Page 34 of Presumed Dead

“Anything else about the man?”

“He walked the way a man walks when he doesn’t want to be heard. He was wearing dark clothes, no logo, no markings on the pickup. He had a small bag in his left hand on the way down the pier and the same bag in his left hand on the way back, and the bag looked the same weight both times, which I noticed because my husband used to carry his fishing tackle home empty when he hadn’t caught anything, and a man’s arm hangs the same way going home empty as it does going home full when the bag is the right size for the work.”

“Catherine, did you write any of this down?”

“I did not. I read books, drink coffee on my deck, and pay attention to my dock. I haven’t written anything down since I retired in 2014. If I started writing things down, my dock would know, and my dock would treat me differently. I prefer it not to.”

“Understood.”

She set the coffee down on the small table, folded her hands in her lap, and her shoulders settled into the small specific quarter-inch they settled when she was done with the heavy work.

“I’m going to read for a while. You’re welcome to sit, but I’m going to read.”

“I’ll let you read.”

“Good. Tell Sloane the casserole was your idea if it comes up.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“Tell her it was anyway. She’ll like that you took the trouble.”

“Catherine.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I’m not going to lie to Sloane about a casserole.”

Catherine looked at him over the chain of her glasses. Whatever she’d been about to say went through her head the small revising count it took an older woman to revise what she’d been about to say, and she nodded once.

“All right.”

“Good.”

He stood up, stepped off the houseboat the way he’d come on, with one hand on the rail and his weight even, and Catherine watched him go from the chair, and he walked back up toward the boardwalk.

Doyle was still in the office.

Ethan walked back to slip seventeen and went below and wrote it in the back of the notebook.

Slip nine. Monday night. Twenty-two thirty-eight to twenty-two fifty-three. White pickup, no logo. Unknown male, dark clothes. Small bag, same weight in and out, per neighbor. Pier Two observer position confirmed — C. Pell, slip six, eleven years on dock, no written records.

He closed the notebook and sat at the dinette with his hands flat on the table for a long count of breaths.

Catherine had told him about the white pickup because she had decided he was the kind of man who ought to know. She had also decided, separately and in advance, not to tell Sloane. The decision-tree in Catherine Pell’s head was operating on rules he didn’t yet have full visibility into, and Catherine was running her own quiet operation on this dock in parallel with the one he’d been deployed to run, and the two operations were now braided together in a way he was going to have to be careful about.

Sloane didn’t know about Monday night.

That was the part he wrote down second, in his head, without writing it in the notebook. The most observant tenant on the dock had decided to give him the intel and not Sloane, and Sloane was the woman whose marina the white pickup had been on, and Sloane was the woman who deserved to know what was happening at her own dock at ten thirty-eight on a Monday, and Sloane was the woman who was now another thing on the list of things he was carrying that he hadn’t yet told her about.

He stood up, and went back up the cabin steps and got back to the manifold.

George Halsey came across the channel at eleven fifty-four with the Tarpon Lady’s tender, because the easiest way for a charter captain on Pier One to invite a tenant on Pier Three to come out for the afternoon was to row the tender across instead of yelling.

Ethan saw him coming. He stepped off the swim platform and met George at the cleat.

“Vale.”

“George.”