of them have been here longer than you’ve been shaving. I’m not going to tell you the numbers are good. I’m telling you who the numbers are.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

He thought of the staff table in the summer of 2021, and the gardener who had taught him to splice rope, and the housekeeper who had cut his hair on the porch. “I ate lunch with them for eleven weeks,” he said. “I remember who they are.”

Winnie’s mouth tightened. He could not tell whether that had helped him or hurt him.

She went down to find the roofing invoices. Gideon stayed in the corridor and opened the folder on the windowsill of Room 19.

The acquisition memo was nine pages long. He knew it nearly by heart. Hallett Hotels had paid $23.5 million for the four inns, and three of them were sound. The fourth section was headed Larkspur Inn, Saxby Point, VT, and under the heading were last year’s figures: revenue of $1.48 million, a loss of $410,000, eight rooms out of service. Below that was the paragraph about Alder Shore Homes, who had offered $6.4 million for the eleven acres and their nine hundred feet of shoreline. They meant to take the inn down and cut the land into fourteen house lots. The offer ran until the thirtieth of June.

It was a good offer, and he was too honest about money to pretend otherwise. Selling this one property would bring back more than a quarter of what the company had paid for all four.

In the margin beside the paragraph, in green ink and square block capitals, was one word: SELL.

Desmond Pike wrote everything in green and always had. He had been the company’s chief operating officer since Gideon was ten years old, and his margins had steered Gideon through every hard decision of the last five years. Desmond was very seldom wrong about a number, and this note was not really wrong either. It was a judgment made from Madison Avenue by a man who had not been up the ladder.

Gideon had put this inn on the list himself. He knew what that looked like, and he knew what the board would say if they ever learned why. The board would meet on Saturday, the twenty-sixth of June, to decide. He had made up his mind on the drive north that they would meet here, in the Larkspur’s own dining room, and look at the place before they voted on it.

That left him seventy-five days to find out whether SELL was the truth.

He closed the folder. He had put off the kitchen as long as he decently could.

The pastry kitchen was at the back of the house, and he could have found it blind. It was warm now, and it smelled of butter and caramelized sugar, as it had when he was twenty-seven. He had spent five years not thinking about that smell. He stopped in the doorway until he was sure of his face.

She was alone, portioning dough on a scale at the long bench. A blue bandana held back her curls. There was a burn scar on her left forearm, a pale pink bar the width of an oven rack, that he had never seen before. She was thinner in the face than she had been at twenty-five and she stood straighter. She had been pretty then. Now she had a hard, finished kind of beauty, and it was plain that she had earned every bit of it without any help from him.

“Chef Bouchard,” he said.

“Mr. Hallett.” She did not turn round. Her hands kept moving, cutting and weighing and setting each piece down. “Winnie tells me that’s the name.”

“It is. Camille, I—”

“Chef is fine.”

“Chef.” He came two steps into the room and stopped where the tile changed colour, because it was her kitchen. “I didn’t know whether you’d still be here. I thought, after Lyon—”

She set the bench knife down, flat, with a click. Then she turned and looked at him. Her eyes were the dark brown he remembered. Nothing else in her face was the same.

“I’m going to say this one time,” she said. “You’re the owner. You can walk through my kitchen whenever you like. You can look in my walk-in and count my eggs. Tomorrow at ten o’clock I’ll be in the office, and I’ll give you every number this kitchen has, to the dollar. They’re good numbers, and you’ll want them.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not finished. You may ask me about flour. You may ask what I pay for it and where it comes from and how much of it I go through in a week. Flour, butter, labour, covers. That’s the list. You don’t get to ask me about anything else, and that includes where I’ve been and how I am and what I thought.”

“I owe you an explanation.”

“You owe this inn a fair decision. I’m not collecting on the rest.”

She said it without raising her voice. That was worse than shouting would have been, because it meant she had got through being angry a long time ago and had managed it without him.

He had believed for almost six years that she had got on a plane to France that September, two weeks after he left, and started the year she had been saving for since she was nineteen. He had believed she had got over a sailing instructor quickly. No word had ever come from her. He had asked at home once, that October, whether anything had arrived for a Jamie Rourke, and nothing had. He had taken that for her answer and decided he deserved it. Looking at her now, he still thought he deserved it. He had not expected it to hurt this much to see it on her face.

He could push, or he could do as he was told. He had not come here to take anything else from her.

“All right,” he said. “What flour?”

Her eyebrows went up a fraction. She had expected him to argue.

“King Arthur for the bread. For the laminated doughs I use a low-ash flour from a mill in Quebec, because nothing made on this side of the border behaves the same.”

“What does the Quebec flour cost you?”

“Twenty-six dollars for a fifty-pound bag. It was nineteen in 2023.”

“How many bags a week?”

“Four now. Fourteen in July.”

“So when the season starts, your flour bill more than triples and your prices don’t move.”

“My prices went up a quarter last May.” She picked up the bench knife again. “That was a labour question, and you’re close to the edge of the list. Ten o’clock tomorrow, Mr. Hallett.”

“I’ll be there.”

He went out the way he had come. He noticed in the corridor that his hands were not quite steady, and he put them in his coat pockets.

Winnie was at the front desk with a shoebox of invoices. She had a brass key laid out beside it, the one for the Champlain Room.

“I’d like the room over the boathouse instead,” he said. “If it’s free.”

“It’s been free since the night you left it. There’s a space heater and not much else.”

“That will do.”

She considered him. Then she opened a drawer, hunted in it and took out a smaller key on a loop of tarred twine. He recognised the twine. He had tied it.

“I’ve still got your deposit card in the box,” she said. “It has six hundred dollars on it and an address on East 74th Street. I always did wonder about that address, for a boy who owned one pair of shoes.” She slid the key across. “Dinner’s at the staff table at six, if you’ve the nerve.”

“Not tonight. They should be able to talk about me.”

“They will, whether you’re there or not.”

He carried his bag down the lawn himself. It was two hundred yards from the porch to the boathouse, and the grass was soft and soaked under his boots. The lake was high and brown at the edges with spring runoff. The outside stair still had the loose tread, fourth from the top.

The room was the same. There was the iron bed with the old quilt folded at its foot, faded red and cream. One window looked at the water and the other looked back up the lawn at the inn. He sat down on the bed and the springs made the sound they had always made. For a minute he was twenty-seven with a rope burn on his hand, and he heard a girl with flour in her hair running up the stair, laughing, with something warm from the oven in a tea towel.

He had been happy in this room, and he had not really been happy anywhere since. He made himself admit it, because he was going to be sleeping here.

He worked until the light began to go. Then he took the folder and walked the shoreline north, all the way to the iron pin that marked the edge of the property, to see what $6.4 million bought. It bought cedars and a shale beach and a view of the sun going down behind the Adirondacks, and it was beautiful. Fourteen families would be very happy here, and nobody else would ever stand on this spot again.

He turned to go back, and saw that there were people on the dock.

They were a long way off, small against the pale water. One was a woman in a dark coat. The other was a child, very small, in a life jacket so yellow that it was the brightest thing on the whole shore. The child held the woman’s hand. They walked out a little way along the planks, slowly, and stopped well short of the end. The child crouched to look at something. The woman waited.

It would be a guest’s grandchild, he supposed, or somebody from the village. He had taught children that size to sail off that dock, and for a moment he was only glad that there was still a child on it.

The woman lifted her head and looked toward the boathouse, where he had left the lamp on. She bent and said something. Then the two of them walked back to the shore, a little faster than they had come, and went up the lawn into the dusk.

Gideon stood at the property line with the folder under his arm and watched the yellow jacket until he could no longer see it.
***