Hearts Inn

by Lilly R. Mason

  Summary

  Rosalie Campbell is bequeathed a rundown hotel in rural New Mexico in her grandmother’s will. She arrives to discover a dried-out shell of a place that barely makes enough money to stay afloat. In a state of limbo with her girlfriend and accounting job in Philadelphia, Rosalie is keen to sell the hotel and go back to the comfort of her urban life. When new information about her grandmother surfaces and the hotel proves difficult to sell, Rosalie tries to attract buyers by restoring the building to its former glory with the help of Alex Ecker, a local handywoman. In the process, Rosalie learns a few things about hotel management, hard work, and opening her heart.

  hearts inn

  hearts inn

  Lily R. Mason

  Sapphire Books

  Salinas, california

  Hearts Inn

  Copyright © 2018 by Lily R. Mason. All rights reserved.

  ISBN EPUB - 978-1-948232-37-1

  This is a work of fiction - names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without written permission of the publisher.

  Editor - Tara Young

  Book Design - LJ Reynolds

  Cover Design - Treehouse Studio

  Sapphire Books Publishing, LLC

  P.O. Box 8142

  Salinas, CA 93912

  www.sapphirebooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition – November 2018

  This and other Sapphire Books titles can be found at

  www.sapphirebooks.com

  Dedication

  For anyone who ever found themselves in an unexpected desert.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not be what it is without the dozens of people who helped me write it: first and foremost, my longtime collaborator and friend Muriel, who challenges me to make my stories thirty-three percent angstier; the team of beta readers who gave me feedback that made the story so much better; the people who read my previous work and assured me I could be signed by a publisher; the corners of the internet that aren’t horrible; my parents, who took me to New Mexico as a child; my writing group friends Lynn and Autumn who offered enthusiasm and companionship during the writing process; my editor Tara with her sharp eye and cheerful notes; and Chris, whose faith in me and made this process smooth and easy to navigate. Thank you all!

  Chapter One

  Vacancy

  Rosalie Campbell didn’t know what she’d expected to accomplish before her thirtieth birthday, but it certainly didn’t include becoming the manager of a shitty motel in the middle of nowhere. Behind the counter in the lobby of the once-beautiful Hearth Inn, she picked at her nail polish, listening to the drone of the antique air conditioner as it battled with the New Mexico heat. It had been two weeks since Gran had died and one week since Rosalie had arrived to deal with the estate.

  A guest came into the lobby, ruddy complexion highlighted by how sweaty she was. She was round to the point that it looked like someone had inflated her torso and it extended out to her fingers. She spoke to Rosalie in rapid Spanish, the strange and familiar cadence of mumbled couplets and triplets sending Rosalie into a panic.

  Rosalie hated when this happened. It rarely did back home in Philadelphia, but here in Ashhawk, New Mexico, it had happened a dozen times already. A practiced shame flowed through her, heating her face and making her hands fidget. She felt like an interloper: a girl who looked Latina but didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

  “Um, sorry,” she said. “I don’t speak Spanish.”

  She hoped the woman wouldn’t look at her strangely or laugh at her.

  “Oh, uh…” The woman fought giving her a judgmental expression. “We need more towels.”

  “What room?”

  “Six,” the woman said. “Some might say seis.”

  Rosalie looked down at the counter. “I’ll bring some right over.”

  The woman left, and Rosalie paused a moment before following her out of the drab lobby, heat overwhelming her as she walked in front of the hotel. The hotel stood two stories high with little balconies on the top level, and its crumbling exterior was an eyesore. She noted the obvious areas for upgrades: paint the exterior, derust the window frames, replace the dilapidated chairs outside the rooms where guests sat smoking cigarettes and drinking beer near the parking lot. The faded sign of the Hearth Inn that was peeling and sorry for the wear. Several letters were so faint the sign looked like it read Heat In. It was apropos; the heat was the only constant in the town aside from the trickle of truckers and the plodding of time. Below the sign was a small sign reading Vacancy, with a hook in front of it where she would hang the part of the sign reading No if she were to sell out the rooms. The rusted hook hadn’t been used in years.

  As she opened the door to the housekeeping room, Rosalie was met with more dry heat and the choking smell of fabric softener, chemicals, and lint. She held her breath as she found a stack of haphazardly folded towels. The room was filthy, the corners almost obscured by dirt and lint, while the rest of the floor had a layer of fine desert dust spread across it, such that it crunched under her shoes. The shelves opposite the washer and dryer were unorganized and full of empty bottles and rags worn to threads. As she turned to go, she almost tripped over a bottle of bleach that sat uncapped on the floor next to the door.

  Rosalie slammed the towels down on top of the dryer and looked around for the cap. Had the housekeeper really left an open bottle of bleach right there where someone could trip over it?

  Rosalie looked all over for the cap and was about to give up hope of finding it when she spotted it tucked in the corner behind the door, cozying up to a large insect Rosalie didn’t recognize, belly-up, legs curled.

  Rosalie couldn’t hold in a noise of disgust as she gingerly reached for the cap with two fingers, lifting it out of the dust away from the insect and screwing the cap on the bottle. She slung the bottle onto the lowest shelf and grabbed the towels, eager to leave the room.

