We’d just settled into her telling me about the date she’d had the night before when the lobby door blew open on a stiff gust of wind and someone came inside. I didn’t recognize them, and they had a suitcase, so I was assuming it was someone here for early check-in. Easy enough to accommodate at the moment. Shanda and I both faced the new guest and put on our professional smiles. But the guest, a woman somewhere in her middle years, with short black hair and an impressively large pair of sunglasses on, glanced our way, then went to one of the chairs near the fireplace and sat down, her small, rolling suitcase tucked up beside the seat.
“Guess she’s not ready to check in after all,” Shanda leaned in close to whisper. She opened the computer and started scrolling through the guests we were expecting that afternoon.
Only three rooms were checking in today. One with a single woman. One with two men. And the third a two-person reservation with a woman’s name on the booking. The second name wasn’t in our records. Which wasn’t the usual procedure. We liked to have the names of everyone staying in each room—the bosses liked to send follow up marketing to everyone without discrimination. But sometimes people left the names of the other people staying in the rooms off if those other people were minors.
Given who we were expecting, both Shanda and I assumed the guest by the fire must be the woman sharing a room with an unnamed companion. If she was the woman with the single room, she could have come right to the desk and checked in already, getting up to her room early. But if this was the woman with an unnamed companion on her reservation, that unnamed companion wasn’t likely a minor. If a minor, where were they?
So I had to assume that second guest was an adult and the reason the woman by the fireplace was waiting. And since it didn’t look like we were going to get a jump of activity any time soon, Shanda and I went back to quietly talking, keeping our voices low so they didn’t travel across the open lobby.
Still, I was curious. I’m always curious about people. It’s one of the reasons I loved my job. You meet all kinds of people in a New York hotel. Especially a hotel like the Azur Regent.
An hour later, we got our single woman, and the two men, who turned out to be a couple on their honeymoon! So we did a whole thing upgrading their room and getting permission from our day manager, Tara Lang, to have some champaign and chocolates delivered to their room—after checking for allergies, of course.
If we’d known ahead of time, we like to set up rooms especially for honeymooning couples. That’s the benefit of booking a boutique hotel, and the owners encourage it. But we did a whole thing once we did know and hopefully got their honeymoon started right. They picked a good time of year for a honeymoon in New York in some ways. No kid holidays to fill up the museums, there were usually tickets for Broadway shows to be had, and while the weather was pretty iffy this time of year, nothing was packed so you could do most everything.
Once the celebratory setup was done and the happy couple sent up to their room, I glanced across at the woman with the suitcase still sitting and waiting by the fireplace. She was the only one in the lobby now, and she was reading stuff on her phone, not looking bothered by the fact that she’d been waiting for more than an hour. I was tempted to ask if she needed anything, if she wanted to go ahead and check in and get up to her room. We try not to be pushy about these things, but, like I said, it was quiet. And after all the fuss with the happy couple, I had a second wind and was wide awake now.
Shanda shrugged when I suggested talking to the woman and gave me a little hand motion to indicate it was me gonna do it if either of us would. I didn’t mind. Like I said, I’m curious about people. My sister likes to say it’s really me being noisy, and maybe she’s right. But I prefer the word curious.
I rounded the reception desk and crossed the lobby, glancing at a lobby door that remained firmly closed, and out the huge front windows, to a relatively quiet sidewalk as the early evening darkened the street. This time of year, it’s fully dark by five, and we were in that twilight time when lights were starting to come on and things were harder to see than even full night. The Azur Regent was located on a relatively busy block with shops and restaurants and bodegas and us, so the sidewalk was rarely empty. But with the harsh winds blowing, it wasn’t exactly busy outside either.
The lobby’s recessed lighting had come on just a few minutes earlier, slowly rising to make the interior of the lobby a bubble of brightness that only highlighted the gloomy twilight outside.
I stopped close enough to the waiting woman to get her attention but not so close as to be hovering over her—I don’t like to hover over guests—and asked, “Can we help with anything?”
“I’m just waiting for my friend.”
Up close, the woman’s age was still that sort of middle years range that could be hard to tell. Mid to late thirties or early forties. Her makeup was perfect, and her eyes, now she had the sunglasses off, were a very sharp shade of blueish purple that you didn’t see very often. Her dark hair was sleek and smooth. And she wore a perfume I couldn’t place but was willing to bet was expensive based on the subtle musky flower scent that didn’t make my nose twitch. She was the kind of woman I thought of as “put together.” Those people who could wear jeans and a t-shirt and still look styled somehow. She wasn’t wearing jeans and a t-shirt, she was dressed in soft gray wool dress slacks and a cream silk shirt with subtle jewelry that included a necklace with a small diamond charm and dangling earrings, but it was the overall way she presented herself. Just…put together.
