Page 20 of Presumed Dead

He went.

He didn't look back. She'd been almost sure he wasn't going to. He was, she'd figured out at six thirty-two that morning and was confirming at twelve twenty-eight now, a man with discipline about looking back.

She walked up the boardwalk to her office, and she didn't look at slip eight on the way.

She filed that too.

Chapter Four

Ethan came up the cabin steps at seven-twenty with a clean coffee mug in his hand and the second half of the cinnamon roll in a napkin and the day in front of him.

Pier Two sat directly across the channel from slip seventeen, close enough to wave to and far enough that nobody on Pier Two was going to overhear a conversation on his deck. He’d been counting on the geometry of it since David had first put the marina diagram on the table. A man who wanted to learn a dock was a man who needed to be seen on it.

He set the coffee on the engine cover. Took a bite of the cinnamon roll and watched the marina wake up around him.

The Tarpon Lady was on Pier One, and five slips down. A man Ethan placed in his fifties, was on her cockpit deck with a hose in his hand and a Tampa Bay Rays cap on his head, and he was washing down the deck in the unhurried morning way of a charter captain who’d been doing it for twenty years and saw no reason to do it any differently today. He looked up. Caught Ethan looking. Raised a hand.

Ethan raised one back.

The little houseboat in slip six on Pier Two had a woman on her deck with a coffee mug and a paperback. White hair, blue caftan, glasses pushed up into the hair. She’d been watching the marina the way a woman watched a marina from the deck of a houseboat she’d lived on for a long time, which was the way a person watched what she already knew. She looked across the channel. Looked at him. Lifted the mug an inch.

Ethan lifted his coffee back.

Two waves. Two deposits. Cheap currency on Day One, and the cheapest deposits were the ones that paid the highest interest, and Ethan had been making them for nineteen years.

He finished the cinnamon roll standing on the gunwale and watched both of his new neighbors not-quite-watch him back. The dock was a working dock. He was a new tenant on a fixer-upper. The watch on his wrist said seven twenty-eight, and the day was already paying out.

He pulled the canvas off the windshield frame at seven-forty.

The canvas had been on the boat the way old canvas got left on a boat that nobody loved, which was tied down everywhere it could be tied down and crusted with salt at every grommet. He worked his way around her in the unhurried way of a man who’d untied canvas before, and he folded the panels as he went and stacked them on the cockpit cushion.

The sander came up out of the truck bed at eight. He’d bought it at the hardware store in Jacksonville two weeks ago, because a man on a fixer-upper bought a sander before he bought anything else, and a man who already owned a sander didn’t buy a sander, and Ethan Vale had owned nothing that lived in one place for thirteen years.

He took the bottle of mineral spirits and the rolled drop cloth out of the bed too. Locked the cover. Crossed the lot to the boardwalk with the sander hanging off two fingers and the bottle in the other hand.

He didn’t look at Doyle Pruitt’s green truck at the far end of the lot.

He’d clocked the truck through the office window at six twenty-eight, when Sloane had been at her counter, and the man in the doorway hadn’t yet stepped inside, and he’d clocked it again on the way to the bait shop for the sandwich, and he didn’t need to clock it a third time. The truck was where the truck was. The man it belonged to was somewhere on the property. A new tenant who already knew which truck belonged to which tenant was a new tenant who’d been doing more looking than a new tenant should be doing on his first morning, and Ethan was being a new tenant who hadn’t.

He went down Pier Three to slip seventeen and got to work on the starboard rail.

The man from slip three came by at nine fifteen with a brown paper sack from the bait shop in one hand and a fresh coffee from the Sandbar in the other and the easy interested face of a man who’d decided to introduce himself.

Ethan saw him coming from forty feet away. The man wasn’t pretending to walk past, which was the kindness of a man who had no intention of being indirect about it, and Ethan set the sander on the cushion and stood up off the rail and put both hands on his hips and waited for the introduction to come to him.

“You’re the one who bought Don’s boat.”

“I am.” Ethan stepped to the gunwale. “Ethan Vale. Come aboard if you’ve got a minute.”

“George Halsey.” The man came up the swim platform without hesitation. “Captain on the Tarpon Lady, three slips across. Welcome to the marina.”

“Appreciate it.”

George set the bait sack on the engine cover and his coffee beside it and looked at the boat. He took his time. The Rays cap came off and went on again. He scratched the back of his neck. He nodded once at the toe rail and once at the stack of folded canvas on the cushion.

“Don would be glad somebody took her serious.”

“I’m taking her serious.”