Page 14 of Presumed Dead

She didn't say anything else for a moment. Then she said, without looking at him: “If anything looks wrong on this dock, Ethan, I want to hear about it. Not because I’m paranoid. Because it’s my marina, and I’d like to know.”

“What kind of wrong?”

“Any kind.”

He didn't answer right away.

A dozen reasonable answers were available — the kind a tenant gave the woman renting him a slip, the kind a man with a sander and a fixer-upper gave at the start of a six-month lease. He had several at the ready. The professional thing to do was to give her one of them.

He gave her a different one.

“All right,” he said. “You’ll hear about it.”

She looked at him then, and the small adjustment in her face was the same adjustment that had happened when he had said back, but in the other direction. Whatever scaffolding she had built around new tenants, he had walked through one of the smaller doors in it, and they both knew it, and neither of them was going to acknowledge it out loud.

“All right,” Sloane said. “Welcome to the marina.”

She walked back up the boardwalk toward the office.

He watched her go. He didn't pretend not to. The loose shirt, the unhurried walk, the stray piece of hair the breeze had pulled out from where she had tied it back — none of those things were operationally significant. All of them were operating on him anyway.

She turned the corner of the kiosk at the head of the boardwalk and went inside. The screen door of the office made a small sprung clap. The bell dinged once. The marina kept being a marina around him — a charter captain two slips down hosing a deck, a man in waders walking the length of Pier One with a thermos in one hand and a tackle box in the other, the morning sun lifting in earnest off the water — and Ethan Vale stood on Pier Three at six fifty-four on a Tuesday in May with a manila folder in one hand and his life for the next six months at his feet.

He went below before he did anything else.

The cabin smelled like dust and old upholstery and the closed-up smell a boat got when it hadn't been opened in a long time. The duffel went on the dinette settee. The paper bag from Mae’s went on the small fold-down table. He cracked the small port window over the table and the larger port over the V-berth, and stood in the middle of the cabin for a count of about ten seconds with his hands flat on the dinette table and let his pulse come back down to a pulse he could work from.

Then he sat.

The personal phone came out of his back pocket. He keyed the encrypted line. Two rings. David Mien picked up.

“In.”

“Okay.”

“She know your face?”

“She doesn’t.”

“She heard the word?”

“She heard the word. She filed it. She didn’t push.”

A small breath. The breath was David’s version of a sigh of relief, and Ethan had spent enough years on the other end of David’s phone calls to know what it meant.

“What about the friend?”

“Margo Marriott. Jace’s wife. Reads people for a living. She’s going to be a problem or a friend.”

“Make her a friend.”

“Working on it.”

“Caleb has the slip seventeen lease in his file. Mitch DeMario is going to get a call from Sloane in the next two weeks, per the operative who planted the seed. You stay clean, buy primer, learn the boat. We'll talk again Thursday.”

“Thursday.”

A pause. The pause was longer than the operational pause, and Ethan knew the pause too.