Page 22 of Presumed Dead

He finished the sandwich and put the wrapper in the bag and the bag in the trash and washed his hands at the slip hose and dried them on the rag he’d hung off the cleat. Then he picked the sander up off the cushion and got back to work on the starboard rail, because the rail was the cover and the cover was the work and the work was what kept him on this dock for as many hours as he needed to be on it.

The houseboat lady came down Pier Three at eleven fifty.

She walked the way an older woman walked a dock she’d walked for many years, which was unhurried and sure-footed and with the cup of coffee still in her hand. The paperback was folded under her arm now, spine out. The blue caftan moved around her ankles. She had small gold studs in her ears that caught the noon sun.

Ethan saw her coming. He had the sander down before she’d reached slip nineteen, and he’d picked up the rag and wiped his hands and stepped off the boat onto the dock by the time she reached the pylon at the head of his slip.

“I’m Catherine Pell.”

“Ethan Vale. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“Catherine, please. I’ve been ma’amed past my limit this decade.”

“Catherine.”

She had a face that had been a beautiful face for a long time and was now the face of a woman who’d stopped being interested in being beautiful and was something better than that, which was at ease. Her eyes were a pale, clear blue. She looked at the boat the way George had looked at the boat, which was to say with the precise unromantic affection of a person who’d known the boat as somebody else’s thing and was now meeting her as something new.

“I am so glad somebody finally took her.”

“George said about the same.”

“George Halsey is right about more things than he gets credit for.” Catherine took a sip of coffee. “I watched Don sit on this deck on Sunday afternoons for nine years; I've been here eleven. He used to drink an Old Fashioned at four o’clock and tell Edna she was the most beautiful woman in three counties, and Edna would tell him she could only count two counties and he was already drunk in both of them, and it was the prettiest love story on the dock. After Don went, it broke my heart to watch this boat sit.”

“She’s going to get fixed up.”

“I can see that. The canvas is already off.”

“The canvas was the easy part.”

“It usually is.” She smiled. The smile reached her eyes. “What are you finding under it?”

Ethan gave her the abbreviated tour from the dock, which was the right thing to give a marina neighbor who was being friendly and not the wrong thing to give a marina neighbor who might one day be useful. He pointed out the salt damage along the toe rail and the soft place in the sole he’d need to lift this fall and the manifold leak Sloane had flagged. Catherine listened the way a woman who’d lived on a boat for eleven years listened, which was with informed nodding at the right places.

Halfway through his pointing-out, his eyes went past Catherine for a half-second without his face going past her. Doyle Pruitt had come down the gravel from the parking lot and onto the boardwalk. Doyle had a black tool bag in his right hand.

Ethan kept his eyes on Catherine.

The watch on his wrist said twelve oh-three.

“What are you reading?” he said.

She lifted the paperback. The cover was navy blue with a lighthouse on it and a woman in a long coat walking toward it, and the title was in white script across the top.

“Romantic suspense.” She gave him a small confiding smile. “I read four a week. I’m sixty-eight years old, and my husband has been dead for nine years, and I have not yet been able to convince myself that I shouldn’t spend my afternoons reading about handsome dangerous men, and frankly I’ve stopped trying.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“It is reasonable. It’s the most reasonable thing I do.”

“Anything good lately?”

“This one.” She tapped the cover. “A federal agent moves to a small fishing village and falls in love with the woman who runs the lighthouse. It’s ridiculous. I’m enjoying it enormously.”

Ethan let the smile come up because the smile was the right answer, and because the smile was also the answer of a man who hadn’t been told the joke he was inside of. He didn’t let his face do anything else.

“Sounds like a tough commute for the federal agent.”

“He manages.”