Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Ethan saw her walk Pier Two at five forty-three.
He was at the dinette with his second cup of coffee and the curtain over the port pulled back the inch he’d pulled it back yesterday, and Sloane Mercer came past the kiosk and onto the boardwalk and down the long arm of Pier Two with the green thermos in her right hand and her shoulders set in the careful particular way of a woman who’d been walking the same dock at the same hour for four years.
She didn’t look at Pier Three.
Yesterday she hadn’t looked at Pier Three either, and yesterday he’d let himself believe the not-looking was a four-year habit.
This morning, he watched her not look at Pier Three with the small attention a man paid to the difference between something a person did out of habit and something a person did on purpose, and the difference was the count of about a quarter second longer than yesterday between the kiosk and the head of the boardwalk.
She was working at not looking.
He set the coffee down.
That she was working at it was the first piece of information he’d gotten this morning, and it wasn’t yet six, and the day was going to pay out, but it had paid out something already.
She reached the end of slip eight and set the thermos on the piling.
He could see her in profile from the cabin port if he held the curtain at the angle he was holding it, and he held the curtain at that angle until she’d poured the first cup and drank it, and then he let the curtain fall, because a man who watched a woman drink the second cup was a man who’d crossed a line he hadn’t earned the right to cross yet.
He drank his coffee.
The watch on his wrist said five fifty-three.
He had seven minutes before she’d walk back up the dock, and he had to be doing something other than thinking about her by the time she walked back up the dock, because she wouldn’t see him from inside her own counter at six on the dot when the marina opened, but she might feel him from anywhere on the property if he wasn’t doing something.
He went up the cabin steps and onto the cockpit deck.
The clean Pyrex dish was on the engine cover. He'd put it there last night after washing it so he'd remember to return it to Catherine today.
He stood at the gunwale for a count of about three breaths and looked across the channel at her houseboat. The deck light was off. He looked at the Pyrex and the note she'd written to him when she left it.
The handwriting was the handwriting of an older woman who’d been writing notes for a long time and was no longer interested in being legible to anyone who wasn’t paying attention. He paid attention.
Tuna noodle. Enjoy. Bring the dish back when you’re done. — C.
He had enjoyed it. It was likely loaded with all things that did terrible things to a person's waistline, but it was delicious. It had been put together with too much of every ingredient she’d reached for, which was the cooking a woman did when she’d decided her affection was going to be measured in cheese, and Ethan ate the plate standing at the dinette and noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that this was the first home-cooked meal he’d eaten in three years that hadn’t been served at a Shadow Ops table.
He'd take it to her in a little while. Then he went back up and got to work on the manifold.
By nine-thirty, he had the manifold sleeve seated, and the bolts torqued and the work-side of his morning done, and he washed his hands at the slip hose and went below for the Pyrex.
The towel that had been with it had a small monogram in the corner he hadn’t seen yesterday because it had been facing the engine cover. C P, in faded blue thread, in the stitching done by a woman who’d been monogramming her household linens since her wedding.
He carried the Pyrex and towel up the cabin steps.
Pier Two was a hundred yards by water and a five-minute walk by dock.
Doyle Pruitt was on the Bertram. The Bertram was on her cleats, and Doyle was on her transom with a rag and a bottle of teak cleaner, watching Ethan stride along the boardwalk to Pier Two with the casserole dish in his hands. Ethan tipped him two fingers.
“Morning, Doyle.”
“Morning, Vale.”
“Catherine fed me.”
“She does that. She’ll fix you a dish a week if you let her.”
“Returning the dish.”
“Smart man.”
Ethan kept walking. The smart man landed without inflection.
Doyle Pruitt, leaning on the transom of his Bertram with a rag in his hand at nine-thirty on a Wednesday morning, had given him three pieces of information in eight words: Catherine fed the dock on a regular cycle, Doyle knew her cycle, and Doyle was paying enough attention to Pier Three to have clocked which neighbors were on Catherine’s list.
He kept walking.
Pier Two ran out directly behind the marina, and the houseboat in slip six was the first slip on the pier.
