Page 19 of Presumed Dead

"Yes."

"Checking on the boat?"

"Checking on the tenant."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "Different thing."

She didn't step onto the boat. She didn't step closer to the pylon than she needed to step to look down at him. What she registered, because she was paying attention to it whether she wanted to be or not, was the third finger of his left hand. A small ring of pale skin where a band had been. The mark wasn't old.

Divorced, the application for tenancy had said.

The mark wasn't old.

She filed it. The shelf behind the insurance certificates was getting busy.

"How is the tenant?" she asked.

"The tenant is having a productive day. He has a list. The list is six pages."

"Six pages."

"Three of parts. Two of tools. One of things he's going to need somebody for. Your name's on the last page three times."

"My name."

"Once for the holding tank. Once for the manifold. Once for whatever you're going to charge me to use the lift before October."

"You're going to need the lift."

"I know."

She didn't, for a moment, have a reply for that.

Which was the second thing in two days she hadn't had a reply for, and she didn't have a category for it yet, and she wasn't going to develop one standing on Pier Three at noon with the heat coming up off the boards and a man on her swim platform watching her with the small careful quiet of a man who had decided not to fill the silence for her.

"There's a sandwich place," she said. "Across the lot. Behind the bait shop. They close at two, and on a Tuesday they'll still have the turkey if you go in the next twenty minutes."

"Noted."

"They won't have it at two."

"I'm going."

He stood. Picked up the folded T-shirt. Did not, immediately, put it back on, and she did not let her eyes register the length of time it took him to put it on, because that was the kind of thing a woman registered when she had been a long time without registering things, and she was not interested in being that woman in front of a tenant on his first afternoon.

He stepped off the swim platform onto the dock. Pulled the T-shirt over his head as he came up the pier, in the unhurried way of a man who'd been changing on a dock for thirty years, and at the head of the slip he stopped four feet from her.

"Sloane."

"Yes."

"Thank you for the turkey."

"It's not my turkey."

"It's your information about the turkey."

"Go."