Page 86 of Presumed Dead

She turned in his arms then, onto her other side, so she was facing him, close, her face inches from his in the low light, and she looked at him with the steady blue directness that had taken him apart the first morning and took him apart now.

“Is tomorrow the day,” she said. Quietly. Not quite a question, the way she did when she already half-knew.

And there it was, the thing she'd built her whole careful self to ask plainly, and he'd promised her from me, first, and the promise didn't mean he had to hand her the whole of it tonight in the dark, but it did mean he could not look at her and lie.

“Something's tomorrow,” he said. “I can't tell you what. I can tell you that when it's done, the next thing that happens is me finding you and telling you the thing I've been holding. That part's tomorrow too. I need you to get through the first part of the day, whatever it looks like, knowing the second part is me walking back to you. Can you do that?”

She was quiet for a long moment, reading him, and he let her read, held still under it and didn't hide, gave her the most honest face he had, which was the only currency he had left to give her tonight.

“Yeah,” she said finally. “I can do that.” Her hand came up and rested flat on his chest, over the place she always put it, and she didn't know, she couldn't know, that what she was resting her hand on was the exact thing he'd just told her was coming. “Walk back to me. That's all I'm asking. Whatever the rest of it is, you walk back to me, and you tell me, looking at me, and I'll take it from there. I've taken hard things before, Ethan. I'm not made of glass.”

“I know you're not.”

“Good.”

She settled her head under his chin and he held her on the narrow couch with the lamp burning low and the inlet quiet outside, and he stayed awake long after her breathing went even, memorizing it, the weight and the warmth and the small trust of her asleep against him, because he didn't know what she would let him hold after tomorrow, and he wanted to have this one exactly, all of it, to set against whatever came. The lamp burned down. He didn't sleep. He held the last untouched hours of it and let them pass through his hands one at a time, and when the window over the inlet started to go from black to the first gray of the morning he'd been counting toward for eight months, he eased his arm out from under her, and covered her with the blanket, and stood looking at her a moment in the gray, and then he went to do the thing he'd come to Blossom Springs to do.

Chapter Twenty

Ethan was on his swim platform at four-forty with a coffee he wasn't drinking and a radio earpiece that read as a hearing aid to anybody who wasn't looking for it, doing the small pointless things a man did on a boat at an ungodly hour so that a man at slip nine waking to a noise would see only the harmless neighbor who kept strange hours.

The marina at this hour was a held breath. No wind. The basin lay flat and pewter under a sky going from black to the bruised gray that came before the sun, and the boats sat motionless at their lines, and the only sound was the small electrical tick of the ice machine up by the office and the slap of a halyard somewhere that nobody had quite tensioned. He knew every sound on this dock by now. He'd spent eight months learning them, and this morning every one of them was exactly where it belonged, which was its own information, because a quiet dock was a dock that didn't know what was coming.

In his ear, Caleb's voice came low and even. “Positions.”

Graham first, from the head of Pier Three, a murmur. “Set.” Then the federal team lead, a woman named Okafor, whose voice Ethan had heard for the first time forty minutes ago from the dark of the parking lot. “Set.” Then Victor, somewhere back by the vehicles with the evidence team and a chain-of-custody kit and the patience of a man who'd waited two months and could wait twenty more minutes. “Staged.”

“Vale.”

“In position,” Ethan said, to the coffee, to the flat water, his lips barely moving. “He's aboard. Cabin light's off. No movement.”

“Hold for light,” Caleb said. “We move when there's enough to see his hands.”

So Ethan held, and the sky came up by degrees, and he stood on his platform with the cold coffee and made himself breathe slow and let the eight months funnel down to this, the boxed man asleep across the basin, the flat water, the gray going pale. He didn't think about the house on the east side of the inlet where a woman was asleep under a throw blanket on a couch, her alarm set for six. He'd put that away at the first gray, eased his arm out from under her, covered her, and driven to the dock to become the second man, and the second man did not think about the woman. The second man watched slip nine and waited for the light.

