Chapter 1
Chapter One
Sloane Mercer poured coffee into the green thermos at five forty-one and walked out the back door of the office at five forty-three.
The order mattered. She had been doing the same three things in the same order before the marina opened for four years, because order was a small thing she could hold on to when so many other things had stopped sitting still.
Coffee into the thermos. The walk to the end of Pier Two. The cup, poured and finished, while she watched the water for her brother.
That was the morning.
The thermos had a dent in the base from being set down on too many pilings, and the lid had to be turned half a thread past finger-tight, or it leaked.
She had earned the dent. She had earned the trick with the lid.
Neither was a reason to replace a thing that had been hers since the year Noah taught her to drive his truck.
Her boots came down on the boardwalk. The long pier — Pier Two — complained the way it always did under her at this hour.
A soft spot on the sixth board from the end had been waiting on her for two seasons, and she would replace it this fall when the weather turned, the way she promised herself most things in the fall.
Slip seven was empty. Slip eight was empty, too.
Bert Hollis’s Boston Whaler rocked once at his cleat in slip ten as her wake brushed past him under the planking.
Slip eight was empty. The emptiness mattered. Slip eight was where her brother had kept his charter boat for the seven years he had owned it, and was the shape of his absence, and the absence had a body of its own that she had been visiting at this hour for four years.
She stopped at the end of the dock. The cleat at the head of the empty slip was the one her father had set himself the summer she was nine, with Noah holding the cleat and Sloane holding the bolts in a coffee can and their mother on the office porch with a glass of iced tea and her opinions about straight lines.
It had been crooked then. It was crooked still.
Her father had said good enough and gone in for lunch, and that had been the end of straight lines at slip eight forever.
She set the thermos down on the piling. She unscrewed the lid half a thread past finger-tight. She poured.
The Gulf at this hour did not have weather, just temperature, just the long flat skin of itself between the dock and the horizon. Sloane stood at the end of Pier Two and drank her coffee and waited for the sky to remember what color it was.
She didn't call this watching. She didn't call it grieving.
Four years ago, a Coast Guard officer had stood on this dock with his cap in his hand and told her what the search had and had not found, and what the search had not found was her brother.
No body. No wreckage. No piece of the boat with a number on it.
Without those things, the official story was a story, and Sloane Mercer had been raised by a father who didn't respect stories he could not verify, and so she had decided, in the seventy-two hours after the Coast Guard officer left, that until somebody put a thing in her hand she would not call her brother dead.
Four years. She knew what other people thought.
Margo hadn't pushed her on it. The word closure had never once come out of Margo’s mouth in her direction, which was one of the reasons Margo had been her best friend since the third grade.
Most people had stopped saying anything to her about Noah at all, which suited her fine.
The truth was simpler than other people made it. Her brother had taken a boat out one night and not come back. He had not come back any of the nights since. She didn't know whether he was coming back. She knew only that nobody had given her a reason to stop expecting it.
So every morning before her marina opened, Sloane Mercer walked to the end of Pier Two, stood at her brother’s empty slip, and drank a cup of coffee while she waited for him.
A pelican came in low over the water and landed on the second piling from the end. She watched it fold its wings, which was a process pelicans did in stages, and she drank her coffee.
The sky settled on a color somewhere between pink and the color a bruise turned on the second day.
The water under the empty slip held the sky and gave it back.
A halyard tapped a slow tap on a mast somewhere down Pier One, and Sloane finished her cup, screwed the thermos lid back to half a thread past finger-tight, and walked back up the long dock toward the office.
Today she had a new tenant coming. The Sea Ray in slip seventeen would finally be somebody’s problem other than hers.
She had a paperwork pile on the counter and a back room order for two-stroke oil that needed to go in by ten, and the fuel pump at the head of Pier One had been running rough on the prime for three days, and Sid Hoffman would come look at it on Thursday or she would learn what was wrong with it herself, which was the same thing in the long run.
The bell on the office door dinged when she went in. The AC was still on its overnight setting, and the smell of yesterday’s coffee hung in the back room where her father’s nineteen ninety-six pot had sat untouched since seven o’clock the night before.
She propped the front door open with the rock her father had used for the same purpose for thirty years, put fresh coffee on, and she got to work.
By six-fifteen, she had the kettle on for her second cup, and she had pulled the manila folder for slip seventeen out of the standing file and was reading the paperwork for the third time.
Ethan Vale. Forty-six. A Jacksonville address she didn't recognize. A Florida driver’s license that looked clean.
Bank routing on the deposit, which had cleared at one o’clock the previous afternoon.
Logistics, his application said. Retired.
He had written retired early in tight, small handwriting that didn't take up the whole line, with early underlined once, like the underline was the joke and you were supposed to catch it.
The joke hadn't been lost on her. She had read his application enough times to have an opinion about his handwriting, which was not a thing she should have had an opinion about, and she set the file down on the counter and turned the kettle off the burner before she could pretend not to be aware of what she was doing.
It was the email exchange that had done it.
The first email from him had been five sentences, courteous, the email of a man who knew how to write a business email and didn't waste anybody’s time.
The second email had been six sentences, after she had warned him about the boat, and the sixth sentence had said, Hold the slip — and tell me your favorite breakfast place, which was the kind of sentence a man wrote when he was either an idiot or a man with a sense of humor about himself, and Sloane had been reading men’s emails for fifteen years and could usually tell the two apart.
She had told him about Mae’s. She had recommended the cinnamon roll, signed her name — Sloane, which was something she didn't do in form letters from Sloane Mercer’s Marina, and she had stared at her sent folder for ten minutes wondering why.
That had been Friday. She hadn't, in the four days since, found a satisfactory answer to the wondering, and so she had stopped wondering, which was the same thing as not having an answer but cleaner to live with.
The Sea Ray in slip seventeen had been sitting there for a year and a month.
The owner — a retired airline pilot from Sarasota named Don Bickford — had died at his desk in October of a heart attack that had taken him before the coffee cup he had been holding hit the floor.
His widow had called Sloane two weeks later.
She had asked Sloane to broker the boat for her because Sloane had been Don’s friend, and Sloane had said yes the way she said yes to all the things she should have said no to, and the Sea Ray had been on her hands ever since.
Don Bickford’s widow had wanted out of the slip fees by Christmas.
By Easter, she had wanted out of the slip fees at any price.
Sloane had refused, on the widow’s behalf, the first three offers because they had been from men who would have put the boat back in the water with a coat of cheap paint and a story.
The Sea Ray deserved better than that. Don Bickford had loved her.
Ethan Vale had paid full asking. He'd paid full price for a boat he had not seen, which any sensible person would call reckless, and the Sea Ray wasn't in the kind of shape that rewarded recklessness.
Sloane had written him an email about the boat that was as honest as she could write an email, because she had decided two months ago that whoever ended up with the Sea Ray was going to get her with full disclosure or not at all.
He had written back, I’ve made my peace with the boat — and with the slip, which had pleased her in a way she wasn't going to examine.
She closed the folder. The kettle clicked. She poured the second cup, and she leaned her hip against the counter, and watched the steam rise out of her mug for a minute longer than she would have admitted to anyone.
Margo Marriott came in at six twenty with two coffees from the Sandbar and the tail end of a sentence she had apparently started fifty feet ago.
“ — and I told him, Jace, honey, you cannot keep climbing on the bar to change a lightbulb. You are forty-eight years old, and you have a Lipitor prescription, and if you fall off that bar and break your hip, I am not the one driving you to the hospital. Hanna can drive you to the hospital. Hanna has a station wagon. I have a husband who needs to stop being eight years old about ladders.”
“Good morning, Margo.”