"Is something wrong, Mrs. Bennet?"
"The booking starts on Wednesday," Gussie said. "My son changed it. He called you and changed it to Wednesday. Didn't he?"
There was the sound of keys. Gussie pictured the woman at a desk somewhere near the ocean, with a fan going and a window full of sea oats, scrolling. "No, ma'am. I've got it right here. Saturday to Saturday, June twenty-seventh through July fourth. That's how it was booked in March and there's no change on file. The deposit came in March and the balance came off your card on the first of June."
"Yes," Gussie said. "I remember the balance."
She did. It had been four thousand one hundred and eighty dollars for the week, plus the cleaning fee and the county occupancy tax and a damage waiver that she had paid because she had a sixteen-year-old granddaughter and a son who had once backed a rented pontoon boat into a dock in Kentucky. It had been the largest single check she had written since the new roof. She had written it on the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold next to her and her late mother's reading glasses on, the ones with the little chain, and she had felt, writing it, like a woman taking a running jump.
"Who signed?" she asked.
"Pardon me?"
"You said the gentleman signed. Which gentleman?"
More keys. "It's showing as a Bennet. L. Bennet. Signature's a little hard to read on the tablet, they always are. Is that your husband? I can just put him down."
Gussie sat back on her heels in the dirt.
There were, at that moment, exactly two male Bennets on the face of the earth who might sign for a beach house in North Carolina. One was her son, Ramsay, who was forty-four years old and an operations manager for a regional freight company in Dayton and who signed his name with an R like a man swatting a fly. The other was Lysander Bennet, who was seventy-three, and who had not been her husband for twenty-six years, and whose L she would have known in the dark, because it was the same L that had been on every check, every birthday card, every permission slip, every note on the refrigerator for the twenty-one years they had been married, a tall, looping L with a little hook at the bottom, like a man casting a fishing line.
"Mrs. Bennet?"
"I'm here," Gussie said. "Ms. Searcy. Can I ask you a strange question?"
"I get a lot of strange questions. It's the beach."
"How many people are in that house right now?"
"Well, I'm not standing in it," the woman said, carefully, kindly. "But the gentleman put five down for this afternoon and wrote that one more was coming. That was the note. One more coming later in the week. I assumed that was you. You're the cardholder. That's why I'm calling, I wanted to be sure you'd be counted, so you're not number seven when you get here. Septic," she added apologetically.