The Yacht Owner Thought My Dock Slip Was Easy to Take. He Had Not Met Tommy Pruitt

I did not sleep much that night. Around two in the morning I got up and went to the hall closet. Joan had told me once that she never threw away anything with my handwriting on it.

Behind the winter coats and a broken vacuum I found a gray waterproof logbook with a cracked spine. It was the one I kept aboard the CG Cutter Dauntless Harbor, our 110-foot patrol boat out of Pensacola.

I sat down at the kitchen table and opened it under the light.

The first entry I looked for was dated March 14, 1989. My handwriting was steady then. It said we had responded to a distress call off Perdido Key, a sinking shrimp boat, and had pulled one man from the water. The name written underneath was Thomas Pruitt, age 29.

I remembered Tommy. He had been a deckhand on that boat, young and stubborn, and he had gone back for a crate of gear before he would get in the basket. I had to tell him to get in or I’d leave him.

The second entry was dated September 8, 1996. Hurricane Fran had kicked up hard swells near Pensacola Pass, and a charter boat had lost power and was being pushed onto the jetty. We got a line to her and pulled her clear. The man I brought off was Luis Arceneaux, 37, the captain. He had shaken my hand so hard my knuckles hurt for a week.

I closed the book and put my hand flat on the cover for a minute.

Before the sun was up I drove back to Bayou Crest and asked Marisol Ibarra for ten minutes. She was a sturdy woman with reading glasses on a cord, and she ran that marina the way her father had, like a family business where people’s names mattered more than their checks.

She listened without interrupting. When I was done she took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“Mr. Mabry, I haven’t seen any notice,” she said. “Nobody asked me about it. I’m going to find out who did.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “I’d also appreciate it if somebody looked at the old agreement. My memory isn’t what it was.”

Brianna came in with a stack of paper files, dusty at the edges. She had been listening from the hall. “The early records are in the back room,” she said. “Give me the afternoon.”

She found it before lunch. It was a single sheet, handwritten in blue ink and signed by Rafael Ibarra in January 1995. It said that slip D-14 was to be held for Ernest Mabry for as long as he wanted it, at the agreed rate, and that the marina would honor it without further paper. It was dated and witnessed.

Marisol read it twice. Then she read it aloud, slowly, the way you read a will.

“My father never told me about this,” she said. “But he kept his word. Everybody in this town knew that about him.”

That afternoon her phone rang. She put it on speaker. It was the Destin attorney, polite and impatient. He said the Whitfield family would bring a lawsuit unless the slip was cleared by the end of the month.

Marisol let him finish. “Counselor, the slip is not mine to clear. It was promised. I need a little time to look at the records, and I’m not going to be rushed.”

When she hung up she looked at me across her desk for a long while.

“Can you get Tommy and Luis to the harbor board meeting on Tuesday?” she asked.

“I think I can,” I said. “And I think they’ll want to come.”