“Unfortunately, it’s going to drag out for months, if not years,” Deke told Adam as soon as they got outside the courtroom. “They’ll do everything they can to drag their feet. If we see those records in six months, it’ll surprise me.”

“The judge said five days.”

“It means nothing. They’ll be filing an appeal with a higher court by the end of the day. It doesn’t matter to us. We accomplished our goal with the injunction. The records are just a smoke screen. We know where the problem is coming from. They’ll just have to cough them up eventually, but the longer they drag it out the more in damages we’re going to be getting. I’m taking this case on a contingency fee basis, so the longer they drag it out, the more money I’ll be seeing out of it, while it won’t be costing you a thing.”

“Well, that’s good news. I could see this whole goddamn thing bleeding me dry.”

“You have to know how the game is played, but unfortunately you just about have to be a lawyer to understand it. For practical purposes, though, it means that we’ve got them off your back for a while. Hopefully, it will be permanently.”

“I suppose,” Adam sighed. “But in a way, I wonder if it hasn’t been a little counter-productive. I mean, it’s pretty clear to me that Brittany has had her hopes set on the agency getting hold of Matty and giving him to her.”

“It’d never happen in the long run, not considering the fact that he has a good mother and that Brittany is a mental patient.”

“True, but it doesn’t matter what could happen, it’s what she thinks could happen. Those are two different things. Now that this door is closed to her, who knows what else could try?”

“I suppose you’re right on that. You’re not hearing anything from her, are you?”

“Very little. I have a friend who talks to her every other week or so and then reports back to me. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t tell me everything, but the last I knew she’s still thinking about moving back to take care of her parents. That probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, although it would free up some cash for her to use for detectives or whatever.”

“So you’re saying you don’t think this is any closer to being resolved?”

“Pretty much. Well, we’re a little closer. Matty’s birthday was a few days ago, and that means we only have seventeen more years to go.”

“You’d still like to see him, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would. I’ve talked to Mary on the phone a few times, never on a personal line and never around here in the past year, not since Brittany has known he existed at all. Mary and I have exchanged a few e-mails through anonymous addresses that have been set up. I only e-mail her or check my e-mails at Internet cafés or libraries, so that’s not a real solid means of communication, either. Most of our communication is passed through a mutual friend.”

“That has to hurt.”

“It does. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been to where Mary lives in the past, and while it’s small and a touch on the primitive side compared to here, it’s not a bad place. And I have a considerable amount of faith in Mary. But still, I’d like to be able to do more for her and my grandson, and not being able to see them with my own two eyes is frustrating, to say the least. There have been times I’ve been tempted to just get on a plane and go there, but with all this shit hanging over my head I haven’t dared to.”

“I’d say it still wouldn’t be a very good idea, at least just hopping on a plane and going. Just because we have this problem cleared up doesn’t mean that Brittany doesn’t have someone who knows what he’s doing on the case. That arrogant little bitch from the agency sure wasn’t very professional when it came to doing investigations. I mean, she got a little power and it went straight to her head. They’re so goddamn sure they hold all the fucking power in the world over the accused without any fear of retribution that they’re more than a little sloppy.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t go visit them, then?”

“I certainly wouldn’t do it right now, at least not until the divorce is final. And then when you do, I’d be pretty careful about flying or using a credit card. Let’s face it: Mary ought to be easy to find except for the fact that Brittany hasn’t given her people enough information to work on. All it would really take is Mary’s name and ‘Newfoundland’ to give any halfway competent detective all he would need.”

“I’ve often wondered about that,” Adam replied thoughtfully. “The only thing I can think of, and the only thing, is that Brittany must not have paid attention when the word was used. Of course, she didn’t pay much attention to Mary anyway on the two times they met.”

“You might be right on that,” Deke nodded. “It could explain why the agency, or at least that Balch bitch, seemed to think for a long time that Mary and the kid were somewhere in the metro area. Oh, well, it’s Brittany. Who knows?”

“Right, and that’s my point. She’s not predictable, and she may not recognize limits the rest of us would see.”

“Which means that you have to continue to be careful. Like it or not, you’re still the one route Brittany knows about that might lead her to Matty, and there’s at least some chance that sooner or later a competent detective is going to get on your tail.”

“Then how am I supposed to go see them?”

