Even with the help of the Honda breeze it was getting late before they got back to Frenchtown Harbor. They were just getting near the channel when they both realized simultaneously that they still hadn’t gotten dressed. It was a little frantic there for a minute or two while Carolyn found the clothes she’d been wearing for part of the day before, and passed Adam’s clothes out to him. They motored up the channel just a little red-faced, even though they didn’t think anyone had noticed them sailing across the lake au natural.

Once they had the Knick-Knack in the slip, there was still work to do, closing things up, offloading their gear into their cars, and in general getting set to leave the boat for a while. They made a tentative date to get together and go sailing again in a couple weeks, but that would be the Fourth of July weekend, and both of them were doubtful if they really wanted to go to Put-In-Bay. But there were other places good for a three-day weekend, especially if the winds were stronger.

The sun was getting low in the sky before they finally had a casual kiss goodbye, something a lot less sensual than the kisses they’d shared aboard the Knick-Knack in the last day. It wasn’t until he watched her tail lights go out of the parking lot that he realized that he’d never brought up the subject of Brittany and if her feelings about Mary had mellowed. He was sure Carolyn was aware of his concern about the issue, but somehow it had just never come up. Well, it was too late now; maybe he could call her up and ask about it, and besides, if it didn’t, he’d be seeing her in a couple weeks, after all.

While he was sure Brittany still had intentions of causing trouble for Mary, somehow it didn’t seem quite as imperative as it had a few months before. It was something he had to deal with, but right at the moment he had other things on his mind.

He loaded a last couple things in his car, gave the Knick-Knack one final check, then drove back to his apartment feeling pretty good about the weekend. It certainly hadn’t gone like he’d expected, not in the least. He’d already known Carolyn was fun and a good companion, but he’d never really considered her as being much more than a virginal old-maid schoolteacher. She’d proved to be a little more than that, but while he expected to have some more fun with her in the future, now he just couldn’t see it panning out into a long-term relationship.

But, if nothing else, it had proved to him that such a thing was possible – and that not all women were as sexually barren as Brittany had been. If nothing else, that showed there was potential for the future, even if nothing panned out with Carolyn, which seemed likely.

The good feeling from the weekend lasted on into Monday morning, when he was at Caldwell-Deerfield again. It really seemed like it was the same old grind, but he knew that the end was now in sight; his father’s will would be through probate in less than a month, and the management changes at the company could go into effect.

He spent much of the day working with Bob and Fred on the changes. One of the issues to be dealt with was Marcia; he wasn’t going to need a full-time secretary, that was clear, and she wasn’t ready to retire. Bob already had his own secretary and was used to working with her, so after some discussion it was agreed that Marcia would work for Fred, who hadn’t had a secretary until now, and split her time with him when Adam happened to be in the office. It wasn’t the perfect solution but it looked like everyone would be satisfied with it.

Adam set up an appointment with Deke the first chance he got. He’d needed to meet with his attorney for a while on issues that had been less than imperative, but some things were building up that needed some of his attention. Chief among these was the fact that when his father’s will was settled, Adam was going to be receiving a lot of money, both in company stock and in cash, and that meant tax issues. He and Deke had been working on a strategy to deal with these, and they’d generally come up with a fairly decent plan. If he was careful with his money, he might be able to rig it around so he wouldn’t need to work ever again.

The hell of it was that Adam wasn’t quite ready to give up working, at least yet. The management restructuring would take him out of the day-to-day operations of the company, but he would still have to provide some oversight. On the other hand, it meant that he’d have plenty of free time, and he suspected that at least some of it would be spent sailing.

Most of the meeting was spent on the probate issues, even though Deke wasn’t handling the actual will details; that was his father’s attorney. Deke had been monitoring the progress, and seemed to be satisfied with it. “Really, when it shows up in court it should be pretty close to a rubber-stamp thing,” he told Adam again. “But that means we still have to go through the motions.”

However, Deke had also been working with his father’s attorney about how to handle the legacies to Mary and Matty. Matty’s trust fund had been fairly simple since Mary had agreed a bank in the states would simplify tax issues, at least for now, and there was no special reason to have it in Canada. Transferring her funds, though, was proving to be a little more complicated, especially with the need to avoid leaving a trail to Mary and Matty.

