Still Water East
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 5
Trevor’s yacht is sixty-two feet long and has never once been used for fishing.
I know this because Dana Whitlock tells him so, in the first two minutes, before he can get his hand all the way out of his pocket. She’s a compact woman in her fifties with cropped gray hair, a navy windbreaker, and the kind of handshake that suggests she has closed deals in worse weather than this. Her office is a converted dockmaster’s shed at the end of a pier at Harborgate Marina, a mid-sized place south of the Seventeenth Street causeway, and the boat she’s showing us sits at the very end of the longest dock like a prize nobody has been able to afford.
“She’s a 2009 motor yacht,” Dana says. “Three staterooms, new generators last year, fresh bottom paint. The owner is motivated, and I’d tell you why, but you’d find out anyway: his wife hates boats.”
“That’s heartbreaking,” Trevor says, with enormous sincerity.
“That’s a divorce settlement.” She hands him a folder. “Take your time. Go aboard. Open everything. If something sticks, ask me why.”
It’s the second week of October, three days after the second lunch at Camila’s, and the morning is already bright and heavy. Lena has come along because she doesn’t trust Trevor alone with anything that has an engine. I’ve come because I said I would. Trevor climbs aboard the boat the way a man steps onto a stage he’s been rehearsing for in the shower, and within three minutes he’s at the helm, one hand on the wheel of a vessel that isn’t moving, narrating an imaginary departure to nobody.
“Starboard side clear,” he says. “Easing out of the slip. Lena, we’ll be in Bimini by lunch.”
“We’d need a captain’s license,” Lena says, from the salon.
“I’ll hire a captain.”
“You said you’d hate that.”
“I’ll hate it elegantly.”
Dana catches my eye across the deck. Something very dry passes over her face, and she says nothing, which is the finest professional courtesy I’ve ever seen.
I stay aboard for twenty minutes. The boat is large and bright and smells of teak oil and old coffee. Everything has been polished to a level that suggests someone is either selling it or hiding something, and I can’t tell which. I open a few cabinets because Dana told me to. A drawer sticks. I ask why. She says a swollen runner, easy fix. I nod as if I know what a runner is.
Eventually Trevor and Dana go below with a stack of paperwork and a conversation about hull surveys, and Lena touches my arm.
“Walk with me,” she says. “If I hear the word ‘displacement’ one more time, I’m going to jump in the water.”
We climb down to the dock. The marina is quieter than I expected, a long, low arc of concrete piers with boats nosed in on both sides, and the air smells of salt, fuel, and sun-warmed fiberglass. Gulls patrol the pilings. Somewhere a halyard clinks against a mast with the steady patience of a metronome. We walk without hurrying, past a row of sailboats with their covers on, past a dockhand scrubbing the deck of a sportfisher with a long-handled brush.
“How are you doing?” Lena asks.
“You always ask that.”
“You always say ‘fine.’”
“I’m fine.”
“See?”
I grin. She links her arm through mine for a few steps, then lets go. It’s a sisterly gesture, easy and unforced. It’s one of the things I’m most grateful for and least able to say.
“Trevor’s going to buy that boat,” she says.
“Probably.”
“Do you think he should?”
“I think he should buy a boat. I’m just not sure it’s that one.”
“That’s what I said.” She watches a pelican drop off a piling and skim low over the water. “He’s so happy right now. It’s like watching someone get a second life. I don’t want to be the person who slows it down.”
“You’re not slowing it down. You’re keeping it afloat.”
“That’s a terrible joke.”
“I’ve been saving it all week.”
She laughs, and the sound goes out across the water. Then she squints into the sun and says, “I’m going to go back and make sure he doesn’t sign anything. You okay out here?”
“I’ll walk to the end of the pier and back.”
“Don’t fall in.”
“I’m a professional athlete.”
“Retired,” she says, and goes.
The service pier is at the north end of the marina, past the last row of slips, a narrow concrete spur that juts out into the channel and serves as a fuel dock and a loading area for the bigger boats. There’s no one on it when I arrive. A hose coils beside a pump. A yellow bucket sits upside down in the shade of a dock box. At the far end, a mid-sized yacht, maybe a hundred feet, is moored stern-in, long and white and sleek, with a dark hull and tinted windows and a cluster of antennas on the flybridge that make her look like a heron with ambitions.
