“Hello. You have reached the farm of Silas and Elsie Friday. We can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave us a message after the tone, we'll get back to you as soon as we can.”

“Hello Mom, hello Dad, it's Delia. I'm sorry that I haven't phoned you before now, but I've been really, really busy at work. Yes, I know you've been worried about me, and yes, I did get all those messages that you left on my answering machine. It's just that Per—that I ended up staying longer in the Bahamas than we—than I expected to, and when I got back to town I had to spend two weeks doing higher mathematics for a bunch of pirates. No, not the other lawyers, real actual pirates! I'm just so glad that Perry and I took that correspondence course in calculus after that case with the swiveling spotlight! Anyway, let me tell you about it.

“When we—when I got to the Bahamas just after Christmas, I just sat around on the beach for a few days and tried to forget about Lac du Portage and snow and everything. After that I got restless, and one day I found that I could take a trip on a sailboat out to a nearby reef and do some scuba diving. So early the next morning I was on my way for a day of sun and swimming.