Page 44 of Presumed Dead

“No. Thank you. I want to do the rest myself.”

“All right.”

“Ethan.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to ask you the question later.”

“You said.”

“Today. This afternoon.”

He didn’t answer right away. The brown eyes with the small fleck of green didn’t move off her face. The small, careful smile she’d seen at the corner of his mouth at six thirty-two on Tuesday wasn’t there. He looked, in the pale gold morning, like a man who had been waiting for a sentence for a long time and had heard the sentence land.

“I’ll be on the boat.”

“Good.”

He went up the dock toward Pier Three. He didn’t look back. She knew he didn’t look back because she watched him not look back the whole way up the pier and across the boardwalk and onto Pier Three to his own slip, and the not-looking-back was a man holding the line a woman had drawn at the head of her brother’s empty slip, and the man holding the line was the man who’d been on her dock since six thirty-two on Tuesday morning.

She stood at the head of slip nine for another count of about ten breaths.

Then she walked to Pier Two.

Slip ten was the cleat she’d need to replace this afternoon; slip eleven had a fender she’d pulled in; slip twelve’s halyard was tied off. She walked each slip with the small inspection of a marina owner who’d secured nineteen boats in a fifty-knot wind and wanted to see whether the work she’d done at four-forty would hold at six-thirty, and the work held. The lines were where she’d left them, the Bimini on the center console was down where she’d lowered it, the cockpit cover on the Grady-White was snapped where Ethan had snapped it.

She finished the pier at six thirty-five and started back up toward the boardwalk.

Then she heard the engines.

They came in from the east, low and steady, the unmistakable double-throated sound of a forty-foot Bertram running at idle through the breakwater. Sloane stopped on the planking and turned. The Bertram came around the channel marker at six thirty-six and angled in toward Pier Two at the unhurried pace a man brought a forty-foot diesel into her own slip at idle, and Doyle Pruitt was at the wheel in a yellow oilcloth coat she’d never seen him wear before.

He was bringing her in alone.

Sloane walked back down Pier Two to slip nine.

The Bertram came in along the pier with the small, careful inches of a Navy boatswain bringing a boat into her slip in the wake of a storm, and Sloane was at the cleat at the bow end by the time Doyle had her angled in, and she reached for the bow line he tossed her without his having to ask.

“Need a hand with the lines?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good.”

She took the bow. He came off the helm and onto the side deck and tossed the stern, and she walked the bow line to her cleat and figure-eighted it tight, and Doyle worked the stern from the boat, and the Bertram settled into slip nine. She’d settled into slip nine on a thousand Thursday mornings before this one, except this time her owner was wet through and his hands were red along the knuckles and he hadn’t shaved since at least yesterday morning.

Sloane wrapped the bow line and stepped back from the cleat.

“Where were you?”

She said it neighborly. No weight in it. The same offer she’d have made George Halsey or Greg Bonner or any of her long-time tenants bringing a boat in after a hard night.

“Took her out for a shakedown yesterday afternoon. Couldn’t get her back in before dark. Tied her up at a friend’s slip up the channel.”

“In a storm.”

“Couldn’t leave her on a strange cleat in fifty knots. Came back this morning early to bring her in.”

“That’s a long night.”