The Guest Cottage Read Free

up some men. “If the horse throws you, climb right back on” was another motto of Aunt Fancy’s. She had a lot of mottos.
    Fabulous Aunt Fancy had died on her sixtieth birthday while parachuting from an airplane. On the up side, it was exactly the way Fancy Lattimer would have liked to go. But Sophie had counted on her aunt having a long life, serving as a role model and a playmate for Sophie as she got older.
    In her will, Aunt Fancy left most of her money—and there was a lot of it—to her four children. But she also left a nice big chunk of money for Sophie to use for what Aunt Fancy called “mad money.”
    When Sophie started dating, or what passed for dating at age fifteen, her mother sat her down to discuss birth control. Aunt Fancy had given her a pretty quilted coin purse with a flower-shaped clasp. Inside were tucked two ten-dollar bills.
    “When I was growing up,” Aunt Fancy told Sophie, “my mother made certain I carried mad money. All the girls carried mad money, which came in handy if some guy had us out in a car and thought he had us trapped, or if he got fresh during a movie and tried to put his hand up our dress. We always had money for a taxi and a way home back then. It gave us independence.”
    Mad money.
Sophie was certainly mad at Zack. She was also mad in general—demented, flustered, heartbroken, mentally blitzed, psychologically wacko. Sophie had always been a cautious person, a good girl. The idea of spending her inheritance to rent a house, sight unseen, on Nantucket, a resort island she had only visited on day trips, was downright
epic
for her.
    “I’m going to do it,” Sophie said aloud, to herself as much as to Zack. She left him standing in his office and went off to find her cell before she changed her mind. She phoned Susie.
    “Susie, I want the house.”
    “Really?” Susie squeaked with surprise. She hesitated. “Look. I have to be honest with you. One of the reasons I don’t want to go through a rental agent is that they will take a big chunk of money for a commission. This year I need all the money I can get, and I don’t want to share it with my spendthrift cousin Ivan. But we can talk about that another time. Another reason I’d like to do this privately is that not many people would rent a place with a family member stuck in the apartment attached to the house.”
    “A family member,” Sophie repeated.
    “It’s my grandfather, but not the one who bought the property on Nantucket. The other one, Connor Swenson. He moved in this winter after our grandmother died. He’s a nice old guy, perfectly harmless, I promise, but he’s kind of let himself go in his grief. Plus, he was a farmer in Iowa and he totally doesn’t get the whole island thing. I’ve been out to visit him a lot, but he pretty much keeps to himself. He’s not crazy, I swear on my life,” Suzy continued, “but he’s sad and perhaps a bit confused. He’s sort of holed up in the apartment. I can’t ask him to move out.”
    “Do you want us to do anything to help him?” asked Sophie. “Buy him groceries, drive him to the library, that sort of thing?”
    “Not at all. He brought his old pickup truck. He buys his own groceries, cooks his own food, and as far as I can tell, spends his time watching television, doing jigsaw puzzles, and whittling.”
    “Whistling?”
    “
Whittling.
You know, carving.”
    “I didn’t know people still whittled. Does he whistle while he whittles?” Sophie’s mind was all over the place; she was light-headed with excitement.
    “So you don’t mind if he’s hanging out back there?” Susie asked.
    “I don’t see why,” Sophie said.
    Sophie and Susie were friends, so there was no need for any kind of legal contract. Sophie agreed to send Susie a check and Susie said she’d send Sophie the keys and a map to the house.
    Aunt Fancy would have approved.

A s Trevor Black sat in the waiting room, his knee jiggled up and down with anxiety. Was he doing the right