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A flickering light for a twenty-four-hour hotel in downtown Bar Harbor beckoned Grant Griffin as he eased his car through the impenetrable snowfall of late November. Under this shimmering snowfall, Bar Harbor looked picture-perfect, like a miniature village beneath the orb of a snow globe. This late at night on Thanksgiving, the streets ached with emptiness; cars parked on either side of Main Street took on the heaviness of many inches of snow already and, being Maine vehicles, prepared for still more before the morning light.
Grant had never been to Bar Harbor, despite his suggestion that he and Casey take the kids there for a hike through Acadia National Park, whenever that had been. Fifteen years ago? Maybe more? Regardless, Casey had scoffed at the idea and pointed out that she and her sisters had made a forever-pact never to darken a single Bar Harbor doorway. “It’s my father’s territory. You know how I feel about Adam Keating.” Times had changed; the temperature had shifted. Grant felt like a man who’d stepped onto a movie set, armed with a script for a very different film. The woman who’d just sent him to the door with the threat of divorce had very much looked like the vibrant, gorgeous creature he’d committed his life to twenty-four years ago. To hear a voice that ached with such nostalgia and love for him, then to toss him out like yesterday’s garbage— it nearly sliced him in two.
The downtown hotel seemed not to have a name. It was located within a large colonial house, seemingly transported from a long-ago family home to a creaky, nearly-haunted locale that accepted weary travelers just passing through. Grant couldn’t envision anyone stopping here with their children for vacation. Even still, as he stepped through the front door, the receptionist greeted him warmly, with a droopy-eyed smile and a slow-worded, “Hello. Welcome to Bar Harbor.”
Grant paid for a single room for one night. “Do you think that room will remain available over the weekend?”
The receptionist, a middle-aged man who wore a nametag that read, “Tyler,” wore a golden band around his ring finger. The fat of his finger bulged out around it. Grant wondered if Tyler’s wife detested his late hours at the hotel. Perhaps she liked having the bed to herself, if only a little bit.
“Oh, sure. It’s not tourist season around here, as you can tell,” Tyler pointed out. “We don’t get many guests here at the hotel.” He leaned down as his voice grew oddly sinister. “If you ask me, they should close this place down from November to March. But don’t tell my superiors that. I need this job.”
Grant told him he wouldn’t tell. This seemed to please Tyler, who passed him his room key, a heavy, antique thing and informed him that his room was on the second floor.
“There’s a bar in the back,” Tyler said as Grant grabbed his suitcase. “We don’t close up till three in the morning if you’d like a nightcap.”
He could certainly use a nightcap or two, considering what just happened. Perhaps Tyler sensed this in Grant’s face.
Well, the black eye was certainly a dead giveaway.
Grant headed up the creaky staircase to drop his suitcase off in room 27. The room offered a single queen-sized bed with four posters, an antique nightstand, and what looked to be a Walmart-brand wardrobe, which was a funny contrast to the other old-world artifacts within the room. There was a reason the place was cheap and empty. Its commitment to detail seemed inarticulate, at best.
The bar was located in the back room of the old colonial. It featured a wrap-around mahogany bar, with a plaque that explained that it had been taken directly from an old bar that had been quite famous during Bar Harbor’s epic whaling days, the likes of which the little village hadn’t seen in over one hundred years. The man behind the counter was perhaps forty, forty-one, with a clean-shaven face and a little bowtie. Grant imagined he detested the bowtie— that he’d toiled over the tie-up of it every day of his career at the hotel bar. The bartender churned a towel around and around the edge of a beer glass as he greeted Grant.
“Hey there. Happy Thanksgiving.”
Grant slid upon a stool and nodded. He could feel the bartender zero in on his black eye; he could further feel the bartender’s hesitation about bringing it up. He seemed to think better of it.
“What can I get for you?”
Grant ordered a whiskey neat, as was his recent custom after multiple business trips all over the world. People respected you when you drank your whiskey neat, and respect was something he required in the world of sales. Most people these days looked at him with the modicum of respect he’d felt he always deserved; most people, that is, except his wife, who looked at him with a mix of sorrow lined with furious anger.
When the bartender placed the whiskey upon the counter, another man entered the bar. The bartender’s smile cracked open.
“Hey there. I didn’t expect you tonight.”
