Page 42 of Presumed Dead

“I don’t know. Yesterday afternoon at the latest. He paid for diesel at eight forty Wednesday morning and topped her off.”

“Topped her off.”

“Eighty-three forty-two.”

Ethan was looking at her now in a different way than he’d been looking at her before. The way wasn’t a way that was new in him — it was the way of a man who had been a particular kind of man for a long time — but it was the first time it had landed on her. The brown eyes with the small fleck of green in the right one didn’t move.

“He took her out before the storm.”

“He did.”

“On a tank he topped off the morning before.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other across the counter at five thirty-one in the morning with the storm running fifty knots on the other side of the wall and two empty coffee cups between them, and what was in the air between them was the sentence neither of them said out loud, which was that a man who topped off a forty-foot Bertram on Wednesday morning and took her out before a Thursday-morning storm with a weather window that opened at midnight was a man who’d known something the marina hadn’t known.

Sloane was the one who said it.

“He knew where he was going.”

“He did.”

“Ethan.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not asking you what you know about Doyle Pruitt.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to ask you later.”

“I know.”

She finished her coffee, set the cup down on the counter, and looked at the window over the back counter where the rain was running sideways in the dark and the kiosk light made a soft yellow square on the boardwalk, and she did the small private piece of work she’d been doing in pieces since six thirty-two on Tuesday morning, which was the work of deciding what she was going to do with the man on the other side of her counter.

But she wasn’t going to decide it today.

The storm broke at six twenty-two.

She heard it break in the small specific drop in the sound the rain made on the office roof, the small specific easing of the wind against the front window, the small specific dropping-off of the halyards along the head of Pier One that had been doing the storm’s music for an hour and forty minutes.

She set the cup down.

“I want to check the dock.”

“I’ll come.”

They put the foul-weather gear back on. Hers had been on the back of the office door drying for fifty minutes and was warmer than it had been when she’d taken it off. His had been on the next hook over for the same fifty minutes and was the same temperature as hers, which she noticed.

They went out the side door.

The marina at six twenty-five was wet and bright in the new light coming up over the Gulf, with the smell of warm rain on warm planking and the sound of water running off the canvas of nineteen secured boats, and the halyards doing the soft slow tap of a marina that had survived.

She walked Pier Two.

Catherine was on the deck of her houseboat at slip six in the yellow oilcloth coat. She tipped two fingers at Sloane as she passed. Sloane tipped two fingers back. Catherine didn’t say anything; she was good at it.