I stop at the pier’s edge and shade my eyes.
She’s a beautiful boat. I don’t know enough about boats to say how beautiful, but I know what a well-kept thing looks like. What I notice, almost idly, is what’s missing. The big boats along the main piers all have something on them: a brokerage placard in the window, a charter company’s logo on the stern, a laminated sign in the salon door with a phone number and a rate. This one has nothing. Her name is on the transom in discreet gold letters, Calliope, with a hailing port under it that I can’t read from here. No placard, no listing, no sign of anyone trying to sell her or rent her or even admit she exists.
I almost turn back.
What stops me is a small sound from the water side, the putter of an outboard, low and steady. A tender, a gray rigid-hulled inflatable with a center console, comes around the stern of the big yacht and noses up to the end of the service pier. Two men are aboard. One cuts the engine and the other steps onto the pier with a line in his hand, casual, practiced, tying off to a cleat in a single motion.
They’re both unremarkable. That’s what I’ll remember later, how hard it is to describe them. Mid-thirties, maybe, or early forties. Khaki shorts, plain polo shirts, one gray, one navy. Sunglasses. Deck shoes. The one with the line is stocky and sunburned, and the other is leaner, with a ball cap pulled low. They could be crew from any boat in the marina. They could be anyone. I take them for what they seem to be, and look away, and I’m genuinely about to start walking back toward Trevor’s boat when a third figure steps out from behind the dock box.
It’s a young woman.
She’s twenty, maybe twenty-two. She wears a cream-colored sundress, a thin gold bracelet, and a pair of expensive-looking sandals, and her dark hair has been brushed smooth and pinned back. From thirty yards away she looks like she’s dressed for brunch. It’s the walk that stops me.
She doesn’t walk so much as drift. Her steps are uneven and unsure, as if the concrete were tilting under her. Her head dips toward her chest, then lifts, then dips again, like someone fighting the end of a very long night. She keeps lifting her eyes toward the dock, toward the rows of boats and masts beyond, with the vague, straining look of a person trying to find a landmark she can’t quite focus on.
The man in the ball cap has his hand on her elbow.
At first it looks like help. It would look like help to anyone. But his grip is wrong. His fingers are clamped above her elbow, tight enough that the skin around them has gone pale, and he isn’t steadying her. He’s steering her. The other man, the sunburned one, doesn’t look at her at all. He’s scanning the surrounding docks, left to right and back again, with the flat, methodical attention of a lookout.
The young woman’s eyes pass over me.
I don’t think she sees me. She doesn’t seem to see anything, exactly. But for one second her face turns in my direction, and what I see in it isn’t what I would call fear, not yet. It’s the stranger, flatter thing that comes just before fear, a blank, drowning confusion. She says something. I can’t hear what. It might be a word or it might be a sound. The man in the cap bends his head toward her and says something back, quietly, and his hand tightens.
Then they’re moving. The sunburned man steps down into the tender and holds out a hand. The other man helps her over the side, firmly, efficiently, the way you’d load a piece of luggage you didn’t want to drop. She sits. Her head rolls back against the console. The engine coughs and catches. The line is already off the cleat.
The whole thing takes less than a minute.
The tender swings away from the pier and curves back toward the stern of Calliope, its wake spreading white behind it, and a few seconds later it disappears behind the big yacht’s dark hull.
I stand there.
A gull lands on the empty cleat and looks at me. Out in the channel a sailboat slides past, under motor, a man in a bucket hat waving to nobody.
It could be anything, I think. A girl who drank too much. A friend helping a friend who got sick. Two crew members doing a favor for the owner’s daughter. It could be an ordinary, embarrassing, sunny-morning story, the kind that gets told at dinner parties with a lot of laughing.
But the grip. And the lookout. And her face.
I stay at the end of the service pier for a long time after the tender is gone, trying to talk myself into the version of the story where nothing happened, and I’m still not persuaded when Lena’s voice calls me from far down the dock.