Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Sloane went straight to the standing file and pulled the slip seventeen folder.
She didn't open it. Held it for the count of three breaths, looking at the tab she'd written with the same blue Sharpie she'd been using on tabs since her father died and she'd inherited his Sharpies along with everything else.
Then she filed it back between sixteen and eighteen and put the kettle on.
The kettle had been her mother's. The standing file had been her father's.
The marina was hers. The morning had a particular weight to it she didn't have a word for, and she wasn't going to spend the day trying to find the word, because the diesel order had to be in by noon and the fuel pump on Pier One had been catching and losing prime for three days running.
She picked up the daybook.
Sid had texted at five-forty. He'd come at ten.
The pump-out code on Pier Three needed rotating — Tuesday — and the new card had to be in the laminator before the boats started showing up at the head of the pier.
The Tarpon Lady was due at nine for bait.
Mrs. Bickford had called twice last week about the title transfer, and Sloane had not, technically, finished the title transfer, and she would have to either finish it today or invent a reason to call Mrs. Bickford and tell her something she didn't want to hear.
She made the coffee. Three minutes. She poured a cup and drank half of it standing at the counter.
Back.
He had said it without flinching. He'd said it the way a man said a true thing he'd decided to say, and then he'd watched her hear it, and he hadn't walked it back.
Which meant one of two things. Either he was a careless man who used words that didn't match his paperwork — and he didn't move like a careless man — or he was a deliberate one who had decided, on the way to her marina, that the word was the smaller risk.
Smaller than what?
She'd been turning the question for an hour and a half and didn't have an answer, and she wasn't going to find one by turning it any harder.
She filed the question behind the insurance certificates with everything else, and she got to work.
Sid Hoffman came in at ten-oh-six with the slow walk a man walked when he had a bad knee and didn't intend to apologize for it.
He set his coffee mug on the counter — the same mug he used every visit — and he tipped two fingers at the daybook.
"You got the brownies?"
"I made the brownies."
"Then I'll fix anything you've got."
She filled his mug. He drank half of it in one long pull and set it back down. His Miracle Garage cap was pushed up his forehead, the way he wore it when he was thinking, and his eyes had gone past her to the slip seventeen folder in the standing file.
"New tenant."
Sloane didn't look up from the daybook. "As of six thirty-two."
"The Sundancer."
"The same."
"Well." Sid drank the rest of his coffee. "Somebody finally took her."
"Somebody did."
Sid let the word somebody do its small work and didn't push.
"Three days on the prime."
"Could be the check valve. Could be the diaphragm. Could be the line."
"Any tree work near it?"
"No tree work."
"All right. Brownies after." He picked the mug back up and finished the coffee in two swallows. "Twenty minutes. Maybe forty if it's the diaphragm."
"I'm here."
"You always are."
He went out the side door. The bell made a small sound. She watched him cross the boardwalk — the slow knee, the toolkit in his left hand — and she was glad, as she was glad every time, that Grace had kept him.
Doyle Pruitt's voice arrived a half-second before Doyle Pruitt did.
"Morning, Sloane."
She'd noticed the voice the first week he'd taken slip nine, five years ago, and she'd never stopped noticing. Her father's voice had arrived first too — the difference being that her father's voice had been a voice she'd liked hearing arrive first, and Doyle's was not.
"Doyle."
"Got a minute?"
"Got several." She didn't stand up. The daybook stayed open. The pen stayed in her hand.
He came up to the counter and put both hands flat on it, the way he always did.
Broad in the shoulders for a man in his sixties, permanently tanned, with a way of standing in a doorway that took up more of the doorway than his actual body.
His watch was nicer than the watch a man with a forty-foot Bertram on Pier Two wore, which was a thing she'd noticed when she'd first leased him the slip and which had not stopped being true.
"Heard you got a new one."
She kept her face customer-service. "The Sundancer sold."
"Out-of-towner?"
"Jacksonville."
"Jacksonville." Doyle tasted the word. He had a way of repeating one word from her sentence as if he were checking it for fit. "Old boy?"
