She would remember it later the way you remember the first thunder of a storm you've been waiting for. It came from across the fairway, from the fuel dock, high and cracked and much too loud, a young man's voice with the fear showing through it: "Officer! Officer! She owns this slot!"
Everybody turned. The sergeant. The deputy on Clementine's aft deck. The Viking's captain at the fuel dock, beer in hand. Tuan Vo stood at the edge of the fuel dock in yellow rain bibs and a gray Halyard Point staff T-shirt with his arms out, as if he were trying to stop traffic.
"She owns it!" he shouted again. "Slot 1! She's the deeded owner! Ms. Pettaway owns that slot! It's in the book!"
The sergeant looked at Tuan for a long second. Then he looked at Claudine. Then he looked at the brass plate on the piling beside her head, green at the edges, SLOT 1. Z. PETTAWAY. DEEDED, and she watched him read it and watched it not change anything.
"Slot," he said. "Slip. All right." He turned back to her. "Ma'am, owning the slip ain't owning the boat. I'll ask you again. Is this your vessel?"
There it was. She had known it was coming since Thursday, since six-fifteen in the evening in the circular drive at Springhill Manor, and she had rehearsed her answer to it in the shower and in the car and lying in bed at night, and none of the rehearsals had happened on the end of a dock with a man's handprint still burning in her arm.
"No," she said. "It isn't."
She heard Tuan, across the fairway, make a small sound.
"It belongs to Captain Ozro Tillery," she said. "He's eighty-one years old. He's my grandfather's oldest friend. He's been my friend my whole life. He went up to the dock house to use the restroom ten minutes ago, and he'll be back in five more, and he will tell you exactly what I'm telling you. We're taking his boat up the river ahead of the storm. That's all this is."
"Ma'am," the sergeant said. "I got a call from Mr. Tillery's son not forty minutes ago. He tells me his father's in a care facility. He tells me there's a woman's been coming around his father, getting close to him, and that this woman's out here today trying to take his father's boat. Fifty-three-foot yacht, he said. Engines running, he said. Lines coming off." He looked at the spring line lying on the deck where she had dropped it. "So you'll understand how this looks."
"I understand exactly how this looks," Claudine said.
Something moved in his face then. She didn't know him well enough to know what. A flicker, a tightening along the jaw. He reached for the radio on his shoulder.