Page 25 of Presumed Dead

“I’m closing.”

“I can come back.”

“You’re here.” She finished the roll of quarters one-handed; she likely had done it for years. “What do you need?”

He took the folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket. He’d known what he was going to ask before he’d walked off the boat, and he’d told himself the question was the holding tank because the holding tank was the smallest of the three, and a man on his first afternoon asking the smallest question was a man who wasn’t pushing.

“Holding tank.”

“What about it.”

“Last service. Pump-out path. Whether the previous owner kept records on her.”

Sloane closed the till. The drawer made the soft chunk of a marina till closing at the end of a day, and she didn’t key the lock yet, which meant she wasn’t in a hurry to put him out.

“Don kept records on everything.” She crossed to the standing file. “His widow gave me the binder when she signed the boat over. It’s yours now.”

She pulled a thick green binder out of the second drawer and set it on the counter between them.

“Thank you, Sloane.”

“You’re welcome, Ethan.”

That was twice now, his name in her mouth. The first time had been at six thirty-two with two of them shaking hands across the counter, and the second time was now at five thirty-six with a green binder between them and her hand pulling back along the wood.

“Anything else on the list?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” The almost-smile he’d seen at six thirty-two came back, smaller, more careful. “I’ll be here.”

“Good.”

“Lock the side door behind you. The front’s locked.”

“Will do.”

He picked up the binder. The weight caught him, and he felt the surprise show on his face before he could keep it off, and he watched Sloane see that he had seen, and neither of them named it.

He went out through the side door and locked it behind him.

The walk to Pier Three took the same hundred and twenty feet it had taken at six thirty-two.

He carried the binder in his left hand and the folded list in his back pocket and the quiet awareness, which he wasn’t going to dignify by examining yet, that he’d walked to the office for a holding-tank question, and what he was walking back from the office with wasn’t a holding-tank question.

Day One. Twice across her counter. Once on her dock at noon. Once in her office at five thirty-six. A cinnamon roll. A handshake. The half-second she’d held his hand. A grease streak along the inside of her left forearm. The way she’d said his name.

None of those were operational.

All of them were operating on him anyway.

He came down the dock to slip seventeen and stepped onto the swim platform. The Sundancer rocked once under his weight and steadied. Below, he set the green binder on the dinette and sat on the cushion across from it and looked at it for a long count of breaths.

Then he opened it.

Don Bickford’s careful, slow handwriting filled the first dozen pages. Plumbing schematics. Holding-tank service entries going back to two thousand four. The kind of records a man kept when he loved a boat and wanted the man who came after him to know what he’d done to her. Ethan read through enough of it to answer the question he’d gone to the office to ask, and then he closed the binder.

He sat at the dinette with his hands flat on the table for a long count of breaths, just like he’d sat at this same table at six fifty-five in the morning with the office phone call to David still ten minutes ahead of him.