“Carefully. Don’t fly. Especially, don’t fly direct. Don’t use credit cards, and it’s hard to fly without them these days. If you drive, maybe you could come up with a cold car somehow that’s not associated with you, and not in your name. Simple stuff like that, but the idea is to not leave a trail to follow. And I think it’d probably be a good idea to not do it before the divorce is finalized.”

“Well, yeah, I can see that much. At least that’s only a couple more months.”

Weeks continued to roll by, and soon it was the second half of December. That meant the holidays were coming, and they seemed about as bleak this year as they had the year before. It was tempting, very tempting, to call Jake and see if he’d mind if he joined them for Christmas again. He didn’t want to wear out his welcome, but he had to admit that Jake and his family were still about the only friends he had, at least friends who, when he was around them, he didn’t have to keep his mouth shut about Mary and Matty.

Finally, he decided the best thing he could do was to call Jake up and see if Jake made the invitation without him hinting about it. Adam hadn’t been up there since early October, when they’d actually been able to make it out in the Pixie one day – actually, it had been Rachel with him that time, but she’d sat back and let Adam do most of the work.

Adam was still trying to be careful about his contacts with his friend in Winchester Harbor. Jake and his family were another possible route to someone finding out where Mary and Matty were, and it still would be best if no one knew about them – or at least suspected that fact. So Adam was restricted to using pay phones, a pre-paid cell phone or anonymous e-mail accounts to contact him, and that made the contacts rare.

Being careful, that evening on his way home Adam stopped for gas at a convenience store with a pay phone he hadn’t used before. “So what’s happening up around your way these days?” he asked.

“Cold,” Jake replied. “The harbor ain’t iced up yet but it might be by morning. Things are pretty damn slow around here but they usually are by this time of year. Are you coming up for Christmas?”

Well, that was easy. “If you’ll have me,” he replied. “I don’t want to lean on you too much, but it would be nice to have a place to go away from here.”

“We’d love to have you. It’s going to be a quiet Christmas if you’re not here. Amanda is staying with a friend downstate, working in a fast food joint to build up a little savings, and if she’s home for Christmas it won’t be long.”

“I hate to horn in, but I really appreciate the offer. We’re taking Christmas Eve off at the office, so I guess I’ll drive up after work on Thursday.”

“Good enough. I’ll have a motel room warmed up for you. We’ll be looking forward to seeing you.”

Adam had a few days before he was to go north, so he spent the intervening Saturday morning at a marine supply store. It seemed like a good idea to get a Christmas present for Jake and Rachel, considering how much help they had been to him over the past year, so finally decided on a pair of high-quality foul weather jackets – not cheap, but worth the price. Maybe that would make up a little for the kindness he had been shown by them.

Right after getting off on Thursday afternoon, he drove to Reuben James’ shop, just to make sure another tracking device hadn’t been installed on his car – he wouldn’t have put it past the Balch bitch to have done it, court order or no court order. Besides, it was entirely possible that Brittany’s detective – if she had one – had put one there. But James didn’t find any hint of one, so for the first time in nearly a year Adam headed toward Winchester Harbor in his own car.

It was good to see Jake and Rachel again, although things seemed muted without Amanda around. “She’s saving her pennies,” Jake explained in front of the fire in their living room, a cup of hot chocolate in his hands. “I’m afraid some of my old tales of sailing around Florida in the first Pixie have gotten to her. She sort of has it in mind to find a boat something like that, and do it next winter. She figures it’ll beat hell out of freezing her butt around here while she’s not doing anything.”

“And she’d be right,” Rachel added. “We usually get some Florida time every winter and have a boat down there we share with Dad and Barb and some friends. But Amanda wants to get out on her own and do her own thing, and I can’t say as I blame her.”

“You have to do that stuff while you’re young and free,” Adam agreed. “It’s all too damn easy to get tied down to jobs and spouses and stuff like that, and it can be absolute hell to get free. Ask me, I know.”

“You’re sort of looking to do something like that, aren’t you?” Jake asked.

