Page 2 of Presumed Dead

“Listing’s been up online for eleven days. You know what’s on it. You’ve been watching it since it went up.”

Ethan didn’t deny it. He picked up the close-up and turned it under the light. The boat was a wreck. He’d already made a list in his head of what it needed, and it had been growing since the photograph had been taken.

“Lab results?” he said.

David slid a thinner folder across the table. “Forty-eight hours ago.”

Ethan opened it.

The first page was the report. The second was a photograph of the watch. Leather strap. Scratched face. The engraving on the back was clear under the camera’s light.

N.M. — Steady on.

Ethan looked at it for a long time. The watch stayed where it was on the page. There was no need to pick it up. He’d been carrying it in his head for six weeks, ever since David had called him to say a body had come out of an inlet north of Tampa with a watch on its wrist. The question he’d been waiting eight months to ask had come out of Ethan’s mouth. David had said, We don’t know yet; we’re going to know.

Now they knew.

“Two rounds,” David said. “Same as we expected. He didn’t drown.”

“How long had he been in the water?”

“Less than a year. Best guess: three to six months. He was held somewhere first. Then dumped.”

Ethan set the folder down carefully.

David didn’t know yet. Ethan had told himself a dozen times he was going to say it, and a dozen times he hadn’t, because the moment the words were out, the team would have to factor them in. This op needed to run clean. Sloane Mercer deserved to get her brother back through good work, not through some operator’s eight-month-old guilt.

His eyes went back to the close-up of the Sea Ray in slip seventeen. Then to the marina behind it. Four Aprils ago, a pen had slid across a counter. A man had laughed easily about tourists who tried to dock yachts in fishing slips. One sentence had dropped between them with a weight Ethan hadn’t felt at the time.

You ever come across the ones where something’s off? The ones where the books are clean and the slips are full, and you still get a feeling?

He’d said no. Most of his work was paint-by-numbers, he’d told the man. The form Noah Mercer had slid across the counter had gotten signed, and he’d thanked the man and walked back to his car. Three days later, when his insurance file closed clean, he’d left Blossom Springs.

Three weeks after that, Noah Mercer had taken a boat out one night and not come back.

“You okay?” David said.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

David watched him a beat longer than was strictly necessary. Then he turned the page.

“His sister.”

The photograph that came out next was one Ethan had already seen. He’d seen versions of it for eight months. A woman, mid-thirties, standing at the end of a dock with her back to the camera. Hair pulled back. Wind taking the loose pieces. One hand on a cleat. The other held a length of rope she’d forgotten she was holding.

What was new about this one was the date David had circled in the corner. Last Thursday.

“She still goes out there. Every morning. Pier Two, slip eight — her brother’s old berth. Coffee in a thermos on the piling. She’s been doing it for four years.”

“Waiting for him.”

David let the word waiting sit between them on the table. No correction. No softening. They both knew what the woman in the photograph believed, and they both knew what the watch in the other folder said about that belief, and the gap between those two things was the gap Ethan was about to step into.

Ethan looked at her back. He’d looked at her file so many times he could draw the shape of her life on a napkin. Mother gone three years before Noah. Father six years before that. Twenty-two slips she ran by herself. A list she’d kept that nobody had wanted to read. A holiday gathering where she’d said too much to a friend. A deputy’s report from last spring that had gone into a drawer, and four years of nobody coming back.