Page 16 of Presumed Dead

She'd been turning the question for an hour and a half and didn't have an answer, and she wasn't going to find one by turning it any harder.

She filed the question behind the insurance certificates with everything else, and she got to work.

Sid Hoffman came in at ten-oh-six with the slow walk a man walked when he had a bad knee and didn't intend to apologize for it.

He set his coffee mug on the counter — the same mug he used every visit — and he tipped two fingers at the daybook.

"You got the brownies?"

"I made the brownies."

"Then I'll fix anything you've got."

She filled his mug. He drank half of it in one long pull and set it back down. His Miracle Garage cap was pushed up his forehead, the way he wore it when he was thinking, and his eyes had gone past her to the slip seventeen folder in the standing file.

"New tenant."

Sloane didn't look up from the daybook. "As of six thirty-two."

"The Sundancer."

"The same."

"Well." Sid drank the rest of his coffee. "Somebody finally took her."

"Somebody did."

Sid let the word somebody do its small work and didn't push.

"Three days on the prime."

"Could be the check valve. Could be the diaphragm. Could be the line."

"Any tree work near it?"

"No tree work."

"All right. Brownies after." He picked the mug back up and finished the coffee in two swallows. "Twenty minutes. Maybe forty if it's the diaphragm."

"I'm here."

"You always are."

He went out the side door. The bell made a small sound. She watched him cross the boardwalk — the slow knee, the toolkit in his left hand — and she was glad, as she was glad every time, that Grace had kept him.

Doyle Pruitt's voice arrived a half-second before Doyle Pruitt did.

"Morning, Sloane."

She'd noticed the voice the first week he'd taken slip nine, five years ago, and she'd never stopped noticing. Her father's voice had arrived first too — the difference being that her father's voice had been a voice she'd liked hearing arrive first, and Doyle's was not.

"Doyle."

"Got a minute?"

"Got several." She didn't stand up. The daybook stayed open. The pen stayed in her hand.

He came up to the counter and put both hands flat on it, the way he always did. Broad in the shoulders for a man in his sixties, permanently tanned, with a way of standing in a doorway that took up more of the doorway than his actual body. His watch was nicer than the watch a man with a forty-foot Bertram on Pier Two wore, which was a thing she'd noticed when she'd first leased him the slip and which had not stopped being true.