Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
The phone went off at four-oh-six.
Sloane was awake before it finished the first buzz, which was a habit she’d built the spring after Noah went out and had not been able to put down since.
The screen lit her ceiling. The text was from the marina weather service she paid forty dollars a month for, and the text was the one she’d been hoping wouldn’t come this week.
She read it twice.
The first read was the read of a marina owner who’d been reading weather alerts for many years.
The second read was for the part she’d felt before she’d let herself read it, which was that the storm was coming in at the worst possible hour, when the marina had nineteen boats on her dock with two owners on site, and forty-five minutes of warning meant she could secure seven of them herself before the wind hit, and the other twelve were going to be on her conscience if she didn’t move.
She was already in her jeans.
She’d slept in them when the forecast was unsettled; her father had slept in them on nights when the forecast was unsettled also; it was how she learned it. Her boots were beside her, and the keys to the truck were on the nightstand instead of in the bowl by the door.
She had the keys in her hand and the boots on her feet inside ninety seconds.
The rain was already coming down by the time she pulled out of the driveway.
It wasn’t the storm yet — the storm was still fifteen miles offshore by the radar — but it was the line ahead of the storm, the kind of warm steady rain that walked in front of the wind, and she’d driven through it on the way to the marina enough times to know what was behind it.
She drove faster than she meant to. The wipers ran on high.
The clock on the dash said four eighteen, and the rain hit the windshield at the steady, careful tempo of a rain that was about to stop being steady and careful, and she made the turn onto Lake Road at four twenty-three and was at the marina by four twenty-six.
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.
She walked the bow line the four steps to the spare cleat on the side of the slip and figure-eighted it around the cleat the way her father had taught her, and Ethan had the stern line on the cleat on the opposite side in the count of about three breaths after she’d set the bow, and they tied her off on both ends and the Whaler settled in her slip with the small sideways shudder a small boat made when her loose end had been caught.
Then the wind came in harder.
They moved together down Pier Two without talking.
Sloane took the port side. Ethan took the starboard.
A Sea Pro in slip eleven had a fender out, and Sloane pulled it in.
A Catalina in slip twelve had a halyard loose against the mast and Ethan tied it off.
The center console in slip thirteen had a Bimini she’d been meaning to lower for the owner since Tuesday, and she lowered it now.
A Grady-White in slip fourteen had a cockpit cover with three loose snaps, and Ethan snapped them.
The two end slips were empty, and they didn’t stop for them.
Pier Two took them eighteen minutes.
They went back up Pier Two against the wind.
The wind was in their faces now. The rain was the rain of a storm that had decided to be a real storm, and the planking was slick under their boots, and Sloane went down once at the head of slip eight on a soft board she’d been meaning to replace for two seasons.
Ethan had her elbow before her knee hit the planking.
He let go of the elbow the moment she had her balance back. He didn’t say anything.
They crossed the boardwalk to Pier Three at four fifty-eight.
Pier Three was the easy pier.
Ethan’s Sundancer in slip seventeen was already buttoned down.
A Bayliner in slip eighteen had her canvas on.
A Mainship in slip nineteen had her canvas on.
Two Sea Rays in slips twenty and twenty-one had owners on board — a couple from Tampa who came down two weekends a month and were already on deck in matching yellow slickers, the man on the bow with a fender and the woman on the stern with a line, and they nodded at Sloane and Ethan in the way of boat people who’d been doing the same work in the same rain and didn’t need to say anything about it.
Slip twenty-two had a houseboat owned by a retired English teacher named Margaret Linwood who’d been on this dock for nine years and who was on her deck in a yellow oilcloth coat that was the same yellow oilcloth coat Catherine had on, and Sloane saw that the marina had three yellow oilcloth coats on the dock at five oh-two on a Thursday in May, which was the kind of thing she’d laugh at later if there was a later.
Margaret waved them past.
They went past.
Ethan stopped at the head of slip seventeen on the way back.
“Anything else?”
“Pier One again. The two charters are secure but the fuel pump cover strap is going to go.”
“Lead.”
She led.