“Well, thinking about it, as if I knew what I was going to do if I could get free. I can’t make any detailed plans since there’s no way I could do it anytime soon. But I have to admit the idea of spending a few months cruising around Florida in the winter sounds awful good when you think about how far away spring is. I don’t think I’d want to try to do it in a boat as small as the original Pixie must have been, or the Mary Sue or something like that, but the current Pixie, well, it’s not hard to imagine even if it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

“Well, we sure had a good time doing it,” Rachel smiled. “I mean, I look back at it now and think about how tiny the original Pixie was, and it seems impossible that we could have lived in it for four months, not just one winter but several of them, and with a baby one winter. It helps to be young and in love, I guess.”

“It was a lot more fun when it was the two of us, rather than the year I went down there by myself,” Jake smiled.

“There is that,” Adam nodded. “I mean, if everything else said go, I’d probably do it, but I have a little reluctance to just do it by myself.”

“No prospects, huh?” Rachel said, understanding him perfectly.

“Haven’t even thought about looking. I wouldn’t want to do anything about it until the divorce is final, but fortunately that’s only a month off. I may do some looking around then, but about all I can say about that is that I’d like to find a woman who won’t pitch a fit or run off and hide when I mention the word ‘boat.’”'

“I have heard that before,” Jake snickered. “Or, I’ve heard the results of what happens if the guy gets interested in the boat after he gets interested in the woman. Hell, I’d be willing to bet that a good half of our charter fishing customers have wives who wouldn’t go along on the boat, just for a ride, on a bet.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Adam agreed. “I never brought the idea up to Brittany, of course, but I think the only time she was on a boat was when we came up here with Greg and Lisa that time, and you see how that turned out. At least that’s a mistake I don’t plan on making again.”

“It wouldn’t have worked out any better with me,” Jake agreed. “And I don’t have any complaints about how things worked out for me instead. You never know what’s going to happen, Adam. Never.”

“I suppose, but it sure has been the hard way to learn it.”

“So have you given any more thought to buying a boat?” Jake asked, obviously changing the subject.

“Plenty of thought about it,” Adam replied, glad for the new topic. “The problems are the same as they’ve always been. In spite of everything you’ve done, I still think I’m a little green, especially to be taking it out by myself. I sort of suspect I could handle it if I had an extra set of hands along, but I have no idea of where they might come from. It’s a little too far up here to make it frequently, and I think if I went to the trouble of having a boat at all, I ought to be making use of it. That argues for keeping a boat downstate, but from everything I’ve been able to find out, it’s pretty crowded and expensive down there. Add it all up, and I don’t think I’m ready to make a decision just yet.”

“That’s probably wise,” Jake nodded. “It would be real easy to jump in head over heels and make a huge mistake in the process. All I can say is that the Pixie will be here another summer, and you ought to be able to do something about the experience question with that.”

“Unless something changes drastically, I’ll probably be taking you up on that. I have hopes of being able to make it up here more often than I did last year, but that’ll have to depend on several different things.”

“Well, when you do get to come up, most of the time we ought to be able to do something about the extra-hands problem,” Jake told him. “It may not be Rachel or Amanda or me. I think you’re getting to the point where you shouldn’t have any problem taking it out in reasonable conditions, especially if you have another person to help out a little.”

“I’m glad you think so. I still feel a little intimidated.”

“Oh, you’re coming along nicely. You’re already way ahead of some of the bozos we see coming through here in the summer. You know you don’t know it all, and some of those guys are absolutely sure they do. That counts for a lot in my book.”

Christmas Day was low-key, of course, even more so than the year before. Jake and Rachel were pleased with the gifts of foul-weather jackets; they both said theirs were getting worn out and that they had been thinking about new ones. As the year before, the Christmas dinner wasn’t in the house, but in the snack bar; several local people who were without families had been invited, as had Rachel’s father and stepmother.

The best part of the whole thing was that Mary called on the evening of Christmas Day. It was the first time he’d heard her voice in a year; all his communications with her had been through infrequent e-mails, or through Jake. She reported having a good Christmas, mostly with her friends in Blanche Tickle. Matty was growing like a weed, and seemed to be a happy child. Best of all, it seemed unlikely that anyone had been poking around the settlement looking for him; they would have been noticed in a place as small as it was.

“I sure hope I can see you and Matty sometime,” Adam told her. “It’s possible things are easing a little on this end, and there’s the possibility I might be able to sneak away sometime later in the year. I’d have to rig it around so I could be gone for two or three weeks, though.”

