Page 18 of Presumed Dead

"Look at it."

She looked. The diaphragm had a crack along the edge that any half-blind man with a flashlight could have found in fifteen seconds.

"Three days."

"Three days of you running it manually."

"I knew it was something simple."

"It's always something simple. You just don't want to crawl under there."

"I will crawl under anywhere on this marina, Sid Hoffman."

"I know you will. That's why I came out." He grinned. The grin was gray-streaked and entirely without performance. "Parts by Thursday. Back Friday morning to put her in."

"I'll have coffee."

"I know you will. That's why I come."

"The brownies. You come for the brownies."

"The brownies are a co-factor."

She wrapped one in a paper towel and handed it to him. He pocketed it like a kid pocketing a found nickel and tipped two fingers at her and went out the side door, and she watched his truck back out of the lot and turn left onto Lake Road.

Two of the men in her life. Neither of them a tenant, exactly. Neither of them a question.

The third — the one whose folder she had filed and re-filed and filed again — was on a forty-two-foot Sundancer on Pier Three, and she had not, technically, checked on him.

A marina owner who didn't check on a new tenant by lunchtime of his first day was a marina owner who was telling herself a story about why she wasn't checking on him.

Sloane Mercer did not tell herself stories.

She walked Pier Three at twelve twenty-three.

The light off the Gulf had taken on the white-flat quality of a Florida noon, and the heat was sitting on the boards, and somewhere up Pier One, a charter engine was idling rough on a warm-up. The marina did the things the marina did at this hour.

The Sea Ray sat in slip seventeen, looking less affronted than she had on Friday.

Canvas snaps along the windshield had been undone and folded back. Aft hatch propped open. Port windows cracked. A small breeze moved through her — the kind of air a boat got when somebody had finally let her breathe.

Ethan Vale was on his knees on the swim platform with his hands inside the engine compartment.

He'd taken the pale blue T-shirt off. It was folded on the cushion beside him. His back was— lean, ridged along the spine, olive-tan in the noon sun. He didn't turn around when her boots came onto the planking. Didn't have to. Her step had reached him; she was sure of it, the moment she'd come onto the pier.

She stopped at the pylon at the head of the slip.

"Soft board, third one down," he said, without looking up.

"I know."

"Going to want a board this fall."

"It's on the list."

He turned around then. Slowly. He had a pencil in his hand — not a pen — and he tucked it behind his ear in the easy, unhurried way a man tucked a pencil he used a lot, and he sat back on the engine cover with both hands on his knees and looked at her.

"Sloane."