The handsome stranger brought a hand forward to shake the bartender’s warmly. “I brought you a slice of pie.”
“You shouldn’t have,” the bartender returned.
“I knew you were stuck here all night. Doesn’t seem right on a holiday like today.”
“I might have to stay the night, too,” the bartender continued. “That snow out there seems colossal.”
“It isn’t letting up; I’ll tell you that,” the stranger returned. He glanced over toward Grant and nodded firmly before ordering himself a whiskey, as well.
“It’s whiskey night here at the hotel, I see,” the bartender joked.
The stranger sat three stools away from Grant as the bartender poured his drink with the firm flick of his wrist.
“I don’t know that I could put a beer in my belly after all that eating,” the stranger continued.
His accent was strange, Grant realized now. He’d done enough traveling over the years to place accents rather well. This one? It seemed oddly Midwestern, with strange little pockets of outlier accents, as though he mixed and matched where he’d lived before this.
“You’re in good with those Harvey sisters,” the bartender remarked. “They won’t let you get away without a full belly.”
“My belt has gone up a notch. I’ll tell you that,” the stranger said with a boisterous laugh.
Grant’s heart seized with sudden alarm. He sucked down too much whiskey as he contemplated what to do next. This stranger knew the “Harvey Sisters,” seemingly so well that he’d been invited to Thanksgiving Dinner. Was it possible that Casey had some sort of romantic affair? Oh, but no. That was ridiculous. She’d tried to reach him the previous evening, waiting around for him all day, but he’d been occupied. Plus, Casey wasn’t the sort to cheat.
Was she?
Or perhaps he now just projected other situations upon her.
How well could you ever really know someone?
“They had seven pies,” the stranger continued. “I swear that we ate from one in the afternoon until eleven at night. It was like some kind of contest. After being shuffled from foster homes and orphanages, I tell you what, that was the Thanksgiving Dinner I always dreamed about.”
The bartender laughed appreciatively. “If there’s anyone who deserves it, it’s you, Luke.”
Luke. Grant had never heard the name before. He shifted strangely atop his stool so that it creaked beneath him. The bartender asked if he wanted another whiskey, and Grant requested a double.
“I’ve got to say,” Luke, the stranger, began then. “Didn’t expect to see anyone here at the hotel so late at night.” His gaze flicked toward Grant with curiosity.
Perhaps this was the sort of town where you just talked to whoever sat at the bar with you. Grant wasn’t entirely sure he was up for such banter. He could hardly be honest with his wife. He could hardly be honest with himself.
“I got caught in the storm,” Grant offered, words that weren’t entirely a lie but weren’t entirely the truth, either.
“You from Maine?” Luke asked.
“Not originally, but I’ve lived here the past twenty-four years. In Portland, though. Not Bar Harbor.”
“Wow. Yeah. I’m not from here originally, either.”
“I can hear it in your O’s,” Grant said, accidentally smiling.
“Ah right. Midwestern, through and through. Guess I can’t ever shake it.”
Grant lifted his new double whiskey toward Luke— a friend, apparently, of the Harvey Sisters, then cheered him. “To coming here from far, far away.”
“And finding home,” Luke affirmed before he drank the rest of his whiskey and ordered another.
“Your Thanksgiving sounds a lot better than mine,” Grant offered, surprising himself.
Luke arched an eyebrow as the bartender poured him another drink. “It all came as a surprise for me. I started working at the Keating Inn and Acadia Eatery a few years back. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
Grant admitted that he had, without telling Luke, that Casey had demonized the inn as “a place she wouldn’t go if it was the last place on earth.”
“I developed a close relationship with a man named Joseph Keating. An incredible human being. The kind of father I always dreamed of.”
Joseph Keating? Casey’s Uncle Joe? Grant stitched his brows together as Luke highlighted this strange, alternate reality. As far as Grant knew, Joe Keating had been Adam Keating’s right-hand man, another key figure in Adam’s abandonment and the downfall of Jane Harvey.
“He and his brother passed along the Keating Inn and Acadia Eatery to his brother’s daughters. He always thought there were three of them,” Luke said as his eyes shimmered with excitement.