“What it comes down to is that there’s some documentation she needs to sign,” Deke told him. “I suppose I could mail it to her with a cover letter, but you might want to think about making a quick trip up there to get her to do it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind it,” Adam admitted. “I’d kind of like to see what this artist-colony thing is all about, as well as seeing Mary and Matty. But I’ll tell you what, I don’t want to have to take three weeks out of the middle of the summer to drive up there again. In fact, it’s pretty close to impossible. I’ve got plans for the middle of August, and there isn’t three weeks available between the court date and then.”

“Do you think Brittany still has detectives following you?”

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “In fact, I doubt it, but doubting it and knowing for sure are two different things. I told you I talked to Brittany a few days ago, didn’t I?”

“You mentioned it. You seemed to think she’s getting a little more, well, balanced about Mary and the boy.”

“That’s a good way to put it, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve opened up a new line of information with someone who talks with Brittany and her family on occasion, but the last time we spoke she didn’t have any new information. I’m beginning to think that a meeting between Brittany, Mary, and Matty might not be such a bad idea, but I don’t know that Brittany is quite ready for it yet.”

“I don’t know how you’d find out for sure. However you do it, it’s bound to be a gamble.”

“That’s just it. I told you before that if it comes off it needs to be in a neutral location, maybe some place like Montreal. That way if Mary is careful and Brittany acts like I expect she could, it might not lead back to where Mary and Matty are living. That’s still a concern. Either way, the decision to do it has to be Mary’s, not mine. I wouldn’t mind talking with her about that, too. But, like I said, I don’t want to have to rip three weeks out of the guts of the summer to discuss it with her.”

“Maybe you don’t have to,” Deke told him. “You just about can’t get on a plane without a credit card any more, but that doesn’t have to rule out flying, at least part of the way. Let me look into it a little. I might have an idea on that one.”

“Well, let me know. I wouldn’t mind seeing the two of them again, but the timing is awkward right now. I could probably do a three-week trip after the middle of September or along in there, but that would mean I’d have to get there after the artist colony is closed up for the summer.”

“You could take a week, though, right?”

“Oh, yeah, so long as it was at the right time.”

“Like I said, let me work on it.”

After seeing Deke, Adam spent a little time thinking about it. It would be nice to see Mary and Matty, of course, and there was a little business to discuss, but it would also be nice to have a little better information about Brittany to base his recommendation on.

There was one angle he’d never tried to use before, mostly because he didn’t think it would be worth the trouble, but after thinking about it for a while, he came up with a way to approach it. The next afternoon, once he’d gotten his work issues for the day out of the way, he checked through his directory, and placed a call to Dr. Preble at Brookview.

It proved that Dr. Preble remembered him from the sessions he’d been through with Brittany before the divorce. “Look,” Adam said as they got down to business, “I know that from patient confidentiality reasons there’s plenty of things you can’t tell me, so I’m not going to ask them. But I do need to know if you’re still treating her.”

“On an outpatient basis, yes,” the doctor replied. “But you’re right, I can’t say much more than that.”

“I’m not asking you to, but there’s something you should probably know, and I don’t know if it’s come out in the sessions you’ve had with her. My impression is that she’s still pretty fixated on her grandson. My concern is that sooner or later Brittany is going to want to make an attempt to get custody of him, legal or illegal.”

“I can’t comment on that.”

“I wasn’t expecting a comment. But what I’m wondering is that there might be an opportunity in the future for Brittany to meet with the mother and the boy for a brief period. I just don’t know if that would be a good idea for Brittany, or for the mother and the boy for that matter. I’m wondering if you think it would be a good idea for me to pursue such a meeting.”

Dr. Preble was silent for a moment. “Well, if I were you,” he finally said, “I wouldn’t be anxious to set up a meeting like that, at least just now. At some point in the future it might be a much better idea.”

“Thanks. That’s just exactly what I need to know. Can I ask you the same question again at some time in the future?”

“I don’t see any reason why not. In six months or a year it might be a better idea.”

That pretty well settled that question for Adam. He needed to mention that knowledgeable opinion to Mary, but it wasn’t a rush item. It didn’t settle the question in his mind of whether Brittany still had detectives on him, but if she did they weren’t finding out much; he’d been pretty careful about his security on that issue.

