Early May was nice. Adam often found himself looking out his office window, thinking about taking a run up to Jake’s to go sailing on the Pixie. Even with all the hassles of getting the new Ford job set up in the Meridian plant and shifting some of the Meridian jobs to Betzer, there was no reason he couldn’t get away for a weekend. But he knew he’d like to make it a little longer than that; he could stand the break. It would have to be before the Channel Stop got into its summer busy season. Maybe next weekend, he thought one Tuesday morning. Even if I don’t go sailing, it would be nice to kick back and talk with Jake for a while, and see if he’s heard anything new from Mary.

He and Jake had agreed months before to limit the information that was passed along, just in case someone was to get a whiff of it. They didn’t want to hint that Adam was getting information about Mary from Jake at all. He was just getting set to give Jake a call to see if it was a good time to come up when Marcia buzzed him: “Mr. Hampton for you on line one.”

Now what, Adam thought as he picked up the phone. Things had been quiet on that front, unexpectedly quiet. “Hi, Deke,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Couple different things,” his attorney reported. “Blue called me a while ago and told me that a date has been set for the conservatorship hearing, next week.”

“Do I have to be there?”

“I don’t think so, and I’d avoid it unless you’re directly asked. You probably ought to sit this one out, if for no more reason that it might set Brittany off. Mostly, this is just a point of interest, and not the main thing I wanted to talk to you about. You know how Blue hinted that Brittany has been paying private detectives?”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen any evidence of them. I specifically asked Marcia, and she hasn’t had any inquiries, either.”

“Right. Under the circumstances I don’t think it would be prudent to ask him to look into it further for us, but I was watching TV last night. There was a story about someone using a GPS tracking device to follow someone else’s movements. They aren’t that damn expensive, and would be a good way to keep track of where you’re going.”

“Do you think that’s likely?”

“Hell, I don’t know. They get used a lot when someone suspects a spouse of cheating. I suppose that if the boy were in the metro area it could be used to track you to him, but I can’t think of any other reason why someone would want to do something like that, unless it’s to do something to make it look like they’re doing something.”

“Well, that much makes sense. What do you think I should do?”

“It might not be a bad idea to have your car checked out by someone who knows something about that stuff. I know a guy who can take a look at your car for you. He has some special equipment that can detect electronic signals, and he did that kind of stuff for the Army for years. I think he should have a look at your car.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Adam agreed. “I can’t imagine anyone actually learning anything from it, but I’m getting paranoid enough to think it could be a possibility.”

“Good, I’ll get it set up. He can come right to your place, maybe tonight.”

“Set it up, Duke. It might be interesting if he actually finds something.”

Adam hung up the phone, with the possibilities going through his mind. There was nothing anyone could learn about Matty through his movements in the last several weeks. Most of his driving had been between the apartment and his office, with occasional trips elsewhere, like to the grocery store. Well, he’d had to go to the plants in Meridian and Betzer a couple times in relation to the Ford job, but if someone were tracking him through that, they’d see that he’d just been to the plants – totally legitimate business.

Actually, he hadn’t heard anything about Mary and Matty in the last few weeks. He’d contacted Jake a couple times in the last three months, always over pay phones. He knew Jake was considering a quick visit to them, probably right around this time, but he hadn’t heard if it had come off. It was another good reason to see Jake, to get an update on that, but a visit to Jake was the only slim lead that a tracker could provide toward someone finding Matty. He’d have to be more careful than ever.

That evening the apartment’s doorbell rang. His caller proved to be a guy about his age, lean and going a little bald. “Hi,” the guy said. “I’m Reuben James. Dennis Hampton sent me.”

“Reuben James? Like the destroyer?”

“You’ve either got to be a World War II freak or a Woody Guthrie fan to have picked that up,” James grinned. “I was named for it. I don’t hear that very often anymore, but I sure did when I was a kid.”

Adam mentally revised the guy’s age upward considerably. If he had been born right after the Reuben James had been sunk, he’d have to be pushing hell out of seventy, but he didn’t look it. “I wouldn’t want to say freak, but I’ve read a bit about World War II,” he replied.

“That’s more than most people have done these days. Anyway, Hampton said you wanted me to check your car for a possible tracking device.”

