Page 6 of Presumed Dead

The bell on the office door dinged when she went in. The AC was still on its overnight setting, and the smell of yesterday’s coffee hung in the back room where her father’s nineteen ninety-six pot had sat untouched since seven o’clock the night before.

She propped the front door open with the rock her father had used for the same purpose for thirty years, put fresh coffee on, and she got to work.

By six-fifteen, she had the kettle on for her second cup, and she had pulled the manila folder for slip seventeen out of the standing file and was reading the paperwork for the third time.

Ethan Vale. Forty-six. A Jacksonville address she didn't recognize. A Florida driver’s license that looked clean. Bank routing on the deposit, which had cleared at one o’clock the previous afternoon. Logistics, his application said. Retired. He had written retired early in tight, small handwriting that didn't take up the whole line, with early underlined once, like the underline was the joke and you were supposed to catch it.

The joke hadn't been lost on her. She had read his application enough times to have an opinion about his handwriting, which was not a thing she should have had an opinion about, and she set the file down on the counter and turned the kettle off the burner before she could pretend not to be aware of what she was doing.

It was the email exchange that had done it. The first email from him had been five sentences, courteous, the email of a man who knew how to write a business email and didn't waste anybody’s time. The second email had been six sentences, after she had warned him about the boat, and the sixth sentence had said, Hold the slip — and tell me your favorite breakfast place, which was the kind of sentence a man wrote when he was either an idiot or a man with a sense of humor about himself, and Sloane had been reading men’s emails for fifteen years and could usually tell the two apart.

She had told him about Mae’s. She had recommended the cinnamon roll, signed her name — Sloane, which was something she didn't do in form letters from Sloane Mercer’s Marina, and she had stared at her sent folder for ten minutes wondering why.

That had been Friday. She hadn't, in the four days since, found a satisfactory answer to the wondering, and so she had stopped wondering, which was the same thing as not having an answer but cleaner to live with.

The Sea Ray in slip seventeen had been sitting there for a year and a month. The owner — a retired airline pilot from Sarasota named Don Bickford — had died at his desk in October of a heart attack that had taken him before the coffee cup he had been holding hit the floor. His widow had called Sloane two weeks later. She had asked Sloane to broker the boat for her because Sloane had been Don’s friend, and Sloane had said yes the way she said yes to all the things she should have said no to, and the Sea Ray had been on her hands ever since.

Don Bickford’s widow had wanted out of the slip fees by Christmas. By Easter, she had wanted out of the slip fees at any price. Sloane had refused, on the widow’s behalf, the first three offers because they had been from men who would have put the boat back in the water with a coat of cheap paint and a story. The Sea Ray deserved better than that. Don Bickford had loved her.

Ethan Vale had paid full asking. He'd paid full price for a boat he had not seen, which any sensible person would call reckless, and the Sea Ray wasn't in the kind of shape that rewarded recklessness. Sloane had written him an email about the boat that was as honest as she could write an email, because she had decided two months ago that whoever ended up with the Sea Ray was going to get her with full disclosure or not at all.

He had written back, I’ve made my peace with the boat — and with the slip, which had pleased her in a way she wasn't going to examine.

She closed the folder. The kettle clicked. She poured the second cup, and she leaned her hip against the counter, and watched the steam rise out of her mug for a minute longer than she would have admitted to anyone.

Margo Marriott came in at six twenty with two coffees from the Sandbar and the tail end of a sentence she had apparently started fifty feet ago.

“ — and I told him, Jace, honey, you cannot keep climbing on the bar to change a lightbulb. You are forty-eight years old, and you have a Lipitor prescription, and if you fall off that bar and break your hip, I am not the one driving you to the hospital. Hanna can drive you to the hospital. Hanna has a station wagon. I have a husband who needs to stop being eight years old about ladders.”

“Good morning, Margo.”

“Good morning, my sweet girl.” The coffee tray landed on the counter without losing a drop. “One sugar, one cream, the way you would drink it if you were not pretending to drink it black for no reason anyone can identify. Don’t argue with me about it. Drink it.”

“I’m not arguing with you about it.”

“Yes, you are. I can hear you arguing with me about it in your head. The argument has my answer in it already, which is that I've known you for years, and you take a sugar.”

“I take a sugar.”

“There you go.”

Margo dragged out the stool she had been dragging out from under Sloane’s counter for ten years and sat down on it the way she always sat down on it, which was like she was about to be there a while and the world was going to have to make its peace with that. She wore the loose linen shirt she wore for the kitchen prep at the Sandbar, sleeves pushed past her elbows, and the small gold cross her grandmother had given her at her confirmation, and her dark hair tied back with the same green scarf she had been tying her hair back with since two summers ago when Sloane had given it to her for her birthday.

Sloane took the coffee. The sugar was the perfect amount because Margo had been making her coffee since she'd tasted the strong brew Sloane made. She made it the way her father always had and refused to change, though she knew she should.

“How did you sleep?” Margo said.

“Four hours.”

“Liar.”

“Three and a half.”

“There she is.” Margo took the lid off her own coffee and blew on it. “What’s today?”

“New lease. Slip seventeen.”

“The ghost slip.”