There was the possibility that if he was being followed by detectives they might have picked up on the fact that he’d been out sailing with Carolyn, and with Beverly, for that matter. If that news got back to Brittany, it probably would resonate through the family connections and Carolyn would hear about it. He would hate the trouble that would cause Carolyn, but at least it might settle the question of the detectives once and for all. But what was done was done, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

Thinking about Carolyn reminded him that he still had the Georgian Bay trip planned with her for a little later in the summer. After he left the office that afternoon, he took a drive to the marine supply store he’d frequented, and picked up some reading material about the place, and ordered charts the store didn’t keep in stock. They weren’t cheap, but he could see they would be worth it; it had all the potential to be a great trip.

That evening he had an appointment with Beverly to work on his father’s collection a bit more. It was just as well that they’d moved the sale date back to September, because it was becoming clear that they would need the extra time to catalogue and prepare everything. Adam still had a big collection of his father’s personal papers to go through, and it was slow going, although the vast majority of it went into the trash pile. The end was in sight, though; even with taking off for the week in Georgian Bay and the potential few days in Newfoundland, if he kept at it there was a good chance he could be long done with it by the time the sale rolled around.

It was good to see Beverly again. She had her business face on this evening, and was primarily concerned with the cataloging, but at one point everyone took a break for soft drinks around the kitchen table. “So have you been out sailing much?” she asked.

“I started for Put-In-Bay last weekend,” he told her, deciding to leave Carolyn out of the discussion. “But I didn’t get there. The wind was just about dead, so I wound up spending the night at anchor behind West Sister Island.”

“Too bad you didn’t make it down there,” she said. “Dave and Allison and I zipped over there in a couple hours. We spent Saturday evening in the Beer Barrel, listening to Pat Dailey go at it. He’s something else. You ought to check him out sometime.”

“Oh, I’ll probably get to Put-In-Bay sometime, sooner or later. I’m told that’s a pretty heavy party scene, though.”

“Yeah, it gets a little drunk out,” she agreed. “It was good we weren’t driving, because we could barely walk back to the boat, and I had a head you couldn’t believe the next morning. But I’ll tell you what, we were sober compared to some of the people we saw staggering back to their boats.”

After hearing that, Adam was glad that he and Carolyn hadn’t made it to Put-In-Bay. If they had – well, there wouldn’t have been the good time they’d had. But again, that wasn’t anything Beverly needed to know about. “It worked out all right as it was,” he told her.

“So are you ready to take me out sailing on that little boat of yours again sometime?”

“Whenever you’re ready. Maybe Saturday. I don’t think we could go to Put-In-Bay, though, probably just out and around someplace like we did the last time.”

“Oh, that was fun, too,” she smiled. “Just not the same kind of fun. What do you say we meet around nine, at the same place?”

“Works for me.”

Actually, he wasn’t sure just how badly he wanted to go sailing with Beverly again. Oh, she would do to have someone to ride along and talk to on a day sail, but unless something changed radically he doubted that anchoring behind West Sister Island would have worked out anything like the same way it had with Carolyn. Up to a certain point Beverly was fun to be with, but her idea of fun seemed to be a little different than his. While he might like to hang around a packed bar with good music once in a while, it had been years since he’d done it, and that had been on a business trip when there had been nothing better to do. She seemed to really enjoy it, which included the drinking; again, once in a while was fine but to do it a lot, well, there were better things to do.

But Saturday they met to go sailing again. Almost predictably she was an hour late for their meeting, which seemed a little strange since she was always punctual for their meetings at his father’s house. That was business to her, he decided; maybe her time clock ran a little different on pleasure. Still, it irritated him.

The wind was pretty decent that day – not like the previous weekend at all. It would have been easy to make the thirty-five mile run to Put-In-Bay and get in with time to spare, but that would have involved an overnight, so he settled for another run up toward Grosse Ile, this time making a stop at a waterside restaurant along the way. The lunch they had was pretty good, but she punctuated it with three fast beers, which also made him think.

Soon they headed back down the lake toward Frenchtown Harbor. This run was more into the wind than the morning sail had been, so was livelier and more exciting. But on the way, Adam made up his mind that while he might go sailing with her again, at least until the estate was settled, he wasn’t going to even think about doing anything more than that. He hadn’t thought she had a place on his prospect list, and now was sure of it.

