Page 23 of Presumed Dead

Behind her, in the corner of his eye, Doyle Pruitt walked past the kiosk and turned left onto Pier Two. The tool bag went with him.

Ethan kept his eyes on Catherine.

“Can I ask you a thing?” Catherine looked at him over the rim of the mug, and the looking had a different quality now than it had had a minute ago, less performance and more attention. “How long are you here for?”

“As long as the boat takes.”

“That could be a long time.”

“It could.”

“All right.” Catherine took another sip. The coffee mug came down. She wasn’t looking at the boat anymore. She was looking at him. “Sloane Mercer is a friend of mine. I’ve known her since she was twenty-one years old. Her father was a friend of mine before her, and her brother was, too, and the brother is the part of that sentence we don’t have the answer about.”

She let that sit a beat. Ethan didn’t fill it. He let her work.

“His name was Noah. He was funny and decent, and he took his sister to the diner on her birthday every year and ordered the same thing she ordered because he liked making her laugh when he didn’t finish his plate. He went out one night four Aprils ago and didn’t come back. The marina has never been the same since, and Sloane has carried it alone, and I have watched her carry it from my houseboat for four years.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Thank you.” Catherine’s eyes stayed on him. “I wasn’t going to say his name to you on Day One. I changed my mind walking over.”

“Why?”

“Because you bought a boat sight-unseen from a widow who needed out of slip fees and you took it over without trying to talk her down on the price, and George Halsey came back from the bait shop telling everyone on Pier One that you’re polite and you laugh at the right places and you don’t ask questions you haven’t earned, and I have decided I would rather know early than late what kind of man my friend has rented her slip to.”

The water around the dock did what water did. A halyard tapped a slow tap on a mast at the head of Pier One. Catherine waited.

“Catherine.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry for hers. I’m not a man who came here to cause her any trouble, and I will try to be a tenant she’s glad she rented to.”

Catherine looked at him for a beat that was longer than the answer required. Whatever she’d been looking for in his face, she’d either found it or decided to wait for the rest of it. The pale, blue eyes moved away from him and onto the toe rail, and the tension that had been in her shoulders went out of them in the small, unannounced way of a woman accepting a thing on provisional terms.

“All right.”

“Great.”

“I’ll bring you a casserole this week. Tuna noodle. I make it the way my mother made it, which is to say with too much cheese, and I'll not apologize for the cheese.”

“I accept.”

“Good.”

She turned to go. Then she paused, the way a woman in a blue caftan paused, with her weight already on the back foot.

“Ethan.”

“Catherine.”

“If you ever want to know a thing about this dock, you can ask me. I read romantic suspense, and I drink coffee on my deck, and I miss my husband, but I also pay attention, and I've been paying attention from that houseboat for eleven years, and there is very little that happens on these piers that I don't see.”

“Noted.”

“I thought it might be.”

She walked back up the dock. Ethan stood at the pylon at the head of his slip and watched her go, and Doyle Pruitt was not yet back up the dock from Pier Two.