Page 38 of Presumed Dead

The text was from a number he didn’t have saved. The number had a Florida area code. It was a single line.

This is Sloane. There’s a casserole on your dock pylon.

Ethan stood up.

He looked toward the head of his slip. The pylon at the head of slip seventeen had, in fact, a Pyrex dish sitting on top of it, balanced on the flat surface, with a tea towel folded over it and weighed down on two corners by what looked like a half-brick and a small marina cleat she’d probably grabbed off the standing file of spares behind her counter.

He looked at the office.

The kiosk light was off.

He looked back at the casserole and typed.

Catherine brought me one yesterday.

He read the text twice before he sent it, thought about adding a sentence and didn’t, and sent it.

The reply came inside ten seconds.

I know. She told me she made an extra. Eat it tomorrow.

He stood on his swim platform with the phone in one hand and looked at the Pyrex on his pylon. The marina at seven forty-three was cooling and emptying and quietly preparing to be a marina at eight, and somewhere across the parking lot a truck started and pulled out and turned right onto the road, and Ethan typed the next text the way a man typed a text he hadn’t had a chance to draft in advance.

Thank you, Sloane.

She didn’t reply.

He walked to the pylon and picked up the Pyrex. It was heavy. She’d made it heavy on purpose, with too much of whatever it called for, and he saw that the two women on this dock who’d given him casseroles in twenty-four hours must have felt he needed to eat. It could be worse.

He took it below, put it in the icebox, and stood at the icebox for a count of about three breaths with his hand on the door.

Then he went back up the cabin steps and sat on the gunwale in the cooling light and looked across the channel at Catherine’s deck light, and he thought about a woman who had stayed an hour and forty minutes late at her office on a Wednesday so she could leave a casserole on her tenant’s pylon and drive home before he could come to the office to thank her, and the thinking-about-her was what he was going to be doing for the rest of the night, and there wasn’t going to be a forty-five-minute window in it.

He sat on the gunwale until the channel had gone fully dark.

Then he went below and ate a small plate of her casserole standing at the dinette, because he’d told her he would eat it tomorrow but he was eating it tonight, and the small lie to her about the casserole was the smallest lie he had told her in thirty-three hours, but it wasn't the biggest one.

Chapter Seven

The phone went off at four-oh-six.

Sloane was awake before it finished the first buzz, which was a habit she’d built the spring after Noah went out and had not been able to put down since. The screen lit her ceiling. The text was from the marina weather service she paid forty dollars a month for, and the text was the one she’d been hoping wouldn’t come this week.

Line of severe thunderstorms tracking NE off the Gulf. Sustained 35-45 mph, gusts to 60. Arrival window 04:45-05:15. Marina advised to secure all loose canvas, fender lines, and unattended vessels.

She read it twice.

The first read was the read of a marina owner who’d been reading weather alerts for many years. The second read was for the part she’d felt before she’d let herself read it, which was that the storm was coming in at the worst possible hour, when the marina had nineteen boats on her dock with two owners on site, and forty-five minutes of warning meant she could secure seven of them herself before the wind hit, and the other twelve were going to be on her conscience if she didn’t move.

She was already in her jeans.

She’d slept in them when the forecast was unsettled; her father had slept in them on nights when the forecast was unsettled also; it was how she learned it. Her boots were beside her, and the keys to the truck were on the nightstand instead of in the bowl by the door.

She had the keys in her hand and the boots on her feet inside ninety seconds.

The rain was already coming down by the time she pulled out of the driveway. It wasn’t the storm yet — the storm was still fifteen miles offshore by the radar — but it was the line ahead of the storm, the kind of warm steady rain that walked in front of the wind, and she’d driven through it on the way to the marina enough times to know what was behind it.

She drove faster than she meant to. The wipers ran on high. The clock on the dash said four eighteen, and the rain hit the windshield at the steady, careful tempo of a rain that was about to stop being steady and careful, and she made the turn onto Lake Road at four twenty-three and was at the marina by four twenty-six.