Adam led him outside to where the car was parked under the canopy. “It sure wouldn’t be any trick to tag your car sitting here,” the security man shook his head. “Especially if you don’t suspect it.” He pulled a small electronic box – gray, not black, Adam noted – from his briefcase, and walked around the car holding it in his hand.

In less than a minute he was down on his back, flashlight in hand, looking around under the front of the car. “There you are, you little bugger,” he said, emerging with a small black box in his hand. “Someone was tracking you all right. What do you think I should do about it?”

“Good question. What do you suggest?”

“Well, I could give it a quick maintenance treatment with a hammer,” he smiled. “But that probably wouldn’t solve anything, other than to let whoever had this put there know that you’re on to them. But now that you know about it, if we leave it alone you can play with their heads if you need to.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, say you want to go someplace you don’t want them to know about. All you have to do is to take the device off and leave it here. That way they’ll think you aren’t going anywhere.”

“Suppose they drive by to spot check the car is still here?”

“That’s a little more complicated but still easy. Just drive out to the airport parking lot, and take an airport bus to a car rental agency. All they’ll be able to know is that the car is at the airport.”

“That’s good to know. There are not many places I’d go that I wouldn’t want someone tracking me to know about, but at least I’ll know how to deal with it if it’s needed.”

James spent a minute showing Adam where the device was magnetically attached to the car, and giving him a couple other pieces of advice before Adam asked if there were any way he could tell if his phone was being tapped.

“Not really,” James sighed. “The problem with cell phones is that they’re radios, so if someone wanted to pick up a conversation there, well, technically it’s not that complicated if you know what you’re doing, and the tap doesn’t have to be close. If you had a land line, I might be able to help you on that.”

“I don’t have a land line here, but it might not be a bad idea to have the one at my office checked. I could probably write that off as a business expense.”

“I can check it out at your convenience.”

Of course, the first thing Adam did after James left was to take his private cell phone and call Deke at home. “I sure am going to be glad if this conservatorship thing goes through,” he said as soon as he got through reporting what James had found. “That should put an end to that jazz.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Deke pointed out. “There’s a chance it might not be directly from Brittany. I wouldn’t put it past someone at Children’s Protective Services, for example. That issue hasn’t gone away. It’s lying there simmering. They don’t like being told no. And there’s the possibility it might be from someone else, maybe a business competitor or something. That’s the problem with those gadgets, at least from our point of view. You don’t know who’s getting the report.”

“I doubt if it’s a business competitor. The game in this industry just isn’t played that way, and mostly there’s nothing to be found there anyway.”

“You’d know more about that than I would, but in any case, be careful about where you go. Or at least, be careful about letting them know where you’re going.”

The whole episode left Adam more than a little upset. This whole thing was really getting ridiculous. As far as he was concerned, every time something like this came up he became even more firm in his conviction that Brittany shouldn’t have anything to do with Matty. It might well be that having the tracking device put on his car wasn’t her idea, just a detective’s lazy way of maintaining surveillance without actually doing much of anything.

But finding it meant that the threat was more serious than he’d thought. It was clear that Mary needed to know about it, but it would be foolish to try to contact her directly. That meant he needed to go through Jake to get a message to her. What’s more, he knew he’d like to do it face to face; there were some things about the situation Jake ought to know that couldn’t be handled in a phone call full of euphemisms. And it would be nice to talk to Jake, anyway.

Besides, like he’d been thinking earlier in the day, he really wanted to see Jake anyway to go sailing on the Pixie. If it were going to be done, it had to be done soon, before Jake’s summer rush got under way. There was a pay phone not far from the sub shop where he occasionally stopped to get his lunch on the way to work; it would be a good time to call, and there was virtually no chance anyone could listen in.

The next morning, Adam gave Jake a call. It proved that Jake was working in the kitchen of the Channel Stop that morning. “So what’s happening in Winchester Harbor today?” he asked.

“Not a whole lot,” Jake told him. “The fishing season is under way, but it’s been slow. I had a party cancel for this morning, which is fine with me because the weather is rough and crappy. What’s it like down there?”

Adam got the distinct impression that Jake was talking to him with the phone on his shoulder while he got somebody’s breakfast on the grill. “Rainy and windy,” Adam reported. “I’d imagine that a nice warm kitchen is preferable to being out on the lake on a day like today.”