Sloane woke on the couch at six to the alarm on her phone and the cold place beside her where a man had been, and she lay still a moment in the gray light and let herself feel the shape of the morning before she got up to meet it.

He'd gone early. She'd half-surfaced when he eased out from under her, felt him tuck the blanket up over her shoulder, heard the door click softly behind him, and she'd let him think she was asleep because some mornings a person needed to leave without a conversation and she'd learned to give that when it was needed. Today was a day. He'd told her as much, in the dark, in the only language he was allowed. Something's tomorrow. Walk back to me. She'd carried the words down into a thin sleep and brought them back up with her, and they sat in her chest now, not heavy exactly, more like ballast, a known weight she could trim against.

She got up and made coffee in her own kitchen for the first morning in three and stood at the window with it while the inlet went from gray to silver, and she did the thing she'd decided to do somewhere in the night, which was to meet the day as itself and not as the thing she was bracing for. Whatever was coming would come on its own schedule. Her schedule had a fuel delivery at ten and a haul-out at noon and a transient who'd radioed last night wanting a slip, and the marina did not run itself just because the air had gone strange, and a woman who'd kept a dock standing alone for four years knew that the surest way through a bad-feeling day was to do the next true thing in front of her and then the one after that.

She showered and dressed and twisted her hair up still wet, and she drank the second cup standing up, and she got in the truck a few minutes before seven and drove the inlet road in toward town with the windows down and the morning coming in. The marsh was loud with birds. The light came sideways and gold off the water the way it did when a storm had scrubbed the air clean two days before, and the haze hadn't built back yet. It was, by every measure her senses could take, a beautiful morning, and she let it be one, because she'd promised herself she would, and because she didn't yet know it was the last ordinary drive she'd take to her own marina.

The light came up enough at five-fifty-one, and Doyle Pruitt came up the companionway of his Bertram at five-fifty-three, which told Ethan the man hadn't slept any better than he had.

He came up in yesterday's clothes with a travel mug and the stiff, careful movement of a man whose body had been waiting on his nerves all night, and he stood in his cockpit and looked at the gray water and the empty dock and did the thing Ethan had watched him do every morning for a week, which was to read his own marina for trouble. His eyes went up Pier Two. Down it. Across the basin to the Sundancer, where the harmless neighbor was coiling a line he'd already coiled. Up toward the office, dark. Out to the channel mouth, where there was nothing to see because the Coast Guard sat with its lights dark a mile past it.

“He's reading the dock,” Ethan breathed. “Give him a normal morning.”

Nobody moved. The dock stayed a held breath. And Doyle Pruitt, finding nothing his nerves could fix on, did what a tired frightened man did when the morning looked ordinary, which was to let his shoulders come down half an inch and turn to step back down for the coffee he'd forgotten below, and that was the moment, the half-second of a man turned inward with his weight on the wrong foot, and Ethan stepped off his swim platform onto the finger pier and started across the basin walkway toward slip nine at the unhurried pace of a neighbor with a question about a fuel pump.

“Moving,” he said.

“With you,” Graham said, already off Pier Three, closing the angle from the land side, and behind Ethan he heard the parking lot come alive, two car doors easing shut, Okafor and her second crossing the lot at a walk that would become a run the instant it needed to.

“Doyle,” Ethan called, easy, twenty feet out. “Got a second? My port pump's cavitating and you're the only man on this dock who'd know why.”

Doyle turned at the head of his own slip with the travel mug in his hand and his face doing the thing a guilty man's face did when a neighbor spoke, the quick reflexive smoothing, and for one beat it worked, for one beat he was just a boatswain about to talk pumps, and Ethan closed to ten feet, to eight, to the place between the cabin and the cockpit where the man's own boat took the water option away, and he watched Doyle's eyes do the small terrible recalculation, watched them flick past Ethan to Graham closing on the land side and past Graham to the two figures coming down Pier Two, and watched the boatswain understand, all at once, in the space of a breath, exactly what the ordinary morning had been hiding.