Page 24 of Presumed Dead

The watch said twelve oh-eight.

Doyle had been below for five minutes so far.

Ethan picked the sander up off the cushion and went back to the rail. He worked it. Six more minutes. He didn’t look at Pier Two. The sander made the sound the sander made.

At twelve fourteen Doyle Pruitt walked back up Pier Two with the tool bag in his right hand. He went up the gravel to the lot. The screen door of the office didn’t clap. He went straight to the truck.

Eleven minutes.

Ethan finished the section he was working on, set the sander down, and drank half a bottle of warm water from the cushion. He waited the count of breaths it took for a man on a swim platform to look like a man taking a break, and then he went below and wrote it in the back of the notebook.

Slip nine. Bertram. Eleven minutes below. Twelve oh-three to twelve fourteen. No conversation with the office on either end. Tool bag in. Tool bag out.

He closed the notebook. He sat at the dinette with his hands flat on the table for a long count of breaths.

The sander ran for an hour and twenty minutes after lunch.

He worked along the starboard rail toward the stern. Sweat ran along the inside of his arms. The pale blue T-shirt was on the cushion beside the engine cover, where he’d folded it when the sun got ahead of him at two o’clock. His back caught the late-afternoon light through the canvas, and the white tank under the T-shirt had gone damp through, and his hands moved over the rail in a steady, unhurried draw, twenty years of practice carrying the work while his head went somewhere else.

Noah arrived at three forty.

Not Noah. Noah’s name in Catherine’s mouth at twelve oh-six this afternoon. The thought arrived without his permission, the way it had arrived this morning when he’d been watching Sloane’s hands brace on the toe rail.

He stopped the sander.

He stood at the windshield with his hand on the rail he had just sanded, and the dust on his forearms, and the sun coming down across the channel onto the deck, and he let the thought arrive. Eight months he’d been letting Noah arrive. Eight months he’d been letting Noah pass through. Today the thought had a face on it — the face Noah had worn the one night they’d talked, in front of slip eight. He’d brushed Noah off. Three weeks later, Noah had gone out of slip eight and hadn’t come back, and Ethan had spent eight months not being able to decide whether the question Noah had asked him had been the one Noah needed answered.

Catherine had said his name out loud. The first person on this dock to say it to him in eight months had been a sixty-eight-year-old woman in a blue caftan with a romantic suspense paperback under her arm, and she’d said it because she’d decided he was the kind of man she could trust with the name, and she’d been wrong about that without knowing she was wrong.

He took his hand off the rail.

The bottle of water at his feet was warm from the deck. Half of it went down in one pull. He sat on the engine cover with the bottle in his hand and let himself sit for a moment with what was in his chest.

The watch wasn’t in the duffel below. It was on a desk in a town he wasn’t going to drive back to, and it was going to stay there until he asked for it, and he was going to ask for it when the time was right, and the time wasn’t Day One. Two engraved words on the back of it, in a hand that had been Frank Mercer’s hand. A father giving a son the watch his own father had worn. The engraving because the father had been proud to hand the watch over, and had wanted to commemorate it. Noah had worn it every day.

Ethan was going to be the man who put the news in Sloane Mercer’s hand when the time was right, and the time was going to be the time it took for Sloane to be ready to hear it, and Ethan was going to know the time when he saw it, because he’d been reading rooms for nineteen years and hadn’t lost the habit.

Eight months he’d been carrying this. Forty-eight hours he’d been carrying it confirmed. Day One on her dock, and the weight was the same weight that had been in the chair across from David yesterday morning, and the chair had at least had David in it.

He picked the sander back up and worked the rail to the stern in a steady draw. What he was doing while he worked was the thing he’d been doing for eight months when Noah arrived in his head, which was nothing. Nothing was the discipline. Nothing was the wait. Nothing was the price of being able to stand on this dock at all.

At four ten, the sander quit running. He’d finished the starboard rail. The port rail would be tomorrow. He set the sander on the cushion and the canvas back over the windshield and put the bottle of mineral spirits and the drop cloth in the cabin.

Below, the cabin had warmed through the afternoon and gone close.

He opened both ports and the forward hatch. The grease along the side of his right thumb came off in two passes at the head sink. His forearms came clean. He put a clean shirt on — a gray one this time, soft from a hundred washes — and ran his hand through his hair the way a man ran his hand through his hair when he wasn’t admitting to himself why he was bothering.

The six-page list was on the dinette. He tore the top sheet free along the perforation, folded it twice, and put it in his back pocket.

Up the cabin steps. Off the boat. Up the dock.

The office light was on. The OPEN sign in the front window still read OPEN, though the marina had thinned in the way a working marina thinned at five-thirty, with the day-trippers off the water and the live-aboards going down for the evening.

He went in through the side door.

The bell didn’t ding from the side door. Sloane was at the counter with the till open and a stack of singles in her left hand and a roll of quarters in her right, and she’d set them down again before she’d turned to see who’d come in. She’d known the step on the boardwalk.

“You’re still open.”