"It's a closet with a view," said Petronella. "And I'll tell you something else, since you drove nine hundred miles." She leaned forward. "When I put the security footage up yesterday, before I called you back, I watched it longer than I needed to. The old gentleman, he got out of the car, and he stood at the bottom of those stairs for a long time. Those stairs at the Pelican are steep. Twenty-two of them. And everybody else had already gone up, the kids were running, the boy with the bucket was halfway up already, and he stood at the bottom by himself, holding onto the rail, looking up. And I thought, that man is deciding whether he can do this. Not just the stairs."
Gussie said nothing.
"Then your son came back down," Petronella said, "and took his other arm. And they went up together. Slow. It took them about three minutes. Your son didn't rush him. He didn't say anything that I could see. He just went at his speed." She sat back. "I don't know what any of you did to each other. That's not my business. I just thought you'd want to know that part."
"Write up the Sandpiper," Gussie said, after a moment. Her voice came out rougher than she meant it to. "I'll pay you for it now. On a different card. Not the one that's on the Pelican."
"Why a different card?"
"Because the Pelican is the family's," Gussie said. "This one's mine."
The Pelican's Rest was a quarter mile down a sand road off the highway, past a church with a white steeple and a fish market and a sign that said SLOW CHILDREN AND TURTLES. It was taller than it had looked in the pictures. It stood on its pilings like a heron, gray-shingled and white-trimmed, with the crow's nest on top glinting in the sun. There were two cars under it: Ramsay's Honda minivan with the Ohio State sticker, and a dented green Subaru with North Carolina plates and a handicapped placard hanging from the mirror.
Gussie parked the Buick behind the Subaru, which was petty, and she knew it was petty, and she did it anyway.
The house was quiet. It was nearly one o'clock in the afternoon. The outdoor shower dripped. Somewhere on the far side of the house there were voices, faint, and the clink of something, and the smell of charcoal starting.
She did not go up the twenty-two stairs. She walked around the side of the house instead, under it, between the pilings, through the cool shade that smelled like salt and wet wood, and out the other side, where a boardwalk ran from the back of the lot down through the marsh grass to a little dock on the sound.
At the end of the dock, sitting cross-legged with his back to her and a crab line in the water, was a boy of about eight in red swim trunks.