Chapter 2 #3
She didn't say anything else for a moment. Then she said, without looking at him: “If anything looks wrong on this dock, Ethan, I want to hear about it. Not because I’m paranoid. Because it’s my marina, and I’d like to know.”
“What kind of wrong?”
“Any kind.”
He didn't answer right away.
A dozen reasonable answers were available — the kind a tenant gave the woman renting him a slip, the kind a man with a sander and a fixer-upper gave at the start of a six-month lease. He had several at the ready. The professional thing to do was to give her one of them.
He gave her a different one.
“All right,” he said. “You’ll hear about it.”
She looked at him then, and the small adjustment in her face was the same adjustment that had happened when he had said back, but in the other direction.
Whatever scaffolding she had built around new tenants, he had walked through one of the smaller doors in it, and they both knew it, and neither of them was going to acknowledge it out loud.
“All right,” Sloane said. “Welcome to the marina.”
She walked back up the boardwalk toward the office.
He watched her go. He didn't pretend not to. The loose shirt, the unhurried walk, the stray piece of hair the breeze had pulled out from where she had tied it back — none of those things were operationally significant. All of them were operating on him anyway.
She turned the corner of the kiosk at the head of the boardwalk and went inside.
The screen door of the office made a small sprung clap.
The bell dinged once. The marina kept being a marina around him — a charter captain two slips down hosing a deck, a man in waders walking the length of Pier One with a thermos in one hand and a tackle box in the other, the morning sun lifting in earnest off the water — and Ethan Vale stood on Pier Three at six fifty-four on a Tuesday in May with a manila folder in one hand and his life for the next six months at his feet.
He went below before he did anything else.
The cabin smelled like dust and old upholstery and the closed-up smell a boat got when it hadn't been opened in a long time. The duffel went on the dinette settee. The paper bag from Mae’s went on the small fold-down table.
He cracked the small port window over the table and the larger port over the V-berth, and stood in the middle of the cabin for a count of about ten seconds with his hands flat on the dinette table and let his pulse come back down to a pulse he could work from.
Then he sat.
The personal phone came out of his back pocket. He keyed the encrypted line. Two rings. David Mien picked up.
“In.”
“Okay.”
“She know your face?”
“She doesn’t.”
“She heard the word?”
“She heard the word. She filed it. She didn’t push.”
A small breath. The breath was David’s version of a sigh of relief, and Ethan had spent enough years on the other end of David’s phone calls to know what it meant.
“What about the friend?”
“Margo Marriott. Jace’s wife. Reads people for a living. She’s going to be a problem or a friend.”
“Make her a friend.”
“Working on it.”
“Caleb has the slip seventeen lease in his file. Mitch DeMario is going to get a call from Sloane in the next two weeks, per the operative who planted the seed. You stay clean, buy primer, learn the boat. We'll talk again Thursday.”
“Thursday.”
A pause. The pause was longer than the operational pause, and Ethan knew the pause too.
“David.”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you.”
“You were.”
Ethan sighed. “Okay, I was. Did my folks call this week?”
The pause was for David to play this out in his head.
"On schedule."
Ethan set the phone face-down on the dinette table for a count of two breaths. Then he picked it back up.
“My sister tried Tuesday.”
“And.”
“And I didn’t answer.”
“Ethan.”
“Get her brother back,” Ethan said. “Then get me back. You said it. I’m holding you to it.”
David didn't answer for a beat.
“I’m holding myself to it too.”
The line clicked off.
Ethan set the phone face-down again. He sat at the dinette in his new cabin with the small port cracked over the table and the morning sun cutting a thin line of gold across the cushion of the V-berth, and he listened to the sound of the marina around him — the halyards on Pier One, a charter engine starting somewhere, the soft thump of a fender against a hull two slips down — and he made himself wait for the temperature in his chest to come back to a temperature he could work from.
The watch in David’s folder, five hours behind him, had two engraved words on the back of it.
The woman in the office one hundred and twenty feet north of him had not been told what the watch said, nor that the watch had been found.
The man in this cabin was the man who was going to have to tell her, when the time came, and the time was not today, and the time was not next week, and what he had to do for the next few weeks was learn the shape of her well enough to know when the time was right.
He got up. The cinnamon roll came out of the paper bag from Mae’s. He went back up the cabin steps, onto the gunwale of his boat in the morning sun, and he ate the cinnamon roll Sloane Mercer had told him to eat.
It was, in fact, better than a cinnamon roll had any right to be.