“Aye, Adam, I’d love ta see ye,” he heard her say. “It’s been too long, an’ I know ye’ve been tryin’ ta shield us. I’d like ye ta be able ta see your grandson, too. He puts me more an’ more in mind of Matt every day.”

All in all they talked for quite a while, mostly about what she’d been doing. Adam got the impression that she had a quiet life, except for the boy of course, but at least she had real friends in Blanche Tickle, and he knew that counted more to her than any possible advantages of a city.

Adam spent another couple days hanging around with the Lewis family, but as had happened the year before, there were good reasons why he had to head back for year-end reports and the like. While he’d enjoyed himself, for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, the holiday hadn’t been the relief it had been the year before. If it hadn’t been for them, though, it would have been a very lonely Christmas indeed.

Somehow, some way, he had to do something about that. With the exception of the last two years with the Lewis family, his holidays hadn’t been very enjoyable for a long time. The last halfway decent one he could remember had been while Matt had still been in college, and at that Brittany had been bugging Matt about something or another, usually Stephanie, most of the time.

At least, he thought, in less than a month the divorce would be final, and he would be a little freer to explore new angles in his life. But there were really not many of those; he was still tied to the company, but at least the possibility of something going wrong at the last minute to mess up the divorce would be past.

Helplessly, his thoughts turned to Brittany. Though he still didn’t want to spend any more time with her, he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d had a good Christmas, or any kind of a holiday at all. He had heard very little about her in the past few months, much of that had been secondhand through Lisa. It was possible she could have spent the holidays with her parents, and in a way he hoped she had – it might give her something to think about besides trying to track down Matty. As much as he disliked the thought of having anything else to do with her, he still didn’t wish her ill.

He also hoped she’d had some treatment. He’d heard indications – again through Lisa – that she was continuing to see Dr. Preble on an outpatient basis, so perhaps that was helping. Even so, he couldn’t help but believe that she was still trying to track Matty and Mary down with the hope of somehow getting custody of the child. He’d spent much of the last year trying to block that, and he at least hoped that he’d managed as well as it appeared he had.

The stack of messages on his desk was considerably smaller than he’d been used to on his return from weekend excursions; after all, he’d only missed one working day. It was back to the routine, back to the boredom of what was increasingly seeming to be a pointless job. Oh, it provided income, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t feel like he was moving ahead in his life, not that he had any choice.

New Year’s Day came and went; it was a quiet weekend. Adam spent most of it watching football on TV and reading about sailing. More and more the dream of being able to take a long cruise in a boat of his own was on him, and he entertained a lot of different ideas about places he could go, things he could do if he had a boat something like the Pixie. Maybe it would be nice to go sailing around Newfoundland, or down in the Caribbean someplace. Or, maybe not; he spent some time thinking about taking a boat down the Mississippi, up along the Atlantic Coast, and back to the Great Lakes in one of several ways. The problem with that was it would most likely take more than a year – possibly several years – and he didn’t expect to have the time to do it in the foreseeable future. It was something that for now could only be a dream.

The divorce final court date was toward the end of January. One day Deke called him up to remind him that the hearing was to be the following Thursday. “It’s pretty much a rubber-stamp thing, so long as no new actions have been filed,” he reported. “I’ve gotten a little friendly with Blue, and he tells me that nothing has been contemplated. You could probably give it a pass if you want to, but I’d recommend that you be there.”

“If you think I ought to, I’ll be there.”

The following Thursday Adam was in the courtroom with Deke. A little to his relief, neither Brittany nor Blue were present, and the finalization of the divorce was made in only seconds. It seemed rather anticlimactic after all the problems of the previous year, all the waiting until this formality could be dealt with. But at least now it was done, for what it was worth.

As soon as it was over with, Adam and Deke left the courtroom. “Well, it’s over with, and with a lot less pain that I expected,” Deke said. “So what’s next for you?”

“Back to work. We’ve got a new part we’re negotiating with Ford about, and I need to work on that.”

“No celebrating your freedom by finding some hot young woman, getting drunk, or that kind of thing?”

“No,” Adam sighed. “I’m not that kind of person, and you know it. I’m just relieved that chapter of my life is over with. I’ve wasted the best part of my life on it. Maybe I’ll be able to do something better with what’s left.”

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