Page 39 of Presumed Dead

The parking lot was nearly empty.

She’d known it would be. She’d hoped, in the part of her she didn’t let speak out loud, that it wouldn’t be.

She killed the engine and pulled the foul-weather jacket out from behind the seat and was on the boardwalk by four twenty-eight, and the rain was harder now, the kind of rain that ran along the brim of a hood and dripped off the front of a face, and she ran the first two slips of Pier One because the fuel pump cover had a strap she always meant to replace and never had, and she lashed the strap down with a length of marlin from the cart at the head of the pier and moved on.

Pier One took her seven minutes.

Two charter boats, both with canvas down and storm covers already on, because George Halsey and Greg Bonner had been doing this since she was in high school and didn’t need a forty-dollar-a-month text to tell them what the western sky looked like. A Bayliner in slip four had a half-cleated dock line that she retied. A Sea Pro in slip five had a fender she pulled in. The houseboat in slip six on Pier Two was Catherine's — and she lashed the fly canvas to the railing and moved down Pier Two. Catherine’s houseboat at slip six light came on.

The yellow square of Catherine’s cabin light made a soft warm shape in the rain, and Catherine came up on the deck in a yellow oilcloth coat that was older than Sloane was, securing the cherry-tomato pots with a length of twine, and she didn’t look up when Sloane came onto Pier Two but she’d known Sloane was on the pier the moment Sloane’s boot hit the planking. Catherine had been knowing things on this pier for eleven years.

“I’ve got my own boat,” Catherine said into the rain. “Go.”

“Catherine.”

“I have been securing this houseboat for storms since 2014. I do not need you. Go.”

Sloane went.

Slip seven was empty. Slip eight was empty — slip eight was always empty — and she didn’t look at slip eight on her way past, which was a four-year habit and which today wasn’t a habit, because today she didn’t have time to look at slip eight. The storm was the storm. The storm came first.

Slip nine was empty.

She stopped at slip nine.

The Bertram was not on her cleats. The lines were on the cleats, coiled the way Doyle Pruitt coiled lines, which was tight and clockwise the way a man coiled lines who’d been a Navy boatswain in his twenties, but the boat the lines belonged to wasn’t there. Doyle had taken her out sometime between the close of last night and now.

Sloane stood at the head of slip nine with the rain coming down on her hood and the wind picking up off the Gulf in the first hard gust of the morning, and she did the math she had not been letting herself do for five years.

Doyle Pruitt had taken the Bertram out before a storm.

Not after. Not despite. Before. A man who took a boat out before a storm that the marina weather service had been tracking for twelve hours was a man who’d known something the marina weather service hadn’t told him.

She didn’t have what was on the other side of that sentence either.

Then the wind came in earnest.

The first gust was the gust that took the tarp on slip ten, which was the slip after Doyle’s, which held Bert Hollis’s Boston Whaler, which Bert had been meaning to take in for canvas repair for two months. The tarp went up, and the tarp came down across the cleat at the head of slip ten, and the cleat at the head of slip ten was the cleat her father had set himself in 2007 and had not, technically, set quite deep enough.

The wind caught the tarp, the tarp caught the cleat, and the cleat came out of the planking with a sound she would feel in her shoulders for the rest of the day.

The Whaler swung loose.

It swung the way a small boat swung loose at one end of her lines, which was slowly at first and then in a long sideways arc that was going to put her into Doyle’s empty slip nine and break the bow if Sloane didn’t get her tied off in the count of about forty seconds.

Sloane ran.

She made it to slip ten in the count of about six steps and went down on the planking with both knees the way her father had taught her to go down on a dock with both knees, and she had her hands on the spare cleat at the side of the slip and was reaching for the loose line when she heard the second pair of boots on the planking behind her.

They weren’t Catherine’s.

Ethan dropped to one knee next to her without a word.

He was in foul-weather gear that fit him, which was loose at the shoulders and tight at the wrists, and the hood was up and the rain was sheeting off the brim of the hood, and his hands were on the loose dock line before she’d finished registering he was there.

“Take the bow,” he said into the wind.

She took the bow.