Page 26 of Presumed Dead

Day One.

George at nine fifteen. Catherine at eleven fifty. Doyle for eleven minutes between twelve oh-three and twelve fourteen. Sloane at six thirty-two, at twelve twenty-three, and at five thirty-six. Roy at the bait shop counter for forty seconds. Two waves across the channel before any of it started. A tuna noodle casserole promised by a woman who had decided to take a chance on him.

He stood. The cinnamon roll bag from the bakery was still folded in the trash where he’d put it at seven. He ate the apple he’d been carrying since Jacksonville, and he drank a full bottle of water, and he sat on the gunwale in the cooling light off the channel and watched a heron lift off a piling at the head of Pier One and beat slow and low across the water toward the inlet.

He watched until the heron was gone.

Across the channel, Catherine’s deck light came on. Her paperback was on the small folding table beside her chair. She lifted her hand. He lifted his back.

Then he went below to start the work of being Ethan Vale on a forty-two-foot Sea Ray for the night.

Chapter Five

Sloane poured coffee into the green thermos at five forty-one and walked out the back door of the office at five forty-three. She’d walked out the back door of the office at five forty-three for four years, and the marina did the things the marina did at this hour, and she did the things she did inside of them.

The boardwalk under her boots. The complaint of the soft board on Pier Two. A slow tap of a halyard on a mast at the head of Pier One that hadn’t stopped tapping since 2017. A pelican on the second piling. The end of the dock.

She set the thermos on the piling, unscrewed the lid half a thread past finger-tight, and poured.

Slip eight was empty as it had been for four years.

She drank her coffee.

The thing about the morning was that it was the same morning. Day after day after day. Water held what the sky was giving it. The pelican folded its wings in the same stages. A halyard tapped. She drank her coffee. The fact that yesterday a man in a pale blue T-shirt had walked into her office at six thirty-two and shaken her hand half a second too long was not something the dock had any opinion about. The dock was the dock. Slip eight was slip eight. Her brother was still gone.

She finished the cup, poured another, and drank the second one slower.

At five fifty-six, she screwed the lid back to half a thread past finger-tight and walked back up the long dock the way she’d walked back up it for four years, and she didn’t, on the way past, look at slip seventeen.

Not looking at slip seventeen took a small amount of work that hadn’t been required of her yesterday. She did the work without comment.

By six-thirty she had the kettle on and the slip seventeen folder back in the drawer where it belonged.

She’d pulled it on her way past the standing file because her hand had pulled it, not because she’d told her hand to. She held it for the count of three breaths. The folder went back in between sixteen and eighteen. Her father had said once, with his hand on the same standing file in 1998, that a hand that pulled a folder without asking was a hand telling you something the rest of you was being polite about. She’d been twelve. The line had landed then and was landing now.

She made the coffee. Three minutes. She poured a cup and drank half of it standing at the counter.

Tarpon Lady ran out at seven for the morning charter — a half-day trip, three out-of-state customers George had taken in the night before. The Bayliner in slip four was off the dock by seven-fifteen. The houseboat in slip six on Pier Two had its deck light off, which was Catherine going below for her second sleep, which was something Catherine had done in the morning for as long as Sloane had known her.

She did the daybook. The deposit slip from Tuesday got finished. Then she rang up a quart of two-stroke and a Snickers bar for a man she’d been ringing up Snickers bars for since the year her father died.

At eight forty, Doyle Pruitt walked into the office with a hundred-dollar bill in his hand.

“Diesel.”

“How much?”

“Top her off.” Doyle put the hundred on the counter. “Probably eighty, the way she runs.”

Sloane keyed the pump from the office. She watched the gauge climb on the small panel by the register. Eighty-three forty-two. She handed Doyle his change without counting it, because she’d counted it without looking at it; she’d been counting change without looking at it since she was ten.

Doyle didn’t leave.

He put his hands flat on the counter, per his usual, broad in the shoulders for a man in his sixties, the watch on his wrist catching the morning light through the front window. His thumbnail was clean, which was something she’d been noticing about Doyle Pruitt for five years.

“New tenant settling in?”

“Mm.”