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area. The walls were varnished knotty pine that had grown dark with age. The wood floors were still damp from a recent mopping, and the familiar smell of Murphy Oil soap hung in the air. Ellis smiled. Her grandmother always mopped her wood floors with Murphy soap. She decided this was a good omen.
    The place was not fancy, but then she’d seen that in the photographs on the website. There was a faded oval rag rug on the living room floor, alarge, lumpy sofa, and a couple of ’80s-era armchairs facing a soot-blackened fireplace. The walls were dotted with what somebody considered beach-appropriate art—paint-by-number scenes depicting lighthouses, fishing boats, tropical birds, and waving palm trees.
    A nicely framed nautical chart hung over the mantel, but its glass was badly cracked. Ellis leaned in and examined it with interest. She loved the names of the rivers and sounds. Pasquotank, Croatan, Ocracoke, Currituck, and her favorite, Mattamuskeet. But then, Ellis adored anything with names and numbers and places: maps, graphs, charts. As a child, she’d traded a doll—an expensive Madame Alexander dressed as Princess Diana, sent to her by her godmother in Atlanta—for her older brother Baylor’s light-up globe. Baylor had turned around and given the doll to his little fourth-grade girlfriend.

    Reluctantly, Ellis turned away from the chart. She had a car to unload and a house to set up.
    The dining area held a long, scrubbed pine table and was surrounded by eight mismatched white-painted wooden chairs. A hideous plastic flower arrangement in a fish-shaped ceramic bowl was centered on a plastic doily in the middle of the table. It looked like somebody’s granny had just gotten up to fetch another cup of tea.
    A smallish kitchen opened off the dining area. It was clean, yes, but it had definitely seen better days. Here, the board walls were enameled white. The cupboards were painted white, with green glass knobs, and the counters were yellow linoleum with aluminum trim. Instead of upper cupboards there was a pair of shelf units with scalloped trim nailed to the wall on either side of a kitchen window that looked out onto the sand dunes. A small stack of chipped plates, two plastic cereal bowls, and some plastic convenience store go-cups were lined up along the shelves. In the middle of the room stood a large wooden table with a chipped turquoise enamel top. The floors were of cracked and faded yellow-and-white checkerboard linoleum tiles. There was a four-burner electric stove with curious push-button controls and a white refrigerator with rust spots around the corners of the doors.
    Ellis opened the refrigerator, which was empty except for a boxof baking soda, and then she peeked inside the freezer, which held two miserly aluminum ice cube trays, but no automatic ice maker. She congratulated herself for picking up a five-pound bag of ice to keep the groceries she’d bought cold until check-in time. She noticed, to her chagrin, that there was no dishwasher. How had she missed this during all the hours she’d spent poring over the pictures and description of the house?

    Never mind, she told herself. It was only for a month, and after all, four women—not to mention Dorie’s husband, Stephen—were sharing this house. Everybody would pitch in and make do. It would be like Girl Scout camp, Ellis told herself. But with air-conditioning and indoor plumbing.
    Finally, August had come. The month they’d all been planning for was becoming a reality. Ellis could not wait for the fun to begin. As she left the kitchen, she did an impromptu skip-step.
    *   *   *
    Ty tipped the Corona bottle to his lips and sucked down the last drop of icy beer. He wandered around the corner of the porch to check on his new tenant’s whereabouts. Whoa! The silver Honda was pulled up directly in front of the house now, and as he watched, a woman in pink pants and a tight white T-shirt hurried towards the house, her arms full of grocery