"Mrs. Bennet," she said. It was not a question.
"How did you know?"
"You've got the look," said Petronella Searcy. "Mothers who've driven a long way to give somebody a piece of their mind have a look. I've got three grown kids. I've had that look. Come sit down. You want water? I have the little cold bottles."
Gussie took the little cold bottle. She sat in a wicker chair under a framed aerial photograph of the island taken after a hurricane, with the ocean running clear through the middle of it, and drank half the water at once.
"So," said Petronella, sitting down across from her. "Seven."
"Seven," Gussie agreed.
"I have to tell you the truth, I've been thinking about this since yesterday. I can't let seven sleep in the Pelican. I mean I'm not going to stand in the driveway with a clipboard. But the county does inspections on holiday weeks, and if they find seven, it's a fine to me and a mark on the permit, and I've got owners who'd drop me over less. That's not me being hard. That's just the island."
"I understand," said Gussie. "I'm not asking you to break anything."
"Good. Because I had an idea." Petronella turned her computer monitor around. On it was a listing photograph of a tiny house, more of a cottage really, white with blue shutters, perched on short pilings in a stand of live oaks and yaupon. "That's the Sandpiper. Studio, one queen bed, a little kitchen, a little porch. It sits on the lot right behind the Pelican, you can walk between them on a boardwalk through the trees. Same owner, actually, an old guy in Raleigh who built it for his mother-in-law in 1986 so she'd be close but not, as he put it to me, close-close. I had a cancellation this morning. Honeymooners. They got in a fight about the seating chart at their own wedding and the bride called and said she wasn't going to spend a week on an island with a man who'd put her Aunt Gloria at the kids' table." She shrugged. "I don't make the news. I just rent around it."
Gussie looked at the picture of the little white cottage in the oaks, close but not close-close.
"How much?"
"Well, here's the thing," said Petronella. "They paid in full and the cancellation was inside thirty days, so technically the money's already earned. Technically I should rent it again and give some back to them. But I'm going to give them the money back anyway, because they're twenty-four years old and they're going to need it for the divorce lawyer or the marriage counselor, one or the other. And the owner will want something for it, because he's a businessman and he's from Raleigh. Call it four hundred for the week."
"That's very low," said Gussie, who had been a claims adjuster, and knew low.