  When she’d arrived at the hotel for the first time in fifteen years, she realized her childhood memories of the place had been rosy; snapshots of splashing in the pool while Gran watched, roasting marshmallows behind the building, and walking down the street to get pizza every summer were miles away from the rundown building that stood in the same spot. Rosalie only intended to stay in Ashhawk for as long as it took to sell the place and get back to her life in Philadelphia. She couldn’t imagine living here for longer than a few weeks. How Gran had lived here for forty years baffled her.

  Rosalie knocked on the door of room six, bracing herself with an obligatory customer service smile. When the door opened, she held the towels forward. The woman grabbed them without a word of thanks, then said, “You know, our bathroom isn’t very clean.”

  Rosalie tried to maintain her professional smile, though her will to do so vanished.

  “I’ll get someone to come clean it.” Rosalie gritted her teeth to avoid snapping at the woman. She wished she could tell her she was no happier with the accommodations herself, that she’d been saddled with this shitty hotel and had no more desire to run it than she wanted to clean the woman’s bathroom.

  Rosalie went back to the housekeeping room, tied up her long, dark hair, and put on a housekeeping apron. She bit her lip the entire time she scrubbed the bathroom, mouth pulled together tight to avoid cursing at the guests. When she finished, she went back into the lobby, relishing the coolness but choking
on the Freon-thickness of the air. She opened a rickety file cabinet, flipped to the sparse personnel files, and opened the record of the single other employee currently working at Hearth Inn, an old woman named Susan who couldn’t see six inches in front of her face.

  When Rosalie had seen the poor state of things, her first impulse had been to fire Susan. But there weren’t enough hours in the day for Rosalie to do all the housekeeping herself, and Susan had worked at Hearth for thirty-five years. Rosalie didn’t want to fire her without an immediate replacement and plan for her retirement. Rosalie was there temporarily, and Susan appeared to be related to one of the local Native tribes.

  Rosalie sat back down behind the counter, trying to make sense of a business she knew nothing about. Having a degree in accounting, Rosalie had foolishly thought she should know how to run the business until she could sell it. It couldn’t be too hard, so long as the rooms were clean and there were no bedbugs. She could manage the books and the payroll and, if worse came to worse, call law enforcement to ask some of the less savory guests to leave. But the job was proving more difficult than she imagined, which made her miss the predictability of her nine-to-five office job in a clean, well-maintained building in Philadelphia terribly.

  The lobby was more spacious than it needed to be. A worn carpet bearing the brands of local ranchers stretched from the tired wooden counter across the large room to a stone fireplace that hadn’t seen a flame in decades. There was a single sagging couch set against the window opposite the door, and light strained in through dusty blinds. A weary plant drooped in the corner. The walls and furniture were too dark, all wood and forest greens and browns. At twenty-nine years old, with her pink blouse and lively brown eyes, Rosalie was the youngest thing in the room. But listening to the drone of the air conditioner drown out her computer speakers as the Internet struggled to load even the simplest pages, Rosalie felt herself aging.

  As she flipped through a file reading REV MGMT 07, the air conditioner in the window sputtered and coughed. Used to the constant drone, Rosalie looked up. The lights flickered. She held her breath, hoping it was a blip. The lights came back on, then flickered off again, remaining off as the air conditioner whined to a halt, leaving Rosalie in a silent panic.

  She turned to her computer, determined to call a handyman to come fix whatever had gone wrong, but realized the Internet wouldn’t work without power. Her cellphone got some data service in this part of the state, though it was unreliable. Rosalie figured it was her bad luck when no signal came up and even a basic search yielded a blank page.

  A large man in a denim shirt with the sleeves pulled off opened the door, letting the bells clang against the glass. He was a regular who came to stay when he and his “lady friend” were on the outs.

  “Power’s out,” he said.

  “Sorry about that. I’m working on it.”

  The man nodded and turned his burly body back toward the outside of the hotel.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know any reputable electricians in town, would you?” Rosalie asked.

  “Check the fuse box first. No use paying for an electrician to come flip a switch for you.”

  Rosalie bit her lip and nodded, feeling foolish. She was a numbers and lines girl, not someone useful with her hands. She debated asking the man if he knew where the fuse box was but didn’t want to embarrass herself.

  Rosalie left the fading chill of the office and wandered around the building. She had no idea where the circuit breaker might be, but looking for it was better than doing nothing. She walked around the building, finding nothing resembling a utility box, though she did locate the gas meter. Then she remembered the maintenance shed out back where there had once been a fire pit for roasting marshmallows.

  The land at the back of the hotel sat crisping in the sun, the cracked earth and scraggly, dry shrubbery appearing exactly as they had fifteen years ago. A pile of bricks lay forgotten where the fire pit used to be. The land stretched on and on out into the desert, and Rosalie wasn’t sure where the property line was. In the distance were sage-colored hills, appearing motionless by day but alive with the sound of coyotes at night.