Catherine’s deck light was off. The blue caftan was on a hook by her deck chair.
Her paperback was on the small folding table beside the chair, spine out, with a yellow Post-it sticking out at the page she’d stopped at.
He knocked on the cabin door.
Catherine opened it inside the count of four breaths, which was the time it took an older woman to come up from below in her own boat, and she was in a different caftan than yesterday—this one was deep green—her glasses were on a chain around her neck, and she had a mug of coffee in her left hand.
“Ethan.”
“I brought your dish back.”
“I see you did.”
“It was a remarkable casserole.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, Catherine.”
“You're welcome. I'm glad you liked it.”
She took the Pyrex, held it for a moment in the unhurried way she’d held the coffee cup yesterday, and her eyes did the small careful inspection of the dish that women of her generation did when a man returned a casserole dish, which was the inspection of whether the man had washed it correctly, and she nodded once and stepped aside in the doorway.
“Come up. I want to talk to you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Catherine, please.”
“Catherine.”
He went up onto the deck. The houseboat’s deck was the size of a small porch and had two chairs and a folding table and a row of pots along the rail with cherry tomatoes growing in them, and the chairs faced Pier One and gave a clear view of slips one through five on Pier One, and the kiosk-side wall of the office.
Catherine had been watching the marina from this deck for eleven years from a chair that gave her exactly the angles she needed to watch the marina from.
She set the Pyrex on the small white table and sat in the chair on the right. Ethan sat in the chair on the left. She’d picked the chair on the right because the chair on the right had the angle to Pier Three. He noticed that without registering it on his face.
“How was Sloane this morning?” he asked.
“I haven’t been over to see her yet. She was at her counter at six straight up, like every other day. I’ll go over around ten-fifteen to see how she liked the casserole.”
“The casserole?”
“I made two. I always make two. I have made tuna noodle casserole in pairs since 1974, when my mother made me promise I would never let a friend who needed a casserole sit waiting on it. You got the first one. She got the second one at ten-fifteen yesterday. Though she pretended she didn’t need a casserole, but she did. ”
“She needed a casserole?”
“She needed a Pyrex on her counter on a Wednesday morning so that when she went home she didn’t have to cook. That’s a separate condition. The casserole is the vehicle.”
Ethan laughed before he meant to.
Catherine smiled, the small, careful smile of a woman who had been making the people on her dock laugh since 2014, and she took a sip of her coffee and looked at him over the rim.
Doyle Pruitt sauntered past them, heading toward the office. Catherine's eyes watched him. After he disappeared into the marina office, Catherine shook her head.
“He had a visitor on Monday night.”
Ethan didn’t move. He kept his hands on his knees, kept his face on Catherine.
“Did he?”
“A man I haven’t seen on this dock before.
White pickup, no logo, parked at the back of the lot at ten thirty-eight at night, which I know because I was up on the sun deck enjoying the quiet starry night.
The man went down Pier Two, was on the Bertram for under fifteen minutes, and was gone again by ten fifty-three.
I don't know what that was all about, but it was strange.”
“Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell Sloane?”
“I did not. I thought about it for two hours, and I decided I wouldn't tell her yet, because she has four years of carrying things by herself, and adding a white pickup at ten thirty-eight at night to the list felt like something I should think about before I added it.”
She looked at him. The pale blue eyes did the thing they’d done yesterday at noon on the dock, which was the moment Catherine Pell stopped being the friendly neighbor with the paperback and became the woman who was deciding what to put into whose hands.
“But I’ve decided to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because a man who buys a boat sight-unseen from a widow and shows up on his first morning ready to ask George Halsey questions about a manifold is a man who pays attention, and a man who pays attention is a man who would also have noticed a white pickup at ten thirty-eight on a Monday if he’d been on this dock at ten thirty-eight on a Monday, and you weren’t.
So I’m telling you, because somebody on this dock who pays attention ought to know. ”
“Thank you, Catherine.”
“You're welcome.”
“Anything else about the man?”