“Well, you know what they say, a bad day fishing beats the best day at work.”

“Someday I’m going to have to check that out,” Adam sighed. “Hey, is that offer for you to take me out on the Pixie still good?”

“Sure, but we’re going to have to be careful how we time it. The weekends are all plugged up with charters already, but it still gets pretty slow during the week. That’s going to be less true as the weather gets better. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to take you out for your first day sailing on a day like today.”

“I’d have to check my schedule, but I think if I were to take off this weekend I could stretch it into the first of the week a little bit. Maybe like through Tuesday.”

“We’ve got room for you. It’d be good to see you, and there are things we need to talk about,” Jake said without elaboration, which to Adam seemed to mean that he was talking about Mary and Matty.

“That’s good to know. I’ll plan on coming up this weekend, unless you hear back from me. There’s always the possibility that something could come up at work.”

“That stuff happens. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you, even if the weather is too crappy to go sailing. Bring something warm, it can get chilly out on the lake.”

Adam hung up the phone with a good sense of relief. It would be good to be away for a while even if he did nothing more than sit in the snack bar and sip at coffee all day. He really wasn’t liking his life right now, not that he had liked it very much for years. All the hassles with Brittany and her investigators just sharpened the desire to be someplace else, doing something else. Perhaps sailing might be a step in that direction; most likely not, but you never knew. He could imagine having a boat on Lake Erie or Lake St. Clair, just to mess around with on the weekends. It would be, at a minimum, a change of pace from going home and spending his days off reading, watching TV, and dreaming about doing something else, whatever it was.

He already had his luggage packed and in the car when he left the office on Friday; it included a good windproof sailing jacket he’d bought at a marine supply store one weekend when he’d thought he ought to do something more than just read about sailing. It seemed a little excessive to have to go through the hassle of going to the airport, leaving the car there, and getting a rental car, but he knew it was caution he needed to take. Jake was the only other possible route for someone to find out about Mary and Matty, and he was betting a good deal that Brittany didn’t know how well Jake knew Mary. After all, Brittany liked Jake about as well as she liked Mary, which was to say not much, and as far as he knew, Brittany was unlikely to have put the two together – she just wasn’t thinking that well. He was sure she didn’t know Jake and Mary had met on other occasions besides Boston, so she probably wouldn’t put two and two together.

Fortunately it wasn’t very far out of his way to stop by the airport, although it took a while to make the arrangements, using a company credit card that couldn’t be traced directly to him. Before long he was on the highway, heading north. The rental car seemed like a tin box after his own car, but that was to be expected with rental cars, he thought. It may have been lighter than its American competitors, but it certainly seemed cheaper.

Although Adam had rarely had the reason to drive long distances by himself, he’d enjoyed it when the opportunity arose, and it was no less true this time. It was, after all, a road to somewhere else, a chance to get away from problems he didn’t want to deal with, a job that was slowly becoming more odious, and a life that seemed to be heading nowhere. Matt had seen the trap and avoided it, he thought; there were still too many things holding him where he was, but slowly they were loosening. Maybe an answer lay out there somewhere.

Though the sun had set, there was still light in the sky to one side of the rental car when he drove into the Channel Stop; the days were getting longer, especially this far north. The place seemed a lot busier than it had been when he was there at Christmas, although the small parking lot wasn’t exactly jam-packed with cars. As before, Jake noticed when Adam drove in, and came out to greet him even before he made it out of the car. “New car, Adam?” he asked.

“No, a rental, and that’s something we need to talk about. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but there are subjects of mutual interest we have that we need to talk about when we’re sure we’re in private. I found out something unsettling earlier this week.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I don’t know, but right now I’m being very careful.”

“I see. Maybe we ought to go for a walk or something.”

“No rush now, at least, but we do need to talk sometime.”

“Let’s take a walk out on the jetty,” Jake suggested. “It’s going to be a clear night, and the view of the stars out there is unbelievable. You don’t see them like that down where you are, the way the city is all lit up.”

“Sounds like a good idea. I need to stretch my legs, anyway.”

Jake helped Adam carry his minimal luggage into the motel room, then they started down a dark and quiet lane toward the jetty where the channel from the big lake led into the harbor. Once they got away from the Channel Stop for a ways, Jake asked, “So what’s this all about?”

