Page 13 of Presumed Dead

“Most people write this down.”

“I’ll remember.”

“You’ll remember.”

“Try me at the end.”

She looked at him. He could tell she was deciding whether to call his bluff. She decided.

“Bilge pump.”

“Original. Works. Replace it before a long run.”

“Starboard engine.”

“Manifold leak. Watch it.”

“Battery bank.”

“Two years old. One year past comfortable. One season if I’m careful.”

She held his eyes.

“Logistics,” she said.

“Logistics.”

“For fifteen years.”

“Fifteen years.”

“All right.”

She turned and walked back toward the bow. Ethan followed her with the distinct sense that he had just narrowly survived a small examination, and that the woman walking ahead of him wasn't going to forget what had been on it.

She held the manila folder out at the pylon at the head of the slip. He took it. She had paper-clipped a slip card to the inside of the front cover. The Wi-Fi password was written on the back of the card in the same handwriting he had been reading off the copy of the handwritten reservation on his laptop screen for four days — clean, small, slightly slanted.

“Pump-out code is on a sticky note inside the folder,” she said. “Don’t lose it. I’ll give you a new one in two weeks. We change them on rotation.”

“On rotation.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She paused before she answered. He watched the pause, and what was in it, and what wasn't in it, and he kept his face still while she chose her words.

“Because people who come and go through marinas don’t always come and go through them legally,” she said, “and I prefer my marina to be a place where the people who come and go can be accounted for.”

She didn't look at him while she said it. She looked at the boat — at the toe rail she had put her hand on twenty minutes ago — and there was something steady and unembellished in the way the sentence came out that told him she hadn't volunteered the explanation to many men in the last four years.

“That seems sensible,” he said.

“It is.”

“I’ll keep track of the code.”

“Good.”