Maybe the new owners could do something, but Greta wasn’t holding out much hope.
Kind of like how she felt at that moment. Hopeless.
The sky had darkened and the ice had turned even sharper. The nasty storm made it seem so much later. She could just see the top floor of the hotel in the distance. The best suite in the place — the one they reserved for the most wealthy of patrons — shone like a beacon. It both pulled her closer and taunted her for the distance still between them. And reminded her that the maids in the housekeeping department had forgotten to turn the lights off up there.
Greta knew that no one had reserved the suite for Christmas. Or New Years. Or for any time in the foreseeable future.
Much like the rest of the nearly two hundred fifty hotel rooms in the building. They’d sit empty for the holidays — once their biggest time of the year. A miserable end for the year that came just in time to greet the miserable beginning of the next. Greta’s heart hurt for the hotel. It hadn’t deserved to be forgotten.
The hotel had been built in the late 1910s and had pulled families for the holidays from as far as Chicago and St. Louis and even Philadelphia. Then in the late 1940s, everything just stopped. People just didn’t want to come to southern Indiana anymore.
That was something Greta — a native to the area — had never understood. She loved it, despite the poverty that many counties faced. She loved being able to walk to every place she needed to go — except work — and loved being able to call the people she saw by their first names. This area meant home, and she would never leave.
She’d done that once. And only once. And had it not been for her to get her degree, she wouldn’t have done it then. She’d been planning since the age of sixteen to one day take over the running of the hotel where all of her grandparents had worked, where her parents had met and worked, where she had worked her first job, where her brother still worked to this day as Director of Food and Beverage after his first job waiting tables since the age of fifteen. Now, Jubilee Resort Hotel was as much a part of her family as anything or anyone.
And as acting head of the hotel now she could only hope she was the first choice for the permanent position, once the new owners arrived and implemented whatever changes they wanted. Otherwise she was terrified the hotel would be lost.
She’d do the job, and gladly. But she had to survive Stormzilla, first.
A quarter mile separated her and the hotel, yet the light that guided her seemed so much farther away.
Why hadn’t she just stayed at the hotel to begin with?
It would have made her life a whole lot less complicated.
Astraea Press
Pure. Fiction.
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Bed, Breakfast, and Beyond Page 22
