“I don’t know.” His eyes flicked to the racing fleet. Any boat there could have spotted the red ketch half the distance to the Farallons and beaten her hands-down. “Didn’t you like her?”

“I guess,” she shrugged. “She looked slow. Actually, I was too scared to watch.”

He asked her father if he knew the ketch. Shawn, though he grew more forgetful every year, was still an encyclopedia of yachts on San Francisco Bay. But he was too irritated at losing the start to try to remember and only shook his head.

After the race, which they lost to Pegasus and to practically everyone else, Mitch stopped at the Commodore’s slip. Russo, a potbellied pediatrician, had cooled since Mitch had brought the malpractice suit. Coiling sheets in his cockpit while his crew sipped beer, he did not even ask him aboard. He had seen their near collision with the red ketch. He recalled that she’d been for sale, off and on over the years, but didn’t remember her name, or her owner’s.

“Why?” he asked caustically. “He had the right of way.”

“I wasn’t going to sue him, Doctor,” Mitch responded. “Just see if his boat was for sale.”

Mitch spun on his heel and left. Russo, who had sailed with his dad, had treated Mitch thirty-five years ago for whooping-cough.

A gentle doctor and ordinarily a warm old guy. Just the same, since Mitch didn’t tell him how to practice medicine, Russo had no goddamn right to tell him how to practice law.

Sunday morning he dug the plans for the Atkins ketch out of the crate in the basement. In his den overlooking Raccoon Strait, he spread them on the desk, studying the scantlings and dimensions. He should have been polishing the brief for Bernie, who would argue the case. Instead, he wasted half the morning calling yacht-brokers about the red ketch. Nobody knew her.

When he gave up on the boat and tried to concentrate on the brief, his back began to ache. He blamed it on an old football injury and jammed a pillow from the couch behind it. He was studying the long typed pages when his son tapped at the door and wandered in.

Tony was twenty—a very young twenty—almost as tall as he, with gray eyes like his own and black wavy hair as thick as his own had been. He had been catting around the neighborhood for weeks. It seemed an eternity. Now he exuded charm, alerting Mitch.

“I finished the cars, Dad,” he reported. “So I’ll take off, OK? Nancy—”