Page 5 of Presumed Dead

Almost.

First impression of the asset?

Ethan thought about the photograph. The woman with her back turned. The rope she’d forgotten she was holding. The two-line email about a cinnamon roll. Her brother’s voice four years ago, saying, My sister, she’s the one with the eye for it, and the four years that had passed since Ethan had heard it without hearing it.

She’s been waiting, he wrote.

For what?

He didn’t answer right away. The road climbed a low rise, and the water opened up below him. Blue as a thing that didn’t know it was beautiful. Sun scattered across it in the late afternoon, like nobody had figured out how to ration it.

For somebody to come back with the truth, he wrote finally. I’m going to try not to be a disappointment.

You won’t be.

That’s flattering.

That’s data. Eat the cinnamon roll.

Ethan let the phone go face-down on the passenger seat. He drove the rest of the way without picking it up again. The sun came down on his left and the Gulf rose on his right, and somewhere ahead of him a woman who didn’t know his face yet was finishing her afternoon at a marina she had run alone for four years.

Her hand on the cleat in the photograph. The rope she’d forgotten she was holding. What it would be like to walk into her office tomorrow morning, shake her hand, and not be the man who knew.

Ethan drove faster than he meant to for the last hour. The road, he told himself. Just the road.

Chapter One

Sloane Mercer poured coffee into the green thermos at five forty-one and walked out the back door of the office at five forty-three. The order mattered. She had been doing the same three things in the same order before the marina opened for four years, because order was a small thing she could hold on to when so many other things had stopped sitting still.

Coffee into the thermos. The walk to the end of Pier Two. The cup, poured and finished, while she watched the water for her brother.

That was the morning.

The thermos had a dent in the base from being set down on too many pilings, and the lid had to be turned half a thread past finger-tight, or it leaked. She had earned the dent. She had earned the trick with the lid. Neither was a reason to replace a thing that had been hers since the year Noah taught her to drive his truck.

Her boots came down on the boardwalk. The long pier — Pier Two — complained the way it always did under her at this hour. A soft spot on the sixth board from the end had been waiting on her for two seasons, and she would replace it this fall when the weather turned, the way she promised herself most things in the fall. Slip seven was empty. Slip eight was empty, too. Bert Hollis’s Boston Whaler rocked once at his cleat in slip ten as her wake brushed past him under the planking.

Slip eight was empty. The emptiness mattered. Slip eight was where her brother had kept his charter boat for the seven years he had owned it, and was the shape of his absence, and the absence had a body of its own that she had been visiting at this hour for four years.

She stopped at the end of the dock. The cleat at the head of the empty slip was the one her father had set himself the summer she was nine, with Noah holding the cleat and Sloane holding the bolts in a coffee can and their mother on the office porch with a glass of iced tea and her opinions about straight lines. It had been crooked then. It was crooked still. Her father had said good enough and gone in for lunch, and that had been the end of straight lines at slip eight forever.

She set the thermos down on the piling. She unscrewed the lid half a thread past finger-tight. She poured.

The Gulf at this hour did not have weather, just temperature, just the long flat skin of itself between the dock and the horizon. Sloane stood at the end of Pier Two and drank her coffee and waited for the sky to remember what color it was.

She didn't call this watching. She didn't call it grieving. Four years ago, a Coast Guard officer had stood on this dock with his cap in his hand and told her what the search had and had not found, and what the search had not found was her brother. No body. No wreckage. No piece of the boat with a number on it. Without those things, the official story was a story, and Sloane Mercer had been raised by a father who didn't respect stories he could not verify, and so she had decided, in the seventy-two hours after the Coast Guard officer left, that until somebody put a thing in her hand she would not call her brother dead.

Four years. She knew what other people thought. Margo hadn't pushed her on it. The word closure had never once come out of Margo’s mouth in her direction, which was one of the reasons Margo had been her best friend since the third grade. Most people had stopped saying anything to her about Noah at all, which suited her fine.

The truth was simpler than other people made it. Her brother had taken a boat out one night and not come back. He had not come back any of the nights since. She didn't know whether he was coming back. She knew only that nobody had given her a reason to stop expecting it.

So every morning before her marina opened, Sloane Mercer walked to the end of Pier Two, stood at her brother’s empty slip, and drank a cup of coffee while she waited for him.

A pelican came in low over the water and landed on the second piling from the end. She watched it fold its wings, which was a process pelicans did in stages, and she drank her coffee.

The sky settled on a color somewhere between pink and the color a bruise turned on the second day. The water under the empty slip held the sky and gave it back. A halyard tapped a slow tap on a mast somewhere down Pier One, and Sloane finished her cup, screwed the thermos lid back to half a thread past finger-tight, and walked back up the long dock toward the office.

Today she had a new tenant coming. The Sea Ray in slip seventeen would finally be somebody’s problem other than hers. She had a paperwork pile on the counter and a back room order for two-stroke oil that needed to go in by ten, and the fuel pump at the head of Pier One had been running rough on the prime for three days, and Sid Hoffman would come look at it on Thursday or she would learn what was wrong with it herself, which was the same thing in the long run.