“It definitely is,” he answered himself. He was already busy typing something into his phone and consulting the sheet.

It couldn’t hurt just to ask, though. Just for information. After all, Eric was someone Spencer worked with closely, and it was just polite to want to know more about him.

“Spence?” she said. “Is Eric…”

He paused his typing.

“Is he what?”

Nope. She couldn’t do it.

“A good actor?” she heard herself asking. Her voice had gotten weird and high.

“Is he a good actor?” Spencer repeated.

“Yeah…” she said. “It’s interesting. Acting. How do you know if someone is good?”

He just stared at her, which was fair enough.

“I’m just thinking about the basement,” she fumbled. “If they…project a lot. The good actors. Maybe we should put some padding around the basement door.”

This was an extremely bad cover, but Spencer was both distracted and puzzled and decided to let it drop.

“Padding’s a good idea,” he said, turning back to his phone. “I’ll hang some of the rain mats in the stairway. We can buffer the sound a little. Anything that reduces echo is good. We can do that this afternoon.”

“I’ll go start,” she said. “I have a plan.”

There is something about staying in a hotel that makes even the most meticulous and orderly person lose all sense of decorum. It is a place of no shame, where you can use ten towels per shower and dangle them off of anything more sturdy than a wet towel. You can litter the floor with bags, papers, discarded clothing, pillows, wrappers…and much worse things. In fact, Scarlett wasn’t even permitted to turn rooms over by herself until she turned thirteen, and even then she had to have Lola or Spencer with her. They had a special device known as The Claw to pick up anything really scary.

The fine art of hotel laundry is to wash everything using as much bleach as possible without actually dissolving the fabric. When cleaning, you use the most toxic and alarming products on the market—the ones that kill every living thing they touch. The idea is to always destroy what went before.

Before, Scarlett only did the occasional room clean, just as an exercise to learn the family trade. But she was now well-established in the routine of cleaning the Empire Suite every day, usually when Mrs. Amberson went to yoga or dance class or one of her four-hour lunches.

Mrs. Amberson was not like most guests. She actually filled the ancient drawers of the normally unused furniture. Her wardrobe was bursting with clothes. The dressing table was full of little notes, phone numbers, piles of magazines and theatrical publications, and the bedside stand had a neat stack of books on writing, meditation, and natural healing. She had immediately rejected the use of industrial cleaners and sprays and had Scarlett go out and buy a huge bag of organic products and reusable cleaning cloths. It was actually a nice ritual. Scarlett would put in her headphones and tidy up, using the almond wood cleaner, the ylang-ylang bathroom spray, and the vinegar-and-cucumber glass cleaner.