“Of course,” I said, again not wanting to rush her, but we weren’t busy so I wanted to make sure she knew we were there to help. “Would you like to check in now and we can send your friend up when they arrive? It’s not a problem. You don’t have to both be here for check in.” Sometimes people assumed they had to check in together. It wasn’t a rule here, though, and I liked to clarify, just in case.
She glanced at the time on her phone, then out the window to the gloomy sidewalk beyond. Finally, she faced me again and smiled. But the smile was strained. I didn’t ask all the questions I had, but my curiosity was definitely peaked.
“Yes. Yes, let’s do that. I wouldn’t mind getting up to the room.”
At the desk, we got the woman checked in, card on file, identification verified, and a nice clean room for her and her small suitcase. Her name was Angela Yergunson. And turned out she was a doctor. I have to say, I’m glad Becky wasn’t there to see that. Didn’t matter what specialty Dr. Yergunson had, Becky would’ve grilled her about baby stuffed noses and asked if that meant Lilith had cancer or something—I am not exaggerating when I say Becky has lost her mind over Lilith being sick.
As we got Dr. Yergunson checked in, I tried for some casual questions—because as I mentioned I’m nosey and we weren’t busy—but she wasn’t very forthcoming. Here on business. Didn’t need tickets or restaurant recommendations. Wouldn’t be needing to extend her stay. No, she didn’t need help with her luggage. Yes, she’d appreciate a call when her friend arrived and checked in.
“May we have a name for the other guest,” I said as I typed in a few notes. “That wasn’t included on the reservation.”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry. I made the reservation and… Well, anyway.” She glanced back toward the big windows, out to the now fully dark sidewalks lit by streetlights shivering in the wind. A gust hit the windows and rattled the panes as she watched. “Her name is Charlene Rhodes. She should have been here already. Her flight was probably just late.”
The last two sentences seemed to be Dr. Yergunson talking to herself, but I said, “With the wind at the moment, there are probably a lot of flight delays. I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”
Dr. Yergunson looked back at me with an obviously forced smile. “Thank you.”
I handed her a room card key and both Shanda and I watched her head toward the elevator bank at the rear of the lobby.
Benjamin came up to the desk from the back where he’d been on a break. And he watched the doctor disappear into the elevator too before saying, “She finally checked in, huh?”
“Percy had to get her moving,” Shanda said.
“I invited her to check in, I didn’t shove her toward the desk.” To Benjamin, I said, “She’s got a friend delayed.”
“She didn’t seem anxious waiting,” Benjamin said.
“She was when she was checking in, though,” Shanda said. “Nervous and jittery. Kept glancing out the windows.”
“She probably just lost track of time,” I said, trying to give the doctor the benefit of the doubt.
Honestly, if we weren’t so slow, none of us would have noticed her waiting and slow to check in. We might have noted the jitteriness about her friend not being here yet, because most of us at the desk liked to pay attention to how the guests were feeling at check-in. But it wouldn’t have been a big thing that we thought about for long. Because when we’re busy, we’re hopping, and no one had time.
With things so slow, though, even the relatively innocuous can become interesting.
And I was interested in Dr. Yergunson and her mysterious companion who wasn’t here yet.
Or maybe I was just sleep deprived.
Two
By the time my shift ended, we still hadn’t seen Dr. Yergunson’s companion checking in. Charlene Rhodes was either very delayed in her travel or was going to be a no-show. I was curious enough to mention it to Dan Long, the regular overnight clerk, but I was too tired to get more involved than that. Going home to a less sick but still fussy Lilith and my still fussy, medically obsessed sister wasn’t going to help with the rest.
The next day, I was just as exhausted, but we’d gotten a few hours sleep in a row and that helped more than you’d think. So I wasn’t falling asleep in my lunch that day, even if I was a bit of a walking zombie.
Since I’d been thinking about it overnight, as a way to distract my mind from all the talk of deadly childhood illnesses, the first thing I asked Miguel when I got in was whether Charlene Rhodes had ever shown up.
Miguel had to check the computer. “Not that we’re showing in the booking,” he said. “Doesn’t mean she isn’t here, though.”