  Daring to enter the rundown shed with its clutter of old tools and cobwebs, Rosalie saw a promising lead—a metal box against the wall. Grateful it wasn’t locked or too far inside the hazardous shed, she opened it, squinting to see one of the main breakers was flipped in the wrong direction. Faintly proud of herself, she reached forward. But before her hand met the switch, anxiety took hold of her. What if there was something wrong with the electrical system? What if she got shocked or electrocuted? Glad the soles of her shoes were rubber, she lifted the hem of her blouse, feeling it pull tight around her waist, and used the material to flip the switch from off to on. She heard a few air conditioning units shake back on toward the hotel, but nothing else happened. She let her shirt fall back against her body and tiptoed out of the shed, careful not to let her foot catch on a wayward shovel.

  Back in the office, the lights were on, the printer was making a faint buzzing sound, and nothing was on fire. But after the door closed behind her and the bells clanged, she realized her air conditioner hadn’t come back to life. She approached it, frowning at the ancient monstrosity. She turned the dials and pressed all the buttons, but nothing happened. She unplugged it and plugged it in again, hoping it just needed a reboot. Still nothing happened.

  Fed up with the crumbling building, Rosalie let out an exasperated sigh. Living in New Mexico was bad enough with air conditioning. She debated retreating to her room to lose herself in a book but knew she needed to work if she was to ever escape Ashhawk.

  She plopped down in her swiveling chair, twisting her hair into a bun that unraveled down her back as soon as she leaned forward. She Googled HVAC Ashhawk, hoping for a few seconds as the Internet chugged along that a decent result would appear. But the closest HVAC service was in Albuquerque. Rosalie couldn’t live without the AC, so she packed up her laptop, locked the front door, taped up a sign with her cellphone number on it, and got into Gran’s vintage Oldsmobile parked outside. The diner down the street would have air conditioning, Internet, and most importantly, coffee.

  Rosalie drove down the street, taking in the sleepy buildings and faded signs of the storefronts. When she’d arrived back in Ashhawk, she was struck by how rundown it was from baking in the Southwest sun for so long. It was as though time had left it behind, and the residents who hadn’t left limped along its pothole-ridden streets in beat-up cars and rattly old trucks. Freight truckers came through on occasion but not at the rate they had before the mega truck stop had been built one town up. The town wanted for everything but heat and sky.

  Ashhawk’s inhabitants were half rednecks with beer guts and nicotine stains on their teeth and half granola-eating hippies who had wandered away from Santa Fe. Rosalie wasn’t sure whom she wanted to steer clear of more—the men who ogled her from under their sweat-stained baseball caps or the women with straggly braided hair asking her what her sun sign was. On both sides were descendants of Hispanic settlers and several Native American tribes forced to relocate or assimilate countless times in the last two hundred years. It was an odd combination of people to run into at the gas station or drugstore.

  A few well-meaning townspeople had come to visit Rosalie during her first week in town. A woman wearing a ghastly teal blouse, her cheeks ruddy and her gut spilling over her jeans, came bearing a sausage casserole, saying she hoped to see Rosalie at the next Catholic service. Another woman came sliding into the hotel lobby on silent sandals, wearing a hemp skirt, bearing a vegan lasagna. She invited Rosalie to a yoga and meditation group and made a few unsolicited suggestions for effective aromatherapy. Not wanting to engage with either side of town, Rosalie had kept to herself. Cleaning up after Susan and organizing the last twenty years of files kept her busy enough.

  Rosalie pulled into the parking lot of the diner and slipped inside, eager for the relief of cool air and caffeine. The waitr
ess working the afternoon shift was young and attractive, with blond hair and pale pink skin that stuck out among the tan-skinned masses of Ashhawk. Rosalie studied her painted nails, simple jewelry, and a figure that didn’t stretch or pull her white-cuffed diner uniform. She didn’t wear a name tag, and Rosalie couldn’t discern anything about her other than she wasn’t a redneck or a hippie. Without a topic of conversation, she retreated to a table with her laptop.

  Since the last time she’d been in Ashhawk, Rosalie had busied herself with school, work, and a few relationships. The latest girl, Tara, had crept along the boundary of Rosalie’s comfort zone while Rosalie debated how far to let her in. She adored Tara’s company, and she knew the ease with which they conversed was rare. But she found herself needling through Tara’s personality for flaws, looking for a reason to avoid entanglement. She hadn’t found any but had kept Tara at a distance that was perhaps unnecessary.

  Just when she’d decided to step into their relationship with both feet, Rosalie had gotten the news she was now the owner of a shoddy hotel in the middle of nowhere, and they had agreed to reassess where they were when Rosalie returned. They’d talked on the phone once since Rosalie had arrived in Ashhawk, but the conversation had been superficial. Rosalie didn’t know if she should be relieved or sad about it.

  Rosalie decided to look through pictures of her friends on Facebook to remind herself of home. A picture of Tara and some of her friends popped up first thing. Looking at her didn’t bring on the sadness or guilt she’d expected. She missed Tara, but only in the way she missed many things about Philadelphia. Tara was familiar, while everything in Ashhawk was not. She felt only a dull ache paired with a familiar comfort.