"Forty-two."
"Forty-two isn't old."
"No."
"What's he do?"
"Retired."
"Retired at forty-two?"
"Logistics. Took early retirement."
"Logistics and took early retirement." Doyle nodded at the information he hadn't been given. "Family?"
"Doyle."
"What?"
"I don't take family histories on my new tenants."
"I'm just asking."
"You ask a lot."
That landed. His mouth made the small movement it made when she said a thing he hadn't been prepared to hear from her, which was rare.
He lifted his hands off the counter. The thumb on his right hand made a small flick against his pants leg.
She'd seen him do it twice before — once when she'd told him she'd need the deposit before she'd extend his lease, and once when she'd told him she could not, in fact, sell him slip eight.
"Fair enough." His voice came down half a step. He produced the small smile, which had never reached his eyes in five years and didn't reach them now. "You hear anything about the new diesel rate?"
"Going up four cents on Friday."
"Hell."
"Could be worse."
"Always could be worse. That's how they keep us paying." He tipped two fingers at the brim of an invisible hat. "You have a good morning, Sloane."
"You too, Doyle."
He went out. The bell did the sound. She watched him cross the boardwalk and turn down Pier Two toward slip nine, where the Bertram he kept at her dock was — and had always been — a forty-foot boat that didn't match the watch on his wrist or the truck he drove or the careful smiles he produced at her counter.
Her eyes stayed on the kiosk until he disappeared behind it.
Then she sat with both hands flat on the counter for a count of ten seconds and let the small unsettled thing in her chest settle.
Sid came back at eleven-forty with grease on his left forearm and a piece of fuel-pump diaphragm in a sandwich bag.
He set the bag on the counter as carefully as another man might have set down a watch.
"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."
"Yes."
"Checking on the boat?"
"Checking on the tenant."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "Different thing."
She didn't step onto the boat. She didn't step closer to the pylon than she needed to step to look down at him.
What she registered, because she was paying attention to it whether she wanted to be or not, was the third finger of his left hand.
A small ring of pale skin where a band had been. The mark wasn't old.
Divorced, the application for tenancy had said.
The mark wasn't old.
She filed it. The shelf behind the insurance certificates was getting busy.
"How is the tenant?" she asked.
"The tenant is having a productive day. He has a list. The list is six pages."
"Six pages."
"Three of parts. Two of tools. One of things he's going to need somebody for. Your name's on the last page three times."
"My name."
"Once for the holding tank. Once for the manifold. Once for whatever you're going to charge me to use the lift before October."
"You're going to need the lift."
"I know."
She didn't, for a moment, have a reply for that.
Which was the second thing in two days she hadn't had a reply for, and she didn't have a category for it yet, and she wasn't going to develop one standing on Pier Three at noon with the heat coming up off the boards and a man on her swim platform watching her with the small careful quiet of a man who had decided not to fill the silence for her.
"There's a sandwich place," she said. "Across the lot. Behind the bait shop. They close at two, and on a Tuesday they'll still have the turkey if you go in the next twenty minutes."
"Noted."
"They won't have it at two."
"I'm going."
He stood. Picked up the folded T-shirt. Did not, immediately, put it back on, and she did not let her eyes register the length of time it took him to put it on, because that was the kind of thing a woman registered when she had been a long time without registering things, and she was not interested in being that woman in front of a tenant on his first afternoon.
He stepped off the swim platform onto the dock. Pulled the T-shirt over his head as he came up the pier, in the unhurried way of a man who'd been changing on a dock for thirty years, and at the head of the slip he stopped four feet from her.
"Sloane."
"Yes."
"Thank you for the turkey."
"It's not my turkey."
"It's your information about the turkey."
"Go."
He went.
He didn't look back. She'd been almost sure he wasn't going to. He was, she'd figured out at six thirty-two that morning and was confirming at twelve twenty-eight now, a man with discipline about looking back.
She walked up the boardwalk to her office, and she didn't look at slip eight on the way.
She filed that too.