Page 41 of Presumed Dead

Ethan saw the shaking.

He didn’t say anything about it. He went to the back room and pulled the two towels off the shelf above the small office washer she’d been meaning to replace for two years, and he handed her one and kept the other, and they stood at the counter and dried their hair and their hands and their forearms.

She was warming up. The shaking was easing.

“Coffee?” she said.

“Please.”

She made coffee. Three minutes. She poured two cups and gave him one, and they stood at the counter and drank it without talking, and the storm did what the storm was doing on the other side of the wall, which was the work of a fifty-knot wind on a marina that had been secured by two people who’d known what they were doing.

Sloane drank half the cup before she said it.

“Ethan.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know to come up?”

He took the count of about three breaths to answer, drank his coffee, and looked at her across the counter as if he was deciding how much of the truth to give her, and she watched him decide, and what landed on her was that the watching-him-decide was something a woman who’d been a marina owner for fifteen years had learned to recognize.

“I’ve been watching the radar since two.”

“At two in the morning.”

“I sleep light. I always have. The radar app I use pinged a small craft advisory at one fifty-three. I went up to the cockpit at two-ten and watched the western sky for ten minutes, and the sky was the kind of sky I’ve watched roll in off this coast before, and I decided I was going to be on this dock by four-fifteen because there would be work to do.”

“You’ve seen storms roll off this coast before.”

It was the second sentence she’d caught him in. The first had been “back” on Tuesday morning. This one was bigger.

He didn’t walk it back.

“I have.”

“Logistics didn’t bring you to this coast.”

“Logistics brought me up and down it.”

“All right.”

She didn’t push him further. She’d watch him for a while. The shelf behind the insurance certificates was going to be full now, and the new items were all on the same shelf, and the shelf was about Ethan Vale, and she wasn’t going to ask him to take anything off the shelf until she’d decided what she was going to do with what was on it.

She drank her coffee.

“Sloane.”

“Yes.”

“Doyle Pruitt’s Bertram wasn’t in slip nine.”

She set the cup down.

It wasn’t a question. He’d walked Pier Two with her and seen slip nine empty. The telling-her-he’d-seen was a man telling a woman something she’d already seen because he wanted her to know he’d seen it too.

“No.”

“When did he take her out?”