Hotel Stella: a novel

Status: first draft being written.

Hotel Stella has all the charm of a fully restored and modernized grande dame hotel from the 1920s. It also has ghosts and ghastly secrets, including the murders of prohibition-era gangsters, and their ties to a prominent contemporary family.

If only those were the hotel’s worst problems. Now it’s in the sights of corporate types who’ve decided the property is more valuable than the hotel. They’ve dispatched their princess of darkness corporate envoy to find reasons to close the hotel forever, so that it can be demolished and the property redeveloped.

The hotel’s namesake ghost, Stella Gauner, is going to have to join alliances of hotel managers and an odd set of guests to save the hotel. Stella still insists it is her hotel, even though she’s been dead for 100 years.

Excerpt:

Nonetheless, the Barefoot Man surely strained the hotel staff’s ability to pretend not to notice. Black, dark as umber, he was six-foot-six if an inch. His shoulders were like an ox yoke. As he moved, his back, chest, arm and leg muscles rippled inside a  tailored, light blue, seersucker suit. His face was chiseled into a firm jaw, sharp cheekbones, and broad forehead. A set of thick, perfectly styled dreadlocks fell onto his shoulders and back like a designer durag. A reddish-brown bison leather duffle bag strapped from his shoulder. He greeted everyone with an enormous, brilliant smile that made those people happy.

Beneath leg-tight trouser cuffs, he wore no shoes or socks.

He registered as James Johnson, a name confirmed by his driver’s license and credit card. Yet as word spread through staff, an unfounded but nearly universal theme solidified that James Johnson was not his real name.

The woman guest standing at the desk next to him, white, tiny beside him, middle-aged, wearing an ivory business suit and matching shoes, glanced down at his feet. She glanced just a fraction of a second too long, for her impolite indiscretion attracted his eye. She looked away as if she’d been caught passing judgment in a situation that could get her labeled as insensitive or even racist. 

Caught, she was, nonetheless. 

“M’ lady, I have a condition,” he said to her. His voice came soft, slow, low, warm, and smooth, with a British West Indies accent. “I cannot wear shoes.”

She blushed of shame.

“No, I, of, of course,” she stuttered.

He smiled to her, and it was as if the world filled with puppies and old-fashioned love songs. She offered back a smile, and hers looked genuine enough. She looked as if, any more, and her knees might buckle.

The Barefoot Man raised his key card. “Have a nice day, ma’am,” he said.