South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [26]
She walked across the kitchen and through a double swinging door and was behind the registration desk, another massive construction of wood and glass. An enormous, ornate cash register sat on top, and Madeline could not resist reaching out to push the “No Sale” key. The drawer sprang open with a brisk ching that startled her. She eased it shut again and moved around the desk into the front room. Furniture sat covered with sheets, and a rug lay rolled against the far wall. A pendulum clock sat on a shelf, and Madeline could almost hear the Unflappable, eternal ticktock it would make if it was wound. There was no clutter or disorder, no sense of a place packed Up into permanent storage. It was more as if someone had closed down in the fall and would soon be bustling in to open for another season.
She yearned to pull the sheets off everything, Unroll the rug, pull open the drawers of every cabinet and counter, but instead she made herself go to the front hall to find the kicksled. Once she saw it—a sort of wooden chair on runners—and lugged it out the back door, stole a couple of sheets from a china cabinet and a settee and swaddled it into the trunk, she couldn’t make herself drive straight to Bessel Street.
Instead she went back inside. She wandered through every room, climbed every flight of stairs, peered in every closet. She’d stepped back in time. The woodwork and hardware and floors and wallpaper—everything spoke of another era, not so much simpler as more definite, more solid. The place had been built beautifully, but was without ostentation. Each of the twelve guest rooms was furnished with just a bed and dresser and chair. The beds had black metal frames, each with a blue-striped ticking mattress stripped bare, the blankets and pillow stowed in a plastic bag at the foot. Every pine dresser had a china bowl and pitcher, every dangling bulb a frosted glass shade. The blinds were pulled at every window, waiting to be opened and let the light in.
Madeline creaked along the hallways and with every step her enchantment grew. The final set of stairs led to the attic, and she made her way Up, determined to look out the dormered windows she’d seen from the street. At the top of the stairs she pushed a small door open to reveal a large room with rectangles of sunlight falling across the floor—no blinds in these highest windows. There were a few pieces of furniture in a corner, but nothing else. Just a big, empty room. A perfect place for painting. Plenty of light and space, few distractions. She went to the closest north-facing window, and Lake Superior was laid out before her in all its vastness.
Madeline was, suddenly and unequivocally, filled with yearning. This place should be open, running, welcoming visitors, showing itself off, reinstated in its rightful place as queen of the street. Why had Gladys and Arbutus ever closed? The hotel was so beautiful and so ready to work. Maybe it was just too much for them, but if they found someone to help—what a place. If it was open, Madeline could hang out Up here, painting, while the business of the hotel clattered away below her.
For the first time since Emmy died—and before that, before the last battles of the illness had worn them down, before all the years of work and worry and tending to practicalities—Madeline felt a charge of possibility run all the way through her.
A car door slammed on the street below with a muted thump and jolted her back to the moment.
All this dreaminess was brought on by the building—so romantic and lovely, perched in this beautiful spot, so full of potential. She was a sucker for architecture, she always had been—and light, she loved the light on the big lake. And she’d always been insanely sensitive to the spirit of a place. For whatever reason, this hotel called to her at some deep level, called to a self she’d packed Up and put away a long time ago, a self who was