He still had two days of the long weekend left, and the weather still promised to be favorable. He knew he could stretch it to a third day if he wanted to, so he loaded up the boat for two nights by himself the next morning and set out to the east. His plan was not to go to Put-In-Bay, though, but he might stop there if he found himself close. As it turned out, the place was packed, so he pulled into a quiet anchorage on the east side of Middle Bass Island, put down the anchor for the night, and sailed back to Frenchtown Harbor the next day, never even getting close to the town or the well-known bar. After all, it struck him that the reason the place was so busy was that there weren’t many other alternatives for places for the party crowd to go in the west end of the lake.

Carolyn wasn’t home when he called her the evening he got back from Middle Bass Island. It wasn’t surprising; it was the Fourth, and most likely there were fireworks in Amherst. He called her next day, though, and it turned out he was correct; she thought the display hadn’t been as good as it had the previous year. “Hey,” he said. “If you’re up for taking an extra day, let’s hit the lake on Friday. The weather is supposed to be favorable, and I thought we might want to sail on past Put-In-Bay and get into Sandusky Bay. It’s only another few miles, but it’s pretty shallow there and supposed to be pretty quiet. We could stop off in Put-In-Bay if we decide we really want to.”

“Talked me into it.”

So they did. It was a really nice sail, mostly in a good breeze. Adam had never flown the spinnaker that came with the boat, but it turned out that Carolyn knew a little about it from rides on the Pixie, so after some struggle they got it up and pulling. They made a good downwind run, sailing right past the crowds at Put-In-Bay without stopping, rounding the Marblehead Peninsula, and into the bay. It proved to be quiet, if shallow, and they spent the night in a small bay with nothing around but reeds. The next day they sailed back into the wind, and stopped at Port Clinton for the night, before a long but very enjoyable sail back to Frenchtown Harbor on Sunday.

As it turned out she didn’t have any fresh news about Brittany, other than the fact that the sale on the old house had been finalized, and that the arrangements for her new place in Wychbold were nearing completion. “She’s going to be moving the week we’re in Georgian Bay,” she smiled. “So I guess I’m just as glad that everyone thinks I’m going to be going to a teaching seminar that week.”

“Sounds like an adequate excuse to me,” he laughed.

While on the trip they spent a little more time planning the Georgian Bay trip, going over some of the books and charts Adam had accumulated. “It looks like a fun trip,” she said. “But it looks like there’s more there than we’ll be able to see in a week.”

“True, but maybe that’ll give us a reason to go back next year.”

“So are we going to get to go out again before we head up there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got the probate thing next week, and as soon as that’s over with I’ve got a number of arrangements to make. Besides, I think it’s going to involve my taking a business trip that’ll keep me away for a week or so.” That was the best excuse he could come up with on short notice to explain why he would be gone for the quick trip to Blanche Tickle; Carolyn still didn’t know that part of the secret, and he wasn’t about to tell her if he didn’t have to.

“Well, about all I can say is hang in there and do your best with it. Let me know when you get back. Maybe we could leave a couple days early.”

“I’d like that,” he said. “It’s going to take a while to get up there and there’ll be some setting up to get ready.”

The following Tuesday was the probate hearing. As Deke had indicated, there wasn’t much to it, since there were no other claimants to the estate. It couldn’t have lasted five minutes, but when it was over with, Adam and the tax man had a considerable amount of money to both their credits, and he now was the majority owner of Caldwell-Deerfield Manufacturing.

The rest of the week was taken up with the well-planned management rearrangement. Even though most of the issues had been long worked out, there were still things that had to be dealt with in practice, and there was some fussing around. But, by the end of the week, Adam was now the CEO of the company, Chairman of the Board, and, as planned, semi-retired.

“All right,” he told Bob, Fred, and Marcia in his new office at the end of the week. “For the most part Caldwell-Deerfield is yours to run now. I’ll be looking over your shoulder, and I’ll be around most of the time if you need my assistance for anything. But there will be times I won’t be available, and next week is going to be one of them. I’ll be in England, looking at a possible machinery supplier, and doing a few other things. Then I’ll be back for a few days, but I’ll be taking off again for another few days.”

“Taking another vacation?” Bob asked.

“Right, going sailing again,” he said. “I’ll be thinking of you pushing the paper around back here. In fact, I’ll think about it a lot, maybe as much as two or three minutes a day. Have fun, guys!”

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