“Like I said, maybe I’m being a little paranoid, but I found a tracking device on my car earlier this week. I’m pretty sure there’s been a detective poking around me trying to get a lead on Mary and Matty. I don’t know if anyone has suggested that you might be a connection, or what.”

“One of the good things about living in a place as small as Winchester Harbor is that strangers stick out, in the winter anyway. That’s not as true in the summer, but to the best of my knowledge no one has been asking questions about them.”

“Well, all I can say is to keep your eyes open and be careful. If this is coming from Brittany, there’s a good chance the threat will be diminished in the near future. But there’s a chance it’s not coming from her.” He went on to explain about the potential for a conservator being appointed, but that if the surveillance was coming from the Children’s Protective Service, which was possible, a limit on Brittany’s finances wouldn’t affect that. “I’ve got my attorney nosing around about them, but there’s no promise he’ll be able to do anything.”

“I haven’t picked up anything on that,” Jake told him. “So your guess that Brittany may not associate Mary with me might be a good one. That leaves you on the hot seat, though.”

“At least I have the resources to do something about it. We may not be able to hold Brittany off forever, but the longer, the better. And if it gets too bad, there might be other action I could take. The thing I was worrying about on the way up here was that if she gets too frustrated with trying to work the system, she might take direct action.”

“You mean, like a kidnapping?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. I don’t think it would be very successful, since I don’t think Brittany has her act together enough to successfully hide the kid. I mean, just supposing she did manage to do it, which wouldn’t be easy considering what Blanche Tickle is like, what could she do with the kid? Just what she wants to do, which is to take him home with her. But the odds are only in favor of that being what she’d try to do, and considering the way her mind is working, she could do something totally different.”

“Do you really think that’s a risk?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her if she knew where Matty was. In spite of the hassles with the Children’s Protective Service the chances of her being to arrange custody are nil. But she wants what she wants and I don’t think she’d have the good judgment to realize it wouldn’t work in the long run. What concerns me is that she might not try it herself, but hire herself some strong arm to do it for her. That would be harder to defend against. I just thought this all out on the way up here, and I think I need to have a talk with my attorney about pro-active defense measures.”

“It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Jake replied. “I’d hate to see it get that far. But if she did give it a try, well, Blanche Tickle is like Winchester Harbor in the winter. It’s a small place and a stranger gets noticed. And believe me, they’re watching. I had to have Mary vouch for me when I was up there a couple weeks ago. I mean, there were several rough looking Newfoundland fishermen with big gutting knives hanging around, giving me the evil eye until she did.”

“That’s good news,” Adam replied with a sigh. “So you went up to see her?”

“Yeah, I figured I’d better do it before the season got busy. She and Matty are doing well, and I’ve got a few pictures to give you. Rachel seems to think Matty looks like his father, from the pictures anyway. I don’t know why women seem to think things like that, but they do. He seems like a bright kid, but he’s still a baby.”

“How is Mary doing?”

“Reasonably well, I think. She was glad to see me. We talked about what she had to do for Matt, burying him at sea and the rest. That wasn’t an easy thing for her, but she knew it had to be done and she did it. She seems to be bearing up pretty well, but honestly, she strikes me as, well, a woman who would bear up well under the circumstances. She isn’t the first Newfoundland woman to lose a husband at sea, after all. It sort of goes with the territory.”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if you could get a message about this to her, and when you do, be sure to tell her I hope to see her again someday, and I get to see Matty as well. It probably won’t be soon, not with the way I’m being watched. I could sneak away like the way I did to come up here, but I don’t know that I want to run the risk at this point.”

“I’ll let her know. I already let her know why you can’t come visit because of the hassles on this end, and she understands. She’d like to see you again someday, too.”

“I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I guess it has to be. I mean, I’d like to help her more than I am. Is she needing anything? I mean, is she hurting for cash or anything?”

“No, she seems to be in good shape. She has access to the accounts Matt set up in Canadian banks, and she seems to think those will carry her for quite a while. It doesn’t cost her a great deal to live there, compared to here, and she’s careful with her money. That’s a nice little house she has there, and she seems comfortable.”

“Yeah, it’s not a bad place. Small, but all the houses in that town are. To tell you the truth, I don’t have much worry about Mary being able to take care of herself and Matty in Blanche Tickle. It’s the outside threats that worry me.”

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