The old registers were kept in the basement, in a room behind the furnace that Gus called the Archives and everybody else called the room behind the furnace.

Nell slept until two in the afternoon, badly, and dreamed about switchboard lamps. When she came down, the Sunday brunch crowd was gone and the lobby was full of suitcases waiting for Monday. She found Gus in the boathouse, winterizing the rowboats, and asked him if he still had the key to the room behind the furnace.

He looked at her a long time. "You're making it into one of your paperbacks," he said.

"Mrs. Aldrich already told me not to."

"Then you'd better not tell her." He wiped his hands on a rag and took a ring of keys off a nail. "Come on."

*

The registers stood on steel shelves in order, one fat green ledger for every summer since 1911, their spines stamped in gold that had mostly flaked away. The room smelled of dust and heating oil. Gus pulled the chain on the bare bulb and ran a finger along the shelf, past the war years, past the fifties, and stopped.

"Sixty-two," he said, and handed it to her. "I was nineteen. Carried bags that summer. Fifty cents a bag and I thought I was rich."

Nell opened it on the hood of an old chest freezer that hadn't run since the Johnson administration and turned the heavy pages to the end of August. Labor Day weekend. Saturday, September 1, 1962. The names were in a dozen different hands, some in pencil, some in ink, a scrawl of families and honeymooners and salesmen, and there, near the bottom of the page, in a careful, looping hand she had seen twelve hours ago:

R. Castellan — Room 31

Next to it, in the margin, in red pencil, someone had written three words and two initials.

Did not check out. — V.A.

Nell read it three times. Then she looked up at Gus, and Gus looked at the furnace.

"He played piano," Gus said finally. "In the ballroom, that summer. Every night but Mondays. Bobby, everybody called him. He had a white carnation in his buttonhole every night, and the ladies thought he was something, and he was. Miss Vera had been a widow two years by then. She was forty-two." He stopped. "She used to come down and sit at the table nearest the piano after the dining room closed. Just sit. That's all I ever saw, and that's all I'm going to say about it."

"What happened on Labor Day?"

"Nothing happened. That was the whole thing. He played the Saturday dance, same as always. Sunday morning he was gone. Car gone, room empty, bill not paid. Miss Vera told the desk not to bother chasing it. She never said his name again, not once, not in thirty-seven years. And in 1970 she closed the ballroom and never opened it again."

Nell thought of the white carnation lying on the dashboard of the green Buick. She didn't say anything.

She turned the page, to see who had come after, and something slid out from between the leaves and fell onto the freezer lid with a small heavy clack.

It was a key. Brass. On a diamond-shaped fob, worn smooth at the corners, the number stamped deep in the center: 31.

Nell stared at it. "That's the key I gave him last night."

"Can't be."

"It is. Look at the nick on the corner. I hand these out every night, Gus, I know them."

"It can't be," Gus said again, and his voice had gone strange. "There's only ever been the one key to 31. I'd know. I'm the one who'd have had to cut another. And this room's been locked since May. I have the only key to it." He held up the ring. "Right here."

They had not found the key in Room 31 that morning. Nell realized it only now. Not on the dresser, not in the suitcase, not in the door. She had been so busy looking at what was there that she had never noticed what wasn't.

*

That night was her last shift of the season. The hotel was quiet, most of the guests packed and asleep, the rain finally gone and a hard bright moon on the lake. At a little after one, Nell was sitting at the desk with the key in her lap, turning it over and over, when she heard it.

From the far end of the lobby, from behind the tall double doors of the ballroom that had not been opened since 1970, came a single note on a piano.

Then another.

Then, slowly, as if someone were remembering it one finger at a time, the beginning of a waltz.

END OF CHAPTER THREE