Chapter 7 #2
They crossed the boardwalk in the wind. The wind was running at fifty now, or close to it, and the rain had gone from steady to sideways, and the marina at five-oh-five on a Thursday morning was small and dark and full of small things trying to come loose, and Sloane Mercer ran her own dock at her own marina at her own work with a man at her shoulder who’d been on her dock nearly forty-eight hours and was already, in some way she didn’t have a name for yet, the third person who’d ever helped her run it.
The first had been her father. The second was Noah.
She didn’t let that sentence land. She had work.
They retied the fuel pump cover strap with a fresh length of marlin out of the cart, replaced the corner grommet on the canvas, and lashed the cover to the pylon at the head of Pier One with a four-foot length of three-strand.
The strap was going to hold through the storm, but it would need to be replaced in the morning. Sloane filed both.
Then they went back to the office through the rain.
She unlocked the side door at five seventeen and pushed it open into the small warm dry square of the office and stood in the doorway for a count of about three breaths with the rain coming off her in sheets.
Ethan stood behind her on the boardwalk.
He didn’t come in.
She turned around. His foul-weather gear was glossed with rain, and his face under the hood was the face of a man who’d been working in a fifty-knot wind for forty minutes, which was wet and red along the cheekbones and quiet around the eyes, and he was waiting at the door because she hadn’t told him to come in.
“Get in here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He came in. She closed the door behind him. The wind cut off the moment the door closed, and the warm, dry, quiet of the office did the small, specific work an office does when the storm was on the other side of the wall, which was to make a person realize how cold they’d been.
Sloane was shaking.
She hadn’t known she was shaking. Her hands had been working and her feet had been working and she’d been moving from one slip to the next at a pace she’d built over fifteen years of running this marina, and the shaking had been waiting for her to stop.
The shaking was here now. Her hands had a small, tight tremor along the fingers, and her shoulders had the soft uncontrollable shudder of cold-through-wet that came on a body four minutes after the body got under shelter.
Ethan saw the shaking.
He didn’t say anything about it. He went to the back room and pulled the two towels off the shelf above the small office washer she’d been meaning to replace for two years, and he handed her one and kept the other, and they stood at the counter and dried their hair and their hands and their forearms.
She was warming up. The shaking was easing.
“Coffee?” she said.
“Please.”
She made coffee. Three minutes. She poured two cups and gave him one, and they stood at the counter and drank it without talking, and the storm did what the storm was doing on the other side of the wall, which was the work of a fifty-knot wind on a marina that had been secured by two people who’d known what they were doing.
Sloane drank half the cup before she said it.
“Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know to come up?”
He took the count of about three breaths to answer, drank his coffee, and looked at her across the counter as if he was deciding how much of the truth to give her, and she watched him decide, and what landed on her was that the watching-him-decide was something a woman who’d been a marina owner for fifteen years had learned to recognize.
“I’ve been watching the radar since two.”
“At two in the morning.”
“I sleep light. I always have. The radar app I use pinged a small craft advisory at one fifty-three. I went up to the cockpit at two-ten and watched the western sky for ten minutes, and the sky was the kind of sky I’ve watched roll in off this coast before, and I decided I was going to be on this dock by four-fifteen because there would be work to do. ”
“You’ve seen storms roll off this coast before.”
It was the second sentence she’d caught him in. The first had been “back” on Tuesday morning. This one was bigger.
He didn’t walk it back.
“I have.”
“Logistics didn’t bring you to this coast.”
“Logistics brought me up and down it.”
“All right.”
She didn’t push him further. She’d watch him for a while.
The shelf behind the insurance certificates was going to be full now, and the new items were all on the same shelf, and the shelf was about Ethan Vale, and she wasn’t going to ask him to take anything off the shelf until she’d decided what she was going to do with what was on it.
She drank her coffee.
“Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“Doyle Pruitt’s Bertram wasn’t in slip nine.”
She set the cup down.
It wasn’t a question. He’d walked Pier Two with her and seen slip nine empty. The telling-her-he’d-seen was a man telling a woman something she’d already seen because he wanted her to know he’d seen it too.