“Not so!” The bartender piped up from the far end of the bar as he continued to cleanse more beer glasses. Grant wondered who’d drunk from those glasses. It seemed unlikely that anyone had entered the shadowed doors of this hotel bar throughout Thanksgiving Day. Perhaps this was his way of killing time. Perhaps the bar itself was haunted— like something out of The Shining, and Grant would awaken to learn that Luke and the bartender had died seventy-five years before.
“Not so?” Grant echoed as his heart pulsed with intrigue. “What do you mean?”
“Ah, you’re not from around here. What do you care?” Luke continued.
“I don’t. Just need a bit of gossip to put me to sleep,” Grant offered.
“They came back one by one,” Luke went on. “Nicole first, then Heather and then Casey.”
Grant inhaled sharply at the way Luke said Casey’s name. It was so familiar to him, as though he’d said it thousands of times. How could this man look Grant in the eye and say his wife’s name without knowing who he was? Grant felt like a traveler from another dimension.
“They’ve all been through so much heartache,” Luke said. “The gamut, really.”
“Divorce. Death. You name it, they’ve been through it,” the bartender affirmed, as though he was a know-it-all on the history of the Harvey Sisters.
“Heather... she lost her husband in a truly tragic way last year,” Luke said.
Grant’s heart darkened at the memory. Before his death, Max had been a spectacular person and one of Grant’s greatest friends. When Grant had been a stay-at-home father throughout Casey’s prosperous years in architecture, Max had been the first number Grant had called for assistance or just someone to talk to. It was tough to stay at home with two young children, a fact that made Grant frequently spout to colleagues and friends across the continent that “stay-at-home moms and dads deserve a full-time wage and a medal.” Back then, Max and Heather had Kristine and Bella to raise— and several gut-bustlingly hilarious and head-scratching stories about raising twins. Often, Grant and Max had had late-night conversations while the children slept on.
“And I think she just wanted to look for answers about her past,” Luke continued. “Boy, did she find answers.”
The bartender whistled, impressed. There was a strange thudding sound between Grant’s ears. Whatever this story was, it was big, and Casey had avoided telling it to him altogether.
“Anyway, Adam Keating was never her father. Her mother had tricked him, taken all his money and most of his properties, and then ultimately left him with toddler Heather, whom he eventually passed off to Jane Harvey— Nicole and Casey’s mother, because he could hardly care for himself,” Luke continued as his eyes widened. He placed both his hands near his ears and exploded them out like fireworks. “The Harvey Sisters could hardly believe it. It was like the world they’d once known no longer existed.”
“Gosh...” Grant pressed his hands across his cheeks. The edge of his first finger ebbed against his black eye and a jolt of pain permeated up and down his face.
How had Casey kept all this from him? Why hadn’t she at least mentioned this during one of their many phone calls, that Heather’s parents weren’t Jane and Adam? Sure, their phone calls had become briefer and quieter over the past few months. But Grant had thought that Casey would have verbalized it if something truly pressing had come up.
This was hypocrisy. He knew that. He’d been incredibly silent about a number of things.
Even still, this was proof of another crack within their relationship.
“You look white as a sheet,” Luke noted now, incredulous.
Grant guffawed. “Sorry. Didn’t get enough to eat today, I guess.”
“You’re just about the only person in Bar Harbor who feels that way, I reckon,” Luke said. “You want a slice of pie?”
Grant sensed that a small forkful of Heather’s apple pie would send him spiraling. It would take him to family reunions and Christmas celebrations and random birthday parties across multiple decades. It would stir within him a longing for a reality he could no longer return to.
“I’ve never seen someone grapple so much with whether or not he wants a slice of apple pie,” Luke joked now.
Grant cleared his throat and tried his best to look distracted, as though he hadn’t heard. The bartender and Luke exchanged looks that seemed to say, “Is this man a drunk, or what?” Grant’s ego bruised slightly like the black ring around his eye.
“I guess I’d better use that bed I paid for upstairs,” Grant grunted. He splayed a twenty across the counter and told the bartender to keep the change. As he made his way toward the doorway, Luke called out to him again.
“You never said where you were from— before Maine.”
Grant clipped his hand around the edge of the doorway. After a long pause, he directed his eyes back toward Luke’s.
“Further west than you,” he said finally. “I had it in my mind I was a cowboy. Pretty stupid, huh?” He then disappeared into the shadows of the creaking hotel and ultimately collapsed in a heap on the mattress with the big scoop in the middle. It was a blessing that he did not dream.