Page 49 of Presumed Dead

“Anyway,” Doyle said. “Thanks for helping her out. She doesn’t ask for help, and she doesn’t take it when it’s offered, so I’m surprised she let you on the dock at all.”

“She didn’t let me on the dock. I came up because I saw the radar.”

“Saw the radar?”

“I sleep light, and the radar pinged.”

“Ah.”

Doyle tipped two fingers at his invisible hat brim and went around Ethan to the door. The bell rang. He was across the parking lot to his truck inside fifteen seconds and gone.

Roy set the clipboard down.

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

Roy poured him a paper cup of the bad coffee Roy kept on the back burner all day. Ethan took it. He paid for a pack of gum he didn’t need, a tin of mints he didn’t need either. Roy gave him his change without counting it.

“Vale.”

“Yeah.”

“Doyle Pruitt doesn’t have a friend with a slip up the channel.”

Ethan looked at him.

Roy was an older man, lean, Vietnam Veteran cap pushed up on his forehead, the eyes of a man who had not been saying anything at the counter of a bait shop for twenty years and had decided, on a Thursday morning in May, to start saying something.

“I’ve known him five years. He’s never tied that boat up anywhere but Sloane’s. He doesn’t know anybody on this part of the coast who’d let him on their dock for the night. If he told you he stayed at a friend’s slip, he’s lying.”

“Roy.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve been on this counter a long time. I see what I see.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Don’t come back in for a couple of days. He saw you in here this morning, and he’ll come back to ask me about you. If you’re not in, I’ve got less to tell him.”

“Understood.”

He spent the late morning on the boat.

The starboard rail still needed primer in the spot where the salt had eaten through, and a man who had told a marina owner he was on his boat all afternoon needed to be on his boat all afternoon, and so he primed the rail and let it set and primed it again and let that set, and the work was slow and steady and didn’t require his head, and he let his head do the work it needed to do.

Which was the question Sloane was going to ask.

He had until this afternoon to find the middle Caleb had told him to find. The middle was the sentence that gave her enough to keep her on the dock and not enough to break the op, and the middle had to land in her hearing so that it let her trust the next sentence after it, because there was going to be a next sentence after it, and there was going to be a next sentence after that, and there were going to be a couple of weeks of next sentences before he could give her the whole of what he was carrying.

He didn’t have the middle yet.

He worked the rail, drank water, and ate a granola bar at eleven. At eleven-thirty, Catherine waved at him from her deck, and he waved back, and Catherine pointed at her coffee pot and raised her eyebrows, and he shook his head and tapped his wristwatch, and Catherine nodded and went back to her paperback, and that was the whole exchange.

At twelve-ten, Sloane walked out of the office to the fuel dock.