“No.”
“When did he take her out?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday afternoon at the latest. He paid for diesel at eight forty Wednesday morning and topped her off.”
“Topped her off.”
“Eighty-three forty-two.”
Ethan was looking at her now in a different way than he’d been looking at her before.
The way wasn’t a way that was new in him — it was the way of a man who had been a particular kind of man for a long time — but it was the first time it had landed on her.
The brown eyes with the small fleck of green in the right one didn’t move.
“He took her out before the storm.”
“He did.”
“On a tank he topped off the morning before.”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other across the counter at five thirty-one in the morning with the storm running fifty knots on the other side of the wall and two empty coffee cups between them, and what was in the air between them was the sentence neither of them said out loud, which was that a man who topped off a forty-foot Bertram on Wednesday morning and took her out before a Thursday-morning storm with a weather window that opened at midnight was a man who’d known something the marina hadn’t known.
Sloane was the one who said it.
“He knew where he was going.”
“He did.”
“Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not asking you what you know about Doyle Pruitt.”
“All right.”
“I’m going to ask you later.”
“I know.”
She finished her coffee, set the cup down on the counter, and looked at the window over the back counter where the rain was running sideways in the dark and the kiosk light made a soft yellow square on the boardwalk, and she did the small private piece of work she’d been doing in pieces since six thirty-two on Tuesday morning, which was the work of deciding what she was going to do with the man on the other side of her counter.
But she wasn’t going to decide it today.
The storm broke at six twenty-two.
She heard it break in the small specific drop in the sound the rain made on the office roof, the small specific easing of the wind against the front window, the small specific dropping-off of the halyards along the head of Pier One that had been doing the storm’s music for an hour and forty minutes.
She set the cup down.
“I want to check the dock.”
“I’ll come.”
They put the foul-weather gear back on. Hers had been on the back of the office door drying for fifty minutes and was warmer than it had been when she’d taken it off. His had been on the next hook over for the same fifty minutes and was the same temperature as hers, which she noticed.
They went out the side door.
The marina at six twenty-five was wet and bright in the new light coming up over the Gulf, with the smell of warm rain on warm planking and the sound of water running off the canvas of nineteen secured boats, and the halyards doing the soft slow tap of a marina that had survived.
She walked Pier Two.
Catherine was on the deck of her houseboat at slip six in the yellow oilcloth coat. She tipped two fingers at Sloane as she passed. Sloane tipped two fingers back. Catherine didn’t say anything; she was good at it.
Slip seven was empty. Slip eight was empty, though she didn’t stop at slip eight.
She walked past slip eight.
She wasn’t going to think about that yet.
Slip nine was still empty.
She stopped at slip nine.
Ethan stopped beside her.
They stood at the head of slip nine with the rain easing and the wind dropping and the first pale gold of the morning coming up over the Gulf at their backs, and the cleats on the head of slip nine held Doyle Pruitt’s lines coiled tight and clockwise, and the slip held no boat.
Sloane was soaked through under the foul-weather jacket.
Her shoulders were sore. The left knee, the one she’d gone down on at slip eight, ached.
Her hands were cold, and her hair was wet at the ends where it had escaped the hood, and she stood at the head of slip nine on a Thursday morning at six twenty-eight with a man at her shoulder, and what she felt was the small unfamiliar weight of not being on her dock alone.
She turned to him.
“Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“You didn’t ask me to.”
“I didn’t have to.”
He looked at her.
She looked back at him.
The pale gold morning was coming up over the Gulf and the rain had eased to a soft warm drift and the first of the captains on Pier One were starting to arrive in the new light, and Sloane Mercer stood at the head of slip nine at half-past six on a Thursday morning in May with a man who’d come up her dock in the dark at four-something without being asked.
What she didn’t say out loud was the answer the question on the bench seat had given her on Wednesday night.
Care was the word. Care was still the word.
It was a bigger word this morning than it had been yesterday.
She didn’t say that either.