Page 28 of Presumed Dead

Sloane laughed before she meant to.

Catherine smiled. The smile was the small, careful smile of an older woman who’d been making the people on her dock laugh since 2014, and she put the tea towel back over the Pyrex with the unhurried care of a woman who’d been making the same small kindnesses look like nothing for the entire eleven years Sloane had known her.

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

Sloane poured her one. Catherine took it. Catherine did what she always did when she got a fresh cup, which was to hold it for a count of three breaths under her chin and not yet drink. Then she drank. Then she set the cup down on the counter and put her elbow next to it.

“Sloane.”

“Catherine.”

“I like your new tenant.”

Sloane took the line in without letting it show on her face. She had been taking things in without letting them show on her face since she was a girl, and Catherine Pell knew that she could, and Catherine was watching her do it, anyway. There was a kind of compliment in being watched that way by Catherine, which was that Catherine was choosing to acknowledge Sloane was doing it.

“Do you?”

“I do. He's a polite man who knows how to look at a Sundancer and who tells a woman the truth when she gives him an opportunity, and those two things in one man at his age are not as common as you would like to believe.”

“Catherine.”

“Yes.”

“What did you ask him?”

Catherine looked at her over the rim of the coffee. The eyes were pale blue and not a bit apologetic about being pale blue, and they held Sloane’s for the small count of breaths Catherine took to decide whether to answer in full or in part.

“I told him I had known your father, and I had known your brother, and I had been watching you carry it from my houseboat for four years, and I wanted to know early instead of late what kind of man my friend had rented her slip to.”

Sloane didn’t move.

She had her right hand on the daybook, and her left hand on the counter, and a half-cup of coffee that had been cooling for ten minutes, and she didn’t move because she didn’t know which way she would move if she moved. Catherine had walked across the piers yesterday morning, and had walked over to Sloane’s new tenant on Day One, before Sloane had figured out what she thought about him, and Catherine had said her brother’s name to him on Sloane’s behalf and on her own.

“And.”

“And I came home, and I made tuna noodle casserole, and I told myself I was going to wait twenty-four hours before I came to tell you about it, because at our age twenty-four hours is the difference between a thing you tell a friend and a thing you tell a friend too soon, and I have decided twenty-four hours is enough.”

“Catherine.”

“I'm not telling you what to do about him. I'm not telling you what to feel about him. I'm telling you, because I've known you since you were twenty-one and I do not want you to find out from somebody else, that I have looked at him and I have decided he is the kind of man your father would not have thrown off the dock.”

Sloane put both hands flat on the counter.

Catherine waited.

The kettle on the back counter wasn’t on. The bell over the front door wasn’t doing the sound. Outside, the marina kept being a marina around them in the small ways marinas kept being marinas — a halyard, a charter engine warming up two slips down on Pier One, the soft small whirr of the cooler compressor cycling on — and Sloane Mercer stood at her own counter at ten twenty-seven on a Wednesday in May and let the words your father would not have thrown off the dock sit on her chest the way her father’s old jacket had sat on her chest the spring after he died, which was heavily, and without apology, and with a familiarity she hadn’t felt in six years.

“Catherine.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Thank you for the casserole.”

“You are welcome for the casserole.” Catherine picked up the cup. “I'm going home to read my book. The federal agent and the lighthouse woman are about to make a series of unwise decisions. I would like to be on the deck for it.”

“Catherine.”