Page 33 of Presumed Dead

She took the Pyrex, held it for a moment in the unhurried way she’d held the coffee cup yesterday, and her eyes did the small careful inspection of the dish that women of her generation did when a man returned a casserole dish, which was the inspection of whether the man had washed it correctly, and she nodded once and stepped aside in the doorway.

“Come up. I want to talk to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Catherine, please.”

“Catherine.”

He went up onto the deck. The houseboat’s deck was the size of a small porch and had two chairs and a folding table and a row of pots along the rail with cherry tomatoes growing in them, and the chairs faced Pier One and gave a clear view of slips one through five on Pier One, and the kiosk-side wall of the office. Catherine had been watching the marina from this deck for eleven years from a chair that gave her exactly the angles she needed to watch the marina from.

She set the Pyrex on the small white table and sat in the chair on the right. Ethan sat in the chair on the left. She’d picked the chair on the right because the chair on the right had the angle to Pier Three. He noticed that without registering it on his face.

“How was Sloane this morning?” he asked.

“I haven’t been over to see her yet. She was at her counter at six straight up, like every other day. I’ll go over around ten-fifteen to see how she liked the casserole.”

“The casserole?”

“I made two. I always make two. I have made tuna noodle casserole in pairs since 1974, when my mother made me promise I would never let a friend who needed a casserole sit waiting on it. You got the first one. She got the second one at ten-fifteen yesterday. Though she pretended she didn’t need a casserole, but she did.”

“She needed a casserole?”

“She needed a Pyrex on her counter on a Wednesday morning so that when she went home she didn’t have to cook. That’s a separate condition. The casserole is the vehicle.”

Ethan laughed before he meant to.

Catherine smiled, the small, careful smile of a woman who had been making the people on her dock laugh since 2014, and she took a sip of her coffee and looked at him over the rim.

Doyle Pruitt sauntered past them, heading toward the office. Catherine's eyes watched him. After he disappeared into the marina office, Catherine shook her head.

“He had a visitor on Monday night.”

Ethan didn’t move. He kept his hands on his knees, kept his face on Catherine.

“Did he?”

“A man I haven’t seen on this dock before. White pickup, no logo, parked at the back of the lot at ten thirty-eight at night, which I know because I was up on the sun deck enjoying the quiet starry night. The man went down Pier Two, was on the Bertram for under fifteen minutes, and was gone again by ten fifty-three. I don't know what that was all about, but it was strange.”

“Catherine.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell Sloane?”

“I did not. I thought about it for two hours, and I decided I wouldn't tell her yet, because she has four years of carrying things by herself, and adding a white pickup at ten thirty-eight at night to the list felt like something I should think about before I added it.”

She looked at him. The pale blue eyes did the thing they’d done yesterday at noon on the dock, which was the moment Catherine Pell stopped being the friendly neighbor with the paperback and became the woman who was deciding what to put into whose hands.

“But I’ve decided to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because a man who buys a boat sight-unseen from a widow and shows up on his first morning ready to ask George Halsey questions about a manifold is a man who pays attention, and a man who pays attention is a man who would also have noticed a white pickup at ten thirty-eight on a Monday if he’d been on this dock at ten thirty-eight on a Monday, and you weren’t. So I’m telling you, because somebody on this dock who pays attention ought to know.”

“Thank you, Catherine.”

“You're welcome.”