Letters

A long, finally calming late afternoon and evening: smoked oysters and lumpy pina colada in the cockpit, followed by cold sliced ham and a 1962 Argentine Cabernet Sauvignon that cheered me right up. It was, damn it, Jea

And woke refreshed and rededicated to 13 R! A fine breezy morning — wind still SW 18+—but I was in the mood for a brisk day’s work. Bye-bye, Cacaway! Bye-bye, mild Chester: may you flow as handsome, and less polluted, for generations after me! Given the wind, I was obliged to motor down the first nine miles from Langford Creek, straight into it with the dodger up to break the spray, before I could turn west enough to make sail and shut down the engine. A good fast reach then up out of the Chester’s mouth and around Love Point, the top of Kent Island, and we were in the open, whitecapped, serious Chesapeake. Our destination lay almost in the eye of the freshening wind, but no matter; so many tidewater August days are swelteringly still that it was a pleasure, and cathartic, to reef down, close haul, and bash through it all that bright brisk Thursday—O.J. for the most part steering himself with a little sheet-to-wheel tackle while I took bearings, checked charts, and trimmed sail. A five-mile port tack due west, back toward discomfiting Gibson Island; then a six-mile starboard tack therapeutically south, under the Bay Bridge, past tankers and container ships plowing up to Baltimore; west again then another five miles into the mouth of the Severn, up to the Naval Academy and A

But I had things to say good-bye to, including (next day) A

Next morning, Friday, in hazy sunshine, I tied up at the A

Mm hm. Though there was no particular reason for doing so, I decided that A. B. & A. should invest in an investigator — that same apparently reliable fellow in Buffalo who had drawn a blank, but competently, in the matter of Jane’s blackmailing — to look into the coincidence of the names Casteene and Castine: the one (I explained) borne by a former patient at the Remobilization Farm, the other supplied me by a present patient there, Mrs. Mack’s daughter. Whose condition was also to be reported, in my name, to Mrs. Mack. Discreetly. I was mighty anxious; didn’t know exactly what I was searching for; trusted my hunch that the search was worth considerable expense; but was begi

That week I’ll sail through swiftly, though sailing through it slowly was the heart of my enterprise. From A

Now it is Friday again, Day 14, August 22. From Hunting Creek I reach down the Miles (up on the chart) to St. Michaels for provisions, laundry, lunch ashore, good-bye to that dear town and harbor, and a 10 A.M. phone call to the office. Which I log, ponder, and relog thus: 1330: HM’s shit nowhere to be found. Could Jane be staging a diversion? Pursue, discreetly. Her fiancé: one Baron André Castine of Castines Hundred, Ontario, 1/2-brother (so Buffalo reports) of A. B. Cook VI! May be involved in C.I.A. or counter-C.I.A. activity! Foreign? Domestic? Interagency? Buffalo doesn’t know: was “seriously warned off by C.I.A./F.B.I. types.” Reports Castine “somewhere in west N.Y.” since Bermuda cruise. Cook himself at home at Barataria Lodge, B’wth I. Hunch: check out that Bray fellow in Lily Dale, N.Y. “Casteene” of Ft. Erie may be unrelated to Jane’s friend: name not uncommon in Quebec, though usually w. the “Baron’s” spelling. Too